DYSTOPIA #3
High-Rise by JG Ballard

A new world in the sky, a forty storey tower block, is the focus of Ballard's most acclaimed book.  Within the block there is everything the residents could need, on the 10th floor is a supermarket, hairdresser's, bank, primary school and large swimming pool, there is a smaller pool, gym, squash courts and restaurant on the 35th.  Elevators speed the residents to their floors, and on the very top is a sculpture park playground for the residents' children.

However, Ballard has created a dozing monster in this world.  As someone who has lived in a tower block, I know how quickly lifts become abused but I was living in a council block and there everyone was of roughly the same income and social status.  In Ballard's tower block the price of the apartments is graded by height creating a microcosm of society, the working classes living from about the ground to the 10th floor, the middle classes from the 11th to about the 35th and the upper classes above that, bands demarcated by the swimming pools.  Families with children live generally below the 10th floor, the spoilt pooches of the upper classes above the 35th.  A ticking bomb of resentments and irritations in this self contained community does not take long to explode, and Ballard exhaustively explores the collusion by the residents and their withdrawal from the outside world, which becomes less real to them than the world of the high-rise.

Personally, I found it too predictable and without the brilliance of The Drowned World, but High-Rise was written in 1975 and needs to be seen in a historical context, that is, it was written before the animalistic excesses of the 80s and arguments that seem tired to me were way ahead of their time.