Cocaine Nights - Hardcover

Ballard, J. G.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 188717866X ISBN 13: 9781887178662

Publisher: Counterpoint, 1998

Synopsis

A new novel by the author of Crash and Empire of the Sun--both made into feature films--features a man who finds himself drawn into a network of drugs, pornography, and murder in a Spanish resort. IP.

About this title

Review:

When travel writer Charles Prentice arrives at Estrella de Mar, a resort town near Gibraltar populated primarily by British retirees, to find out why his brother Frank has been jailed, he's shocked to find that Frank has confessed to a spectacular act of arson that left five people dead. Charles tries to find the real culprit by hanging around Estrella de Mar, which one resident describes as "like Chelsea or Greenwich Village in the 1960s. There are theatre and film clubs, a choral society, cordon blue classes.... Stand still for a moment and you find yourself roped into a revival of Waiting for Godot." But the longer he stays, the more confused Charles is by the residents' breezy lack of concern about the constant background of vandalism, rape, prostitution, and drug dealing.

Things become clearer as Charles makes the acquaintance of local tennis pro Bobby Crawford, who has some interesting hypotheses about how to maintain the quality of the inner life in the age of affluence. As another of the locals explains, "Leisure societies lie ahead of us, like those you see on this coast. People ... will retire in their late thirties, with fifty years of idleness in front of them.... But how do you energize people, give them some sense of community?" Bobby's succinct answer, provided to Charles in another context: "There's nothing like a violent reflex now and then to tune up the nervous system." Bobby convinces Charles to help him replicate his social experiment in an adjacent retirement community, slowly convincing him that crime and creativity really do go hand in hand. But who, if anybody, takes the responsibility?

Cocaine Nights resonates quite neatly with Ballard's earlier science fiction and experimental stories. As early as The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard was speculating about the salubrious effects of transgression, and his science fiction novel High Rise also deals with the introduction of violence to a self-contained paradise. Cocaine Nights differs from that earlier work primarily in that it is a naturalistic fiction set in a world that is much more ostensibly real, a world that, with a little less detached theorizing (even at his most natural, it seems, Ballard cannot help but be clinical) on the part of its characters, might even be mistaken for real. --Ron Hogan

About the Author:

J. G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai. After internment in a civilian prison camp, his family returned to England in 1946. His 1984 bestseller `Empire of the Sun' won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. His controversial novel `Crash' was made into a film by David Cronenberg. His autobiography `Miracles of Life' was published in 2008, and a collection of interviews with the author, `Extreme Metaphors', was published in 2012. J. G. Ballard passed away in 2009.

About this edition

• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 188717866X
• ISBN 13: 9781887178662
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 328