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Title: High-Rise
Author: J. G. Ballard
Narrator: Tom Hiddleston
Format: Unabridged
Length: 6 hrs and 35 mins
Language: English
Release date: 03-08-17
Publisher: Audible Studios
Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 22 votes
Genres: Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Fantasy: Contemporary
Publisher's Summary:
From the author of the Sunday Times best seller Cocaine Nights comes an unnerving tale of life in a modern tower block running out of control.
Within the concealing walls of an elegant 40-storey tower block, the affluent tenants are hell-bent on an orgy of destruction. Cocktail parties degenerate into marauding attacks on 'enemy' floors, and the once-luxurious amenities become an arena for riots and technological mayhem.
In this visionary tale of urban disillusionment from the renowned author of Crash and Cocaine Nights, society slips into a violent reverse as the isolated inhabitants of the high-rise, driven by primal urges, recreate a dystopian world ruled by the laws of the jungle.
The audiobook of High Rise arrives as interest in the book and J. G. Ballard's work reaches a new peak. The film adaptation of High Rise, directed by Ben Wheatley (Kill List, Sightseers) will be released in September 2015, starring Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons, Sienna Miller, Luke Evans and Elisabeth Moss.
Tom Hiddleston, who is known to millions worldwide for his role as the evil god Loki in the blockbuster Thor and Avengers movies, has lent his voice to this first UK audiobook adaptation of High Rise, which was published in 1975.
J. G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, where his father was a businessman. After internment in a civilian prison camp, he and his family returned to England in 1946. He published his first novel, The Drowned World, in 1961. His 1984 best seller Empire of the Sun won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It was later filmed by Steven Spielberg. Ballard's memoir, Miracles of Life, was published in 2008. J. G. Ballard died in 2009.
Members Reviews:
High-density insanity.
âLater, as he sat on his 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.â
High-Rise is an stupendous book about how the increasing density of our cities could lead to mass insanity. The high-rise of the title is a forty-storied project with a thousand apartments that is inaugurated in London, a building designed to be completely autonomous, with supermarkets, stores, swimming pools, gyms and even schools.
As time goes by, the trivial everyday disputes because of noises, animals, children, parking spaces, elevator use; everything intensifies. The dwellers gather in tribes of close storys, with a particular rivalry among those who live in the top luxury floors and the cheaper ones on the bottom. It all leads to all out anarchy and floor wars, social collapse and beatings, invasions, deaths, rapes, gratuitous violence and cannibalism.
The book is full of âballardianâ ideas, such as how the cyclopean building is really built not to house the residents, but for them to hide in. Is the place where you can disconnect yourself from society and let loose your primal instincts of territory and ownership. Where your inner animal can be himself.
It is incredible how this isolation progresses in the book. In the beginning it is just an unconscious anger, leading to a kind of collective insanity and ending in total madness. The dwellers become animals, dominated by an instinct to sleep by day and go out at night to fight.
