Nearly a century separates the publication of Émile Zola’s tenth novel in his Rougon-Macquart series, Pot-Bouille and J. G. Ballard’s dystopian fiction High Rise.  Given this duration of time, it is surprising how similar is the theme of the two books.

Pot Luck is set in a four-storey apartment block in Rue de Choiseul in the 2^nd Arrondissement of Paris, close to the Opéra, during the period of the Second Empire.  At the time, the apartment block would have been reasonably recently built, and was a new style of living accommodation, the grander rooms being on the lower floors; the servants’ quarters in the attic.

The events of High Rise takes place in a forty-storey concrete residential tower-block, located close to the Thames, a short distance outside of the centre of London, during the 1970s.  This was a period towards the end of the ‘building boom’ when a lot of London’s war-damaged houses were replaced by modernist skyscrapers, and not long after the gas explosion, which caused the collapse of the Ronan Point tower block in 1968.  All too quickly, the optimism of a new, futuristic architecture was being replaced by the often harsh realities of living in a high-rise society.

Both Pot Luck and High Rise explore the social and moral decline of a community struggling to adapt to a new way of living.  In each case the building itself provides an isolated microcosm, in which it is possible to minutely examine its bourgeois inhabitants like specimens in a petri-dish under a microscope.

In both books, there is a clear division in terms of social class between residents of the buildings.  In Pot Luck, the landlord, wealthier families and professional classes live in the large apartments on the lower floors of the building, where ‘behind those fine doors of shining mahogany there seemed to lie infinite depths of respectability’; more junior clerks and – heaven forbid! – the odd manual worker, living on the upper floors where ‘after the third floor the red carpet came to an end and was replaced by a simple grey covering’.  And, above all this, the servants’ quarters where ‘it was as cold as ice under the zinc roofing, with the stale smell of paupers’ lodging-houses’.

In High Rise, the social stratum is reversed.  The penthouse suite is reserved for the building’s wealthy architect and founder; the middle floors for the ‘well-to-do professional people – lawyers, doctors, tax consultants, senior academics, and advertising executives’; whilst the lower levels are the home of the ‘proletariat of film technicians, air hostesses and the like’.

For the residents in Pot Luck, the most important consideration is to maintain a façade of respectability within the building, regardless of the hypocrisy of their actual behaviour, whether it be having affairs with other tenant’s wives, getting servants pregnant, lying to and cheating family members, or getting drunk.  In High Rise, any attempt to conceal the breakdown in law and order within the building is quickly forgotten; what is of paramount importance to the residents there is to maintain an appearance of respectability to the outside world.  Inside the tower block, any pretence of social stability breaks down as quickly as the first elevator that requires repair, and it is not long before the tenants have collectively and consentingly descended into a tribal anarchy.

In High Rise, Ballard seems to be warning about the fragility of civilisation and, as with much of his urban dystopian fiction – The Drowned World; Super-Cannes – how vulnerable our established social order is to threats as varied as climate change or simple boredom.  Zola’s intentions were different.  His novel is a powerful satire on the hypocrisy and snobbery of the bourgeoisie; exposing the moral bankruptcy and breakdown of an individual class not the destruction of the entire fabric of society.

In another hundred years, society might be living in structures four hundred storeys high, or four storeys underground beneath the surface of the Moon but, although the buildings might change, the petty meanness’s, marital infidelities and financial corruption that bubble beneath the surface of much of human society will doubtless remain the same.

© Fergus Longfellow

Fergus Longfellow is back on his concrete island.