A man who falls utterly for the delusion that 'their real opponent was not the hierarchy of residents in the heights far above, but the image of the building in their minds, the multiplying layers of concrete that anchored them to the floor'.

The ugly, brutish, voyeuristic impulse is personified in Richard Wilder, TV newscaster by day, thug for hire by night. Like the characters of both Strangman in 'The Drowned World' and Ventress in 'The Crystal Forest', Royal is similarly portrayed as a white hunter, sociopathic and controlling with his 'Alsatian and his white hunter's jacket', his 'expression was an uneasy mixture of arrogance and defensiveness'. Yet for all that, the hive mentality that should seamlessly bind the inhabitants together once the last buyer arrives, swiftly decays into a brutal set of schisms that is more base than any perceived animal urge. A architectural dream, the high-rise is utterly self-sufficient with its stores, its banks, its pools and schools. It is the story of many characters, each one of them, like Laing and Wilder, overseen by the high-rise's architect, Anthony Royal, who is 'hovering over like some kind of fallen angel'. One of Ballard's finest dystopian novels, High-Rise, takes a community of a forty floor apartment block and narrates the collapse of its middle-class British social ethics and morality, evolving into a renascent primal violence fuelled both by the sub-conscious urge to destroy all trappings of modern civilization and create a protectionist, yet isolated, commune.

High-Rise by J.G. Ballard