High-Rise

Taking his son and his video camera, Wilder sets out for the 35th-floor pool. Finding that the top-floor residents are holding the high-speed elevators on their floors, Wilder resorts to the stairs. On the 25th floor he’s accosted by Paul Crosland’s clan, who bar him from going further. Not wanting to upset his son with a fight, Wilder retreats to his apartment, “one cell in this nightmare termitary” (58).

Wilder outlines the pathology of the high-rise for his documentary. Insomnia, psychosomatic illnesses, and adultery are rampant. A humorlessness prevails—the residents never joke about life in a high-rise. Vandalism is widespread. Despite their socioeconomic homogeneity, the residents are effectively split by floor height into the standard three classes: lower, middle, and upper. The lower and middle classes are divided by the 10th-floor shopping concourse, the middle and upper by the 35th-floor restaurant and recreation center. Wilder hopes his documentary will rally his listless neighbors against the top-floor tenants.

Oppressed by the languor of his apartment, Wilder travels to the crowded and littered 10th-floor pool. There he finds Laing, who’s unconcerned that no one has informed the police of the jeweler’s death. Laing is no longer friendly to Wilder and discourages him from starting his documentary out of a desire for privacy: “[Laing] had no wish to see the collective folly of the residents, their childish squabbles and jealousies, exposed on the nation’s television screens” (64).

That night, a blackout on the lower floors angers Wilder and his fellow residents. Blaming the top-floor residents, they clamor to take elevators to the upper floors to retaliate. When an elevator finally descends to the second floor, it opens to reveal a badly beaten second-floor resident.

The following day, Wilder only goes to work for an hour; his time away from the high-rise feels unreal. In his absence violence erupts between the 9th and 11th floors. Residents describe the violence calmly and welcome it for ending the cell-like isolation of the first three months in the building.

Wilder is now determined to summit the building. As he prepares to leave his family, he realizes his quest has taken on a mythological significance. He sets out for the 37th floor, where he hopes to gain higher status through Jane Sheridan, an actress he had an affair with.

Past the 10th-floor stairwell blockade Wilder notices he’s being filmed by two 18th-floor residents. In the shopping concourse, women getting their hair styled sit feet away from people fighting over supermarket items. On the 14th-floor stairwell, someone throws a chair from above, winging Wilder. He decides against fighting his assailants, wanting to summit the high-rise through cunning, not violence.

Wilder sneaks into the back of the supermarket, where he finds a freight elevator being ridden up and down the building by a lower-floor woman. She takes Wilder to the 29th floor and guides him through a commune comprised of women from all over the building, led by a children’s-story writer. The women are hostile to Wilder but let him pass with his guide.

Leaving his guide, Wilder climbs the stairs to the 37th floor. The clean, plushly carpeted corridors are a world away from the chaos below. As Jane Sheridan opens her door to Wilder, a mob suddenly materializes from the surrounding apartments. Led by Royal, they advance on Wilder with clubs. Wilder laughs, relishing the anticipation of the fight. The lights go out, and the mob beats Wilder unconscious. He awakes under the fluorescent lights of the ground-floor lobby, lights that “with their toneless glow […] seemed to have been shining for ever somewhere inside his head” (77).

In the penthouse, Royal and his wife, Anne, prepare to move, per her demand. The daughter of a rich industrialist, Anne fears that the growing disorder will rob her of her status, which is dependent on her premier position in the building. Furthermore, the building itself undermines Anne’s feeling of superiority. When she was growing up, her sense of class superiority depended on seeing servants work for her. The high-rise replaces servants with invisible technologies: an “army of thermostats and humidity sensors, computerized elevator route-switches and over-riders” (83).

Despite his grievance that the residents inflict the majority of their anger on the parts of the building he designed—the lobby, the concourse, and the rooftop sculpture garden—Royal welcomes their violent social stratification, believing that a rigid hierarchy is necessary to the function of such a large building.

During the day the high-rise appears normal: Most residents leave for work, run errands in the concourse, and travel freely to the upper-floor amenities. However, when darkness falls everything changes: Rival factions barricade their floors and the violence begins.

The high-rise is completely isolated from the outside world—the manager, his staff, and the concourse employees are all residents. No outside person has visited the building in weeks. Royal notices Anne has unplugged every phone in their apartment. He suspects that the reason no one has called the police is that the residents welcome their world becoming self-contained.

As they finish packing, the Royals realize they’ve taken too long—at this point in the day the other floors have commandeered the elevators. Anne begins unpacking, despite their plan to leave the following morning. Royal knows that despite their professed intentions, they won’t move.

As Royal walks his Alsatian on the roof that evening, a flock of gulls descends to scavenge the remains of a cocktail party. Royal—whose fascination with birds led him to design plans for a gigantic high-rise aviary—relishes the sight of the birds in the disordered scene: “[A] renascent barbarism hung among the overturned chairs and straggling palms, the discarded pair of diamanté sunglasses from which the jewels had been picked” (93). Afraid the birds might leave, Royal leaves his dog to spread meal for them.

Royal imagines the gulls are drawn to the building not by food but by the same primal urge as him, “flown here from some archaic landscape, responding to the same image of the sacred violence to come” (93). After he finishes spreading meal, Royal hurls the corpse of a cat killed by the birds over the parapet.

Distant yelps catch Royal’s attention. He runs to the elevator bay, where many floors below he hears a dog being beaten. When the elevator returns it opens to reveal his bloodied Alsatian—the evening’s violence has started. Top-floor residents gather to help Royal with his wounded pet. Chief among them is Royal’s neighbor Dr. Pangbourne, a gynecologist of the new school who eschews checkups for scientific analysis: “His speciality was the computerized analysis of recorded birthcries, from which he could diagnose an infinity of complaints to come. He played with these tapes like an earlier generation of sorcerer examining the patterns of entrails” (98).

Despite knowing that his wife and Jane Sheridan are on the 10th floor, grocery shopping, Royal delays going to their rescue for 30 minutes, returning instead to his penthouse with his injured dog. There he watches the bone-white gulls wheel through the darkening sky, imagining the incipient violence:

Royal was thinking of his wife, of the possible assaults on her, an almost sexual fever of hazard and revenge tightening his nerves. In another twenty minutes he would leave the apartment and make his killing drop down the shafts of the high-rise, murder descending. He wished he could take the birds with him. He could see them diving down the elevator shafts, spiralling through the stairwells to swoop into the corridors (99).

Royal descends to the concourse with his dog, both of their white coats stained with blood. He finds two rival factions—one led by the camera-wielding Wilder—sparring over an empty classroom. Wilder’s group wins, and the classroom door opens to reveal Anne and Jane Sheridan hunkered inside. To Royal’s surprise, the bare-chested Wilder doesn’t attack him as he retrieves Jane and his wife: “[Wilder] watched Royal with interest, patting one armpit in an almost animal way, as if glad to see Royal here on the lower levels, directly involved at last in the struggle for territory and womenfolk” (104). Royal returns to the 40th floor with Jane and his wife. During their shopping expedition, Anne learns that many residents film the outbreaks of violence for later viewing in the cinema.

Royal and Pangbourne realize that they’re in danger of being cut off from the vital mechanical rooms on the 25th floor. They plan to ingratiate themselves with the residents of the middle floors to turn them against the lower-floor residents.

As the night progresses, the upper-floor tenants, dressed immaculately in formal wear, party amid their growing garbage piles. Royal is pleased that the residents are becoming less and less rational in their behavior. Late in the night Royal finds himself drunk with Jane Sheridan and his wife in an empty 39th-floor apartment. Royal and Jane have sex in front of Anne, who sits in silent approval out of “a sense of tribal solidarity, a complete deference to the clan leader” (109).