Please see review on my blog: Underground Man:

http://undergroundmangeomatt.blogspot... ( )

An interesting premise, if you can suspend belief that no one would have called the police. ( )

This book covers territory which is better-charted than its author and his audience (who seem to agree that he's some sort of pioneer) would suspect; the question of how people behave in the breakdown of social order is not a new one in this of all centuries. Ballard's premise, the isolation of the building and its shift into unexpected but psychologically natural warfare, had me expecting _Watership Down_, and the passage with the gulls suggests that Ballard might have been expecting the same, but that isn't exactly what we got.

This is a fever dream of a rootless humanity with no loyalties, no strong emotions, and no understanding of or desire for either; it rings false. The author does not know what people really act like under these kinds of pressures (though a study of the literature of the two World Wars, fiction as well as memoirs and history, would certainly have told him); but he does know, and laboriously depicts, the set of behaviors that modern literary critics would tell him would occur. It is true enough, as the narrator openly states, that the model for these characters' behaviors is postmodern man, not primitive man; but the defining trait of the postmodern is insulation from difficult physical realities -- hunger, death, pain, war, disease -- and postmodernity tends not to last when this insulation has disappeared.

The author's eye is inaccurate in general; one small but telling detail is the mention of a shotgun halfway through the book, and the comment that the inhabitants of the high-rise had a tacit agreement that they would settle their conflicts "by physical means alone." This sort of understanding (an implausibility which this book shares with _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_, in both cases probably due to their authors' aesthetic preference for melee weapons) would last only until someone decided that victory was more important than tacit agreements -- in other words, until someone had been truly and deeply insulted, or found that someone or something that he really valued had been put in danger. Bursts of this sort of real violence happen even in our own more stable society; in a context like this, busily unravelling into a Nietzchean fairyland, they would be all but constant. (Nor does this mention the utter failure of everyone present to involve the police, and indeed the failure of the police, the military, the building inspectors, the insurance companies, and so on to take any interest whatsoever in the high-rise, if nothing else for their own financial self-interest. I'm familiar with what Barzun calls "the loss of nerve characteristic of periods of decadence," but this takes the cake; if Wilder had actually burned down the building as Laing had imagined, think of the life-insurance payouts alone...)

This sort of spurious depiction is probably most painful because much better works have covered this subject, or elements of it. Perhaps the closest analogy to High-Rise is G.K. Chesterton's _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_ (now out of copyright, and readily available on-line). Bill Mauldin's _Up Front_ is one of many memoirs of the World Wars -- and the trench warfare of the Italian campaign of 1943-5 saw physical conditions similar to this book's, but with quite different consequences. Post-apocalyptic fiction is a thriving, if often irresponsible, genre; for psychological truths relevant to this book's subject matter, I would recommend Aldous Huxley's _Ape and Essence_ and Walter Miller's _A Canticle for Leibowitz_. And, of course, for a work dealing with the same themes, but with conclusions as different as its physical trappings, I'd recommend Richard Adams' _Watership Down_.

(Review also posted on Amazon.com.) ( )

This book centres around a typical Ballardian theme which is the idea of the upper middle classes going slightly beserk. Whilst I did enjoy the idea of the residents of a fancy modern high rise apartment block shutting out the outside world and degenerating into tribal warfare, it seemed like that idea had been explored fully by the middle of the novel. The two central characters did not have stories compelling enough to make the ending satisfactory. Although only a very short novel, it probably could have been distilled into a novella or short story. To anyone who wants to get into JG Ballard I would recommend starting with the semi autobiographical Empire of the Sun. Whilst not typical of his other works, it gives a clear insight as to why he writes such vividly brutal dystopian fiction. ( )

This was my first Ballard novel, but certainly won't be my last. I do like dystopian fiction and this depicts horrifically and initially quite realistically the decay of life in a tower block where residents have no sense of social responsibility of proper appreciation of the threads that bind together a community.

However as the decay progresses and the horrors mount, questions of lack of realism do arise. There are 2000 people in this high-rise, many of them with high powered and quite public jobs. Why do no employers and colleagues notice people not turning up to work? Why do none of the residents communicate with the outside world during the early stages and later fail to escape from the horrors going on? Surely many residents would shop and eat outside - the supermarket and restaurant cannot cater for so many people and seem to receive no deliveries. Where is the plague of rats and consequent disease that would result from such accumulations of rubbish?

These problems aside, this is a great and chilling piece of writing. I've already bought The Drought from eBay. ( )