52 pages • 1 hour read
J. G. BallardHigh-Rise
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1975A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Critical Mass”
Content Warning: The source material features graphic depictions of sexual assault, violence, neglect, and cruelty to animals.
On the 25th floor of a high-rise outside of London, Dr. Robert Laing roasts the Alsatian dog of the building’s architect and penthouse resident, Anthony Royal. When Laing moved into the building six months prior in search of solitude and anonymity, there was no sign of barbarism latent in its middle-class residents; nonetheless, barbarism soon consumed the building. As he eats Royal’s Alsatian, Laing realizes the harbinger of this chaos came three months prior, on the day the building reached capacity.
That Saturday morning, a bottle of imitation champagne explodes on his balcony. Looking up at the vertiginous face of the building, Laing is annoyed that no one from the party floors above noticed the falling bottle.
Laing tries to forget about this affront as he arrives at another party thrown by his upstairs neighbor, Charlotte Melville. Despite his efforts to distance himself from his neighbors, Laing soon finds himself drawn into their petty disputes. Charlotte probes Laing for his opinion on the 31st-floor residents—the source of the exploding bottle. No matter their position in the high-rise, residents find reasons to criticize the people above and below them. One of Charlotte’s guests—second-story tenant Richard Wilder, a rugby player turned documentarian—plans to shoot a documentary about the pressures of living in such a “glorified tenement” (17).
The high-rise is the first of five identical buildings in a development located in a former industrial area along the Thames. Across the river sits a new business park containing a television studio and the medical school where Laing teaches. Despite its proximity to London, the high-rise is a world apart from the city: “[T]he office buildings of central London belonged to a different world, in time as well as space. Their glass curtain-walling and telecommunication aerials were obscured by the traffic smog, blurring Laing’s memories of the past” (10).
The high-rise is a self-contained mini city complete with a primary school, bank, supermarket, exercise facilities, and playgrounds. The cell-like units are overpriced but have a futuristic veneer. The building is plagued by problems—from blackouts to thin walls—provoking many disputes. The 2,000 residents, who together co-own the building, are a homogenous group of middle-class professionals. The building affords them luxuries that once demanded an army of servants.
Following a day of parties celebrating the building’s reaching critical mass, the first of the building’s isolated blackouts occurs on the 10th-floor shopping concourse, causing a stampede that injures dozens. Some exploit the cover of darkness to fight and have sex. When the power returns 15 minutes later, Laing finds the Afghan hound of a top-floor resident drowned in the pool. Unknown to anyone, Wilder drowned the dog after it fell into the pool as a symbolic rebuke of the building’s hierarchy.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Party Time”
In the days following the stampede, most residents avoid the concourse. Laing believes the dog was drowned as retaliation for the misbehavior of the buildings’ dogs, who largely belong to the residents of the top ten floors. There is a rivalry between the dog owners and the slightly less successful residents of the bottom 10 floors, who have children instead of pets. The building encourages such conflicts: Top-floor residents get exclusive access to high-speed elevators and premier parking. Laing’s next-door neighbor, an oral surgeon named Steele, blames the continued blackout of the ninth floor on its residents’ reckless use of electricity. Steele’s callousness surprises Laing.
Laing travels to the 40th floor for his weekly squash game with Royal, whom Laing befriended after the architect suffered a serious car crash. On the roof, a cocktail party is in progress. The attendees, all top-floor residents dressed in overly formal attire, gradually crowd Laing. Continuing their conversations, they back Laing against the parapet. Suddenly, a top-floor jeweler calls out from across the roof, dispersing the mob “like a group of extras switched to another scene” (29). Shaken, Laing wonders if he imagined the imminent attack.
The jeweler informs Laing that Royal can’t attend their game. As Laing returns to the elevators, he spots Royal watching him from his penthouse above. Forehead scarred by the car crash, Royal wears his usual white safari jacket and wields a chromium cane. Beside him sits his white Alsatian—the premier dog in the building. Laing suspects that Royal wanted to observe how the cocktail party would react to Laing’s presence.
The following day, neither Laing nor Charlotte goes to work in anticipation of inter-floor conflict. In the afternoon the lower-floor residents throw rowdy parties for their children. The drunken parents pour drinks onto the cars of the upper-floor residents below, provoking their owners. Laing and Charlotte join in the revelry from her 26th-floor balcony. In her apartment, the muted television shows footage of a prison break.
As evening falls, a party atmosphere reigns throughout the building. Residents fraternize with their neighbors within a two-floor span; outside of this range inter-floor hostility prevails. When Laing travels to the busy concourse for liquor, his sister, Alice (who lives floors below him), refuses to let him join her place in line. In the concourse cinema, residents watch an amateur pornographic film shot in the building. At a party thrown by the 27th-floor psychiatrist Adrian Talbot, Laing is shocked by the hostility expressed toward residents from other sections of the high-rise. Talbot believes that this very hostility drives the carnival atmosphere and remarks that, like everyone else, he welcomes the exaggerated animosity.
When Laing and the Talbot party leave for another party a floor below, they’re infuriated to find the elevators stalled. When an elevator finally arrives, it opens to expose a solitary fifth-floor masseuse. As the mob begins harassing her, Laing tries to escort the woman to safety. Overwhelmed, he abandons his attempt, leaving the masseuse to be pummeled by the women in the group. The violence is theatrical: “The crowd’s mood was unpleasant but difficult to take seriously. His neighbours were like a group of unrehearsed extras playing a lynch scene” (35). Eventually, they allow the woman to escape down the stairs. The parties continue until dawn.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Death of a Resident”
The following morning Laing realizes the extent of the violence of the previous night: His body is covered in bruises. The cars parked in the premier spaces directly below the building are covered in food, and some of their windshields have been shattered by falling bottles.
At the medical school across the river, Laing can think only of the high-rise. Disturbed by the memory of stepping aside to let the women beat the masseuse, Laing reflects that the true instigators of violence aren’t the rowdy lower-floor residents or the quarrelsome top-floor residents but the private, unemotional residents of the middle block—people like the Steeles. The high-rise favors people like the Steeles, who thrive in its alienating architecture.
Laing returns to the building, anxious that he’s missed something. In his absence residents vandalized the building, and the top-floor residents padlocked the rooftop sculpture garden intended for the children of the lower floors. Charlotte, frightened by the chaos, seeks solace in the deliberately unconcerned Laing. They have sex, an encounter that Laing realizes marks the end rather than the beginning of their relationship.
Increasingly, residents blame the building’s failures on other residents instead of on its shoddy construction; Laing agrees with Steele that an upstairs resident is to blame for recklessly blocking their garbage chute with old furniture.
The Steeles throw a party for the 24th, 25th, and 26th floors. As television newsreader Paul Crosland organizes a supply run to the concourse, Laing steps onto the balcony with a film critic, Eleanor Powell. Eleanor compares their enjoyment of irresponsibility to the consequence-free world of their childhoods. Suddenly, a body whizzes past them, crushing a car below. The entire building gathers on their balconies to observe the mangled corpse of the 40th-floor jeweler.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
The three main characters—Richard Wilder, Robert Laing, and Anthony Royal—each represent one part of the tripartite psyche Freud defined.
As his name suggests, Wilder personifies the wild, unrestrained part of the psyche: the id. J. G. Ballard uses a number of devices to characterize Wilder in this way. As a second-floor resident, Wilder inhabits the lowest section in the building out of the main characters. To the 25th-floor Laing, this lowly position explains Wilder’s coarseness: his rowdy parties, his “rugby-scrum manners” (14), and his stocky build. Wilder is the most physical of his fellow professionals, the one most in touch with his animality. Childishness is one facet of this animality. Like a child, Wilder seems to be discovering his body for the first time, “continually touching himself, for ever inspecting the hair on his massive calves, smelling the backs of his scarred hands” (17). In his animality and childishness Wilder personifies the id.
As the architect and penthouse resident of the high-rise, Royal personifies the superego—the governing force of the psyche. Like Wilder, Royal’s name describes the nature of his character: He is the king of his domain. Royal styles himself as a sort of colonial overseer with his white safari coat, chromium cane, and purebred dog. This costume lends him a faintly ridiculous aura. His position in his penthouse distances him from the other residents: He is more a spectator to their affairs than a participant. However, as Laing’s experience with the rooftop mob hints, Royal also likes to orchestrate social experiments. Royal is the symbolic father figure of the high-rise.
As the personification of the ego, Laing reconciles the bipolar extremes represented by Wilder and Royal. Laing avoids becoming totally unrestrained, like Wilder, without distancing himself too much from the high-rise, like Royal. Laing strikes the perfect balance, making him the ideal resident. At first Laing doesn’t realize how suited he is to high-rise life. Instead, he identifies his neighbors the Steeles as the perfect tenants because they have “master[ed] a new kind of late twentieth-century life. They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never disappointed” (42). The Steeles are comfortable in the blank, empty lives they lead, happier to play set roles than be themselves. The Steeles allow themselves to be fully molded by the hostile environment of the high-rise, embracing its alienation. In contrast, the slight distance Laing maintains enables him to better survive, and later thrive, in the high-rise.
The high-rise itself plays an outsize role in the narrative. The architecture of the high-rise affects the way its residents live; in turn, the building becomes a screen onto which the residents project their psyches. This interplay introduces the defining theme of the novel: Psychogeography: Setting as Mind. In anatomical metaphor, Ballard fuses the technological with the biological, describing a building that is at once mechanical and animate: “[T]he elevators pumping up and down the long shafts resembled pistons in the chamber of a heart. The residents moving along the corridors were the cells in a network of arteries, the lights in their apartments the neurons of a brain” (47). The high-rise resembles not only the residents’ minds but their bodies as well.
The prefabricated Brutalist high-rises resemble bunkers more than apartment buildings. Ironically, this inhospitable atmosphere is a lure to those like Laing who fantasize about being alone in this concrete landscape. The buildings are designed to indulge this fantasy of isolation: “The high-rise was a huge machine designed to serve, not the collective body of tenants, but the individual resident in isolation” (11). Without courtyards or green spaces to convene in, the high-rise isolates residents in their individual cells.
The high-rise development occupies its own space and time. Its total newness distinguishes it from London, congested as it is with the sediment of history: “By contrast with the calm and unencumbered geometry of the concert-hall and television studios below [Laing], the ragged skyline of the city resembled the disturbed encephalograph of an unresolved mental crisis” (10). Following his divorce, Laing hopes that the uncluttered landscape of the high-rise development will calm his mind.
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