Customer Reviews

Cocaine Nights

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

And this is a brilliant novel of what lies under the thin veneer of civilisation that we all wear, an edgy exploration of the the violence that lies within us all. His usual sparkling, deceptively simple prose is here, together with a thrilling murder story, off-beat characters and a threatening air of menace lurking by the pools and apartments of the up-market retirement village. Ballard is tragically under-read, and I urge you to read Cocaine Nights, one of the best books of the 90s, and then move on to his other novels, particularly The Drought and High Rise, and then devour his short stories, which are nearly all perfectly crafted gems.

i have always been intrigued with the themes and topics ballards works have been dealing with. nevertheless, most of his novels could not satisfy me completely. COCAINE NIGHTS changed that. ballards' amazingly beautiful and poetic descriptive way of writing, a story about tomorrow's society set in our present, the dark side that lurks in each one of us. all of the above come together in this novel, and make COCAINE NIGHTS wahat i would consider ballards flagship work. reminiscent of FIGHT CLUB. great stuff.

Yes, there is plenty of humour in J G Ballard's caustic dig at British ex-pat life on the Costa Del Sol but despite the claims of `dazzling originality' and `exhilarating imagination' it is instead a good but fairly conventional detective novel, very much in the English vein. Charles Prentice arrives in Estrella Del Mar, an outwardly genteel community of retired British professionals, where his brother Frank has confessed to starting a horrific fire which kills the Hollinger family. Frank was the manager of Club Nautico, the nerve pulse of the community, and nobody believes his confession, not even the police. As the Spanish police are ineffectual and disinterested Charles plunges into some clumsy amateur sleuthing to try and save his brother. However, he discovers that behind the façade of respectability the town is a hotbed of decadence and crime peopled by amoral and feckless egoists.
There is a popular tradition in English writing that enjoys depicting tranquil and genteel rural communities as a veneer for all manner of nefarious and murderous activities. An apposite comparison to Cocaine Nights would be ITV's Midsummer Murders series where deranged psychotics hell-bent on revenge lurk behind twitching net curtains or in watercolour classes. In Estrella Del Mar the principal force for good or for evil - depending on your point of view - is the implausible, floppy-haired, tennis playing Bobby Crawford who doubles as a burglar, high-powered drug dealer and pornographer. Charles is fascinated by the man and his motives and gradually becomes sucked into the dark underbelly of Estrella Del Mar and nearby Residencia Costasol forgetting about his brother languishing in jail.
Cocaine Nights is a pretty fast moving book, crisply written and not too deep, but the author does investigate the link between crime and creativity, demonstrates the danger of unbridled hedonism, and cleverly satirises the brain-dead, security-obsessed gated communities that were springing up in the 1990s.

The cinematic beauty of the early apocalyptic books has been replaced by a stripped down, suburban set of tennis courts, retirement homes, and fancy boats. The locals are bored into a catatonic slumber which can only be awakened by crime, violence and perversion. The delinquent instigators use communal participation as a way of bonding the spectators into a mass ritual of performace art where crime is the main event. Ballard fans will find the familiar themes of deviancy, crowd control, and city anarchy. Judged on these merits the book is a solid addition to his works. The weaknes lies in the narrator's too predictable behavior and his fall into temptations that are by ballard's own fictional standards rather tame. For sheer outrageousness, it is hard to top the deviancy and perversity of CRASH.

No matter how long J.G. Ballard writes, his head will always be twisted backwards like an Orpheus fixated on the images of his childhood, their brutal traumas flash framing into his famous mise en scenes of abandoned hotels, mouldering swimming pools, dysfunctional landscapes wrenched out of Time by cataclysmic events in the nuclear universe.

In his senior years, however, his writing has become more mainstream, less indebted to the Golden Age of Science Fiction and the avant garde angst of alienation movies like Hiroshima Mon Amour. While his fantasies still remain an autobiographical souce code from a psychiatrist's log book, their settings are now recognizable as the present, the spiritual malaise more obvious, the world much more like we ourselves have experienced it.

Cocaine Nights echoes his early masterpiece Vermillion Sands. In both works the setting is a semi-tropical landscape which exists somewhere between the disciplined dream imagery of orthodox surrealism and the sexual primitivism of Latino black velvet painting. Sands is a parodic version of a desert resort like Palm Springs; Nights is a coastal resort categorically located on Spain's Costa del Sol, that evironmental nightmare of tourist sepulchres between Malaga and Gibralter.

As usual, the resort -- Estrella del Mar -- is an enclave of dangerous misfits whose twentieth century boredom (an existential impasse) can only be broken by performance enhancers like cocaine and pornographic movies. If you think Ballard has lost it, just read his description of the porno made by the del Mar elite -- this little scenario is at once ironic and subversive. If it doesn't make you hard (or at least smile), then this novel isn't for you.

The narrator, Charles Prentice, is diverted from his profession of travel writing to the del Mar resort by the news that his brother Frank has been implicated in the murders of five sybaritic loafers (a big house fire). Frank pleads guilty, is held by the Spanish police, although it seems obvious to them and Charles that he's innocent. As Charles tries to solve the crime, he gradually assumes his brother's identity by taking over his mistress (Paula, the community's femme fatale shrink), his job (manager of Club Nautico), his "real" role (criminal gamester), and finally, his role as a patsy.

So it's a corrupted version of the crime novel, using the genre's penchant for exotic settings (the old hipster corridor of Torremolinos-Marbella, now an over-developed suntrap for Britain's professional elite) and murder as the real sub-text of the human mind. The writing isn't beyond criticism, of course. J.G.B.'s characters are always fragments of a single persona, speaking with the same idiom, metaphor, world view as the narrator. But we don't need the scalding stitchomythic repartees of an Elmore Leonard or a David Mamet to be impressed by this novel. Ballard's narrative power with its highly original use of metaphor is second to none. While most contemporary writing simply submerges into the sludge of literary psycho-babble, J.G.B.'s unique vision stands apart like an alternative existence, a museum of remarkable mental paintings.

We know he's a bit of a bad boy, an English ruffian who looks like a gentleman, a bit more de Sade than Byron, maybe. A long time ago Doubleday shredded all of their run of his love-hate peroration The Atrocity Exhibition because of its attacks on certain American icons. And there's been quite a bit of shrapnel from the infamous movie version of his novel Crash. While Cocaine Nights isn't quite as dangerous to the status quo as these earlier salvos, it's yet another very interesting addition to the Ballard mythos.

If there's anything crazier than coffee, it's cocaine, and this novel revels in the cultural effects of the hyperstimulant. Hyperstimulation is my middle name, man, and this book'll hit your frontal lobes like a weekend in Vegas with all the pretty lights. The main character goes on a journey from a wild coastal town in Spain to a massive social experiment carried out by a guy who makes Jim Jones (of the Kool-Aid party) seem like just another evangelist. Ballard crosses every frontier, from the boundries of civilization to the borderline of the sane.

If you like your books hot and twisted, read Rabid: A Novel by Kenyon, Tree of Smoke: A Novel by Johnson, The Pugilist at Rest: Stories by Jones, and Fight Club: A Novel by Palahniuk.

The Bookeater!

Ballard's attempt to "expose" the seedy underbelly of English retirement communities under the guise of mystery ultimately fails to deliver on its initial promise. The beginning, with whispered conspiracies and country club cliques, sets the stage for a scandal-laced, brutally honest look at leisure society and its inability and unwillingness to think outside the box without prompting. Unfortunately, the characters are ultimately shallow, the situations familiar (cocaine in discotheques, oh my), and, the mark of death for any mystery, predictable. The prose and Ballard's ability to breathe life into the strangest and far fetched situation shines through as usual, but this neither ranks as a good mystery, nor as good Ballard.

_Cocaine Nights_ is what you get when a writer of the caliber of J.G. Ballard develops what could have been just another novel of murder and suspense into an "immorality tale" of hero worship that goes terribly wrong.

Bobby Crawford is a handsome and talented tennis instructor who wants to transform the sleepy retirement village of Residencia Costasol, situated on the coast of Spain, into an artistic, theatrically oriented, and civic minded community as a front for a den of drug dealers, pornographers, prostitution, and thieves. Crawford previously did the same for the Spanish resort of Estrella de Mar, home of Club Nautica, managed by Frank Prentice, a Brit recently jailed after he confessed to setting ablaze the home of the elderly and wealthy Mr. and Mrs. Hollinger that snuffed out their lives and those of three other people. Charles Prentice, a travel writer and Frank's older brother, believes in Frank's innocence, despite the latter's repeated protestations to the contrary. Charles goes to Estrella de Mar to investigate the matter.

Charles is slowly sucked into the charming and cunning Bobby Crawford's web of corruption, as are many others in the book. They believe that Crawford is basically a do-gooder, in spite of his penchant for petty and not so petty crimes, to which the police repeatedly turn a blind eye.

I was caught in the grip of this unbelievably suspenseful tale of a later day Sodom and Gomorrah that just never lets up. I could not help comparing the character of Bobby Crawford with that of the late Jim Jones of the Jonestown Massacre infamy. Jim Jones was a handsome, charismatic man of many talents who led his naive followers into the promised land of Guyana. Like Bobby Crawford, a cult of personality formed around Jim Jones, and like Bobby Crawford, Jim Jones was a psychopath. Each man believed he was the Messiah, but it was Jim Jones, if not necessarily Bobby Crawford, who eventually proved to be the Angel of Death.

Let me just say that the climax of _Cocaine Nights_, despite my Bobby Crawford/Jim Jones analogy, is quite unexpected. I do promise that the irony of it will leave your mouth gaping.

Well if you understood fight club, this is a book written before and based on the same ideals. Loving other humans, bringing people together, giving up as a liberation, lack of property as the way to ascend and more. This book is about waking people up, about putting a meaning to everything. It is an utterly symbolic book so most of the narrow minded and people without fantasy will never be able to read it. It is also a humorous book, sarcastic as hell, full of ideas alternatives and above all sooooooo entertaining.

I just could not accept the premise that crime is necessary for civic responsibilty and artistic endeavour. To quote the medicis and the Renaissance is not proof; there were many external threats and civic collectivism was no where in sight. having said that, i enjoyed his descriptions of the Costa del Sol which hold good even today.