Does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?
BALLARD, J.G. High Rise. London, Jonathan Cape. 1975.
8vo. Original blue boards lettered in gilt to spine, top edge blue, with unclipped, pictorial dust wrapper featuring photograph of the author to rear, pp. [xiii], 204, very minimal fading to lower margins of boards with slight marking to rear wrapper, otherwise a bright, near-fine copy.
First edition.
“Later, as he sat on the balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months …"
During the course of this landmark novel, a 40-storey tower block housing 2,000 residents , referred to as “a small vertical city”, spirals into a savage revolution in which the inhabitants estrange themselves entirely from the outside world. The very building blocks themselves are configured as possessing an ominous, pyschological threat, with landscape playing riot to the human psyche. Here Ballard uses his fictive dystopia to examine his theory that representing gated communities requires a “nerve tonic of violence” to extricate these opulent homeowners from dangerous and ineffable boredom, making a bold and prescient statement about the state of modern society.
As Ballard himself once said, "Does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?".
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