Cocaine Nights

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Ballard was not an emotionless man and he did not write emotionless fiction. The coolness that many critics have characterised as archetypically "Ballardian" is not as chilly as it seems. In The Kindness of Women, warm feelings – of pity, of passion, of parental love, of fond friendship – course richly beneath the surface of the skin but, like veins that retreat or collapse when a hypodermic needle seeks to penetrate them, they elude the forensic approach of Ballard's pen. The Kindness of Women is a curious hybrid, combining – not always successfully – the merciless thematic rigour of his earlier, more fantastical work and a new humanity that dispelled the deviant cyborg of myth. Many years before, when Crash was rejected by a publisher whose editorial assistant had branded him "beyond psychiatric help", Ballard took the comment as encouraging proof that he'd hit a nerve. By 1991, he no longer revelled in such opprobrium. Cocaine Nights follows Charles Prentice, a famous travel writer based in London, in his search to find out what happened to his brother Frank. His mission takes him to Estrella de Mar, a retirement community on the Spanish Costa del Sol. His brother, the former president of Estrella de Mar’s sailing club, is being held in prison after he confessed to an arson and multiple murders. The faint scent of bath gel still clung to my skin, the perfume of my own strangulation that embraced me like a forbidden memory.

If the strangeness of Shanghai is meant to foreshadow Auschwitz, Vietnam and the contextless chaos of modern media, Jim's medical studies in postwar England tell us a lot about Ballard's values as a prose-writer. When he begins to dissect a cadaver, a friend warns him: "You'll have to cut away all the fat before you reach the fascia." It's an appropriate metaphor for Ballard's clinical approach to narrative, an odd mixture of focus and nonchalance. While he liked to set himself apart from oh-so-literary avant-gardists by insisting that he was "an old-fashioned storyteller at heart", he was impatient with the conventions that had underpinned respectable mainstream fiction since the Victorians. Surrealism's emphasis on the inexplicable and SF's tolerance for haphazard characterisation and unnaturalistic dialogue suited his own inclinations, even if some readers might find these things alienating. I didn't know what to expect from a book titled "Cocaine Nights", so I was surprised when I really, really liked it. Charles' brother, Frank, has been accused of multiple murders in a tiny resort town in Spain and has pleaded guilty. Charles travels to the town to investigate what happened for himself, knowing his brother could not have harmed anyone, let alone killed several people. Estrella de Mar is a thriving, exciting town with an interesting cast of characters. Charles falls into the charms of some of the more charismatic among those characters and the result is a dive into this murder mystery, way down into the dark underbelly of what drives us all to have "successful" society. Anyway, I found it kind of distressing to be so underwhelmed by a book I'd been so looking forward to, so I availed myself of John Updike's criticism rules to see if I'd been fair, or at least to make my opinion completely clear in my own mind.This book started out with tremendous promise. That sounds more patronising than I would like. It blew my mind. Is that better? I couldn't believe I had avoided this author for so long. If you are an avid reader, not reading J.G. Ballard is like depriving yourself of air. Each sentence glitters with intelligence. The rhythm, the poise, the vocabulary, the imagery are all perfect. He has a fine sense of character and there is passion beneath his hard, cynical edge. Constantly being manipulated while he thinks he is finding the truth, Charles soon finds himself out of control and at the nexus of certain disaster, at which point he finally begins to understand just what happened to his brother.

Charles discovers that Bobby Crawford, Estrella de Mar’s amoral and charismatic head tennis coach, is the orchestrator of a society rampant with crime, drugs and adultery. Over time Charles becomes increasingly immersed in resort life and less concerned with his brother’s plight. After enjoying High Rise so much, we went on a bit of a spending spree and bought several Ballard novels to follow it up. In part because it was recently the work book club choice (although I'm not actually a member) Cocaine Nights was the first one out of the pile. As with High Rise this is the tale of something we think we know, British ex-pats moving to Spain, but somehow corrupted beyond our expectations by some trigger event. With High Rise it was the loss of power; with Cocaine Nights it is the presence of the tennis coach – Bobby Crawford. The book is a valuable resource for those struggling with addiction and tells a first-hand experience of how difficult active cocaine addiction can be and then a brighter tale about Chris’s life as a sober member of society. 2) Cocaine: The Musical Cocaine Nights comes at you like a conventional 'all-is-not-as-it- seems' whodunit. But all is not as it seems. Under the light crust of gentility lies a familiar Ballard landscape of sociopathic violence, transgressive sex and the inevitable pornographic web that lies in between. And at its centre stands Bobby Crawford, at once a deeply comic and utterly terrifying character one of Ballard's best monsters. As the tennis pro at Club Nautico, Crawford has become something of a messianic figure who has turned crime into a performance art. He's not selfish enough. Selfish men make the best lovers. They're prepared to invest in the woman's pleasure so that they can collect an even bigger dividend for themselves."The case is thrown into further disarray when it’s revealed that two hundred people were outside the house at the time of the fire – celebrating the Queen’s birthday. Who was the guilty party? Why did none of them help? These are all questions Charles must solve to free his brother.