Cocaine Nights

by J. G. Ballard

Overview

From the iconic author of Crash and Empire of the Sun, Cocaine Nights features a man who finds himself drawn into a network of drugs, pornography, and murder in a Spanish resort.

The remarkable bestseller from one of the giants of modern British literature—at once an engrossing mystery and an unnerving vision of a society coming to terms with a life of unlimited leisure. When Charles Prentice arrives in Spain to investigate his brother's involvement in the death of five people in a fire in the upmarket coastal resort of Estrella de Mar, he gradually discovers that beneath the civilised, cultured surface of this exclusive enclave for Britain's retired rich there flourishes a secret world of crime, drugs and illicit sex . What starts as an engrossing mystery develops into a mesmerising novel of ideas—a dazzling work of the imagination from one of Britain's most original and controversial novelists.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781582435701
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	01/05/2010
Edition description:	Second Edition
Pages:	330
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

J. G. Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930 and lived in England from 1946 until his death in London in 2009. He is the author of nineteen novels, including Empire of the Sun, The Drought, and Crash, with many of them made into major films.

Editorial Reviews

"What infuses Cocaine Nights is a curious blend of deadpan detachment and almost comical self–consciousness." —The New York Times Book Review

"A bristling thriller pastiche." —Kirkus Reviews

"A bit of metaphysical terrorism as carefully planned and executed as [a] fatal blaze." —Washington Post

"[Ballard's] bleak picture of trouble in paradise has the ring of truth." —Publishers Weekly

"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 . . . There is nothing quite like a J. G. Ballard novel." —The Guardian

From the Publisher

There's a fine line, sometimes, between feeling tranquil and being tranquilized. Still, there is a difference. Tranquillity usually proves fragile and short-lived -- taking a Valium, or watching MTV for a few hours, creates a certain momentum of stupefaction, not so easily broken. J.G. Ballard's most recent novel is set in a resort enclave on the Mediterranean coast, populated by British and French expatriates who have made their money and retired while still young enough to enjoy themselves. Estrella de Mar offers its residents a utopia of leisure and comfort. But utopia is boring. Tranquillity has gotten out of hand.

Anyone familiar with Ballard's vision -- as it has taken shape, over the years, in a highly accomplished and often unnerving body of work, most of it in science fiction -- knows what to expect next. Psychic numbness and jaded tastes require extremes of stimulation. Sometimes it takes a good dose of barbarism just to get through the day. Cocaine Nights is not a sci-fi work; but as characters in the novel remark on a few occasions, Estrella de Mar offers a taste of what a "leisure-dominated future" might be like.

The narrator is Charles Prentice, a travel writer who has come to this "residential retreat for the professional classes of northern Europe" not to report on it, but to help his brother Frank, a nightclub manager the Spanish police have arrested in a case of arson that killed five people. Frank has confessed, but no one quite believes him. Charles investigates, hoping to clear his brother, and finds that Estrella de Mar had been a sleepy place until recently. It's undergone a kind of cultural renaissance: There are amateur productions of Harold Pinter plays, and people read Le Monde and the New York Review of Books between screenings of Hepburn-Tracy films at the local theater. There is also a little crime and seediness now, too. All of which appeared on the scene not long after the arrival of a charming tennis instructor, Bob Crawford.

If, at this point, you have deduced that Crawford set the fire -- well, not so fast. The novel gradually peels back layers of corruption and complicity; but this is not a detective story, exactly, and "guilt" is a fairly problematic concept in Ballard's universe. It does not give too much away, though, to note that the tennis pro is an amateur sociologist of a kind. Too much security yields cultural entropy. So Crawford figures that a bit of transgression (petty crime, random violence, some amateur pornography) is vital for the social ecology. As Charles' efforts to clear Frank bog down, he joins Crawford in applying this principle to a boring luxury resort nearby -- another little utopia of narcosis.

The experiment works. A little depravity really is the spice of life -- for perpetrator and for victim alike. "Someone shits in your pool, ransacks your bedroom and plays around with your wife's underwear," Crawford explains. "Now rage and anger aren't enough. You're forced to rethink yourself on every level, like a primitive man confronting a hostile universe behind every tree and rock. You're aware of time, chance, the resources of your own imagination ..."

This is not a moral vision in which the concept of innocence proves all that viable. And step by step, the plot closes in on the characters -- trapping everyone, the narrator included, in the remorseless logic of Ballard's thesis. It certainly disrupted my tranquil day. Time to go shit in the pool. -- Salon

Scott McLemee

A bristling thriller pastiche from the surrealistic novelist (Rushing to Paradise, 1995, etc.) and peripatetic social observer (A User's Guide to the Millennium, 1996). Travel writer Charles Prentice, who seems to be carrying a lot of Ballard's baggage, is a man on a mission: to get his brother Frank out of a Costa del Sol prison. It won't be an easy job, since Frank, who managed the wildly successful Club Nautico, has already confessed to setting the fire that burned down the Hollinger home, with three family members and two hangers-on inside. Every question Charles asks the localsþforeign nationals, most of them, who've come to regard the paradisiacal resort as much better than homeþmakes him more suspicious of Frank's confession. Where would Frank have gotten the mixture of petrol and ether that was used to start the fire, and how did he know how to introduce it into Hollinger's air-conditioning system? Why was Hollinger in bed with the pregnant Swedish maid, and his wife Alice the same with longtime secretary Roger Sansom, when the fire broke out? In fact, since an enormous party was clearly in progress at the time of the fire, why did no one in attendance make a move to rescue any of the victims? And if Frank wasn't responsible, why has he confessed, and then refused to see the brother who's convinced he's innocent? Classic mystery questions, all, but knowing readers who can see that Ballard is less interested in solving the mystery than in using it as a parable of the modern social contract won't be surprised when Charles, instead of closing in on the solution, finds himself insensibly sliding into the comfy, doomed place his brother has vacated. Forall Ballard's air of jaunty abstraction, his tawdry com‚die humaine seems to be viewed through the wrong end of a telescope, his prophetic eye for the ties that bind is as sharp and unsparing as ever.

Kirkus Reviews