Jungle in the Sky (High-rise - J G Ballard)

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Product:	High-rise - J G Ballard
Date:	19/07/00 (41 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Disturbing and blackly humorous

Disadvantages: Ballard's prose could be better, here as elsewhere.

High-Rise, J.G. Ballard

Again, not necessarily a well-written book, but the sick neon vividness of Ballard's imagination makes it worthwhile: as Martin Amis suggests in a review extract on the jacket, he writes to provide a setting, or an excuse, for unsettling fragments of imagery. I came to it from a previous reading with the impression that anarchy prevailed and then fell back into normality, but I remembered wrong. The setting and incidents are grittily and stickily realistic; the plot and the way it develops -- a tower-block cuts itself off from the world and reverts to the jungle -- only possible in a dream. Ballard's characters, especially, I think, his women, are very one-dimensional, acting mostly as symbols for a main character's or the author's obsessions. No-one ever really knows the contents of anyone else's mind and all they do is observe each other acting out inner drives so powerful that they collapse personality. Civilized behavior breaks under the pressure of all-consuming needs for food, sex, and (ultimately unachievable) understanding or self-realization. The image of a tangled mass of putrefying bones in the swimming pool was a powerful(ly sick) one, as was the final image, that of the high-rise remaining what its inhabitants had turned it into: a sealed-off jungle fertilized on the decay of urban luxury.

Summary: