High-Rise by JG Ballard

This novel opens with a recently divorced doctor called Robert Laing moving in to a apartment on the 25th floor of a recently opened luxury high-rise somewhere on the outskirts of London. The building promises all of the modern conveniences, including a supermarket, a bank, a hair salon, its own school as well as two swimming pools and a gymnasium. In fact, you could live your life without ever needing to leave the building for any reason.

Very quickly the social order in the building begins to break down, with the residents losing the social mores that keep their base instincts in check. Rubbish piles up in the hallways, graffiti is scrawled on the walls, the pool is polluted and the infrastructure of the building starts to malfunction with lifts, plumbing and air conditioning becoming increasingly unreliable. The class hierarchy quickly stratifies with workers at the bottom, the super rich at the very top and a fractious middle class somewhere in between.

The story is told through three view points - Laing the educated professional who initially tries to make sense of the encroaching chaos as a detached observer. Wilder from the 10th floor is a working class documentary maker who resolves to show the world what is happening by climbing through the floors one by one. Finally, there is Royal, the architect of the building who lives on the 40th floor in detached luxury.

To say this is a grim read is an understatement. It is truly frightening to see how quickly the people in the building begin to revel in their own filth and accept violence, division and degradation as something to be embraced. No one makes more than a token effort to resist the collapse and it all feels horribly inevitable from the shocking opening flash forward scene to the unavoidable conclusion.

It is based in part in the author's experience of being interned as a child in a concentration camp in Singapore for several years during World War II, coping with casual violence, disease and squalor as the Japanese war effort came to a bitter end. 

I would still like to believe that people are fundamentally decent, but the truth is that the extreme political ideologies that would put people in camps whilst continuing to pollute the planet to squeeze a few more dollars of profit out of the ground are very much in the ascendent again. Can we avoid a collapse like the one seen in the book? I get a horrible feeling that we are about to find out over the next four years.