Cocaine Nights (Paperback)

~ (Author) "CROSSING FRONTIERS is my profession..." (more)
Key Phrases: retirement pueblos, tennis machine, orthopaedic collar, Estrella de Mar, Club Nautico, Bobby Crawford (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com 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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

This new novel by the celebrated nihilist who brought us such underground classics as Crash and Concrete Island is fairly mild by Ballard standards. It involves kinky goings-on in a wealthy British resort community in Gibraltar, where there's not much to do but suntan, get high and play sex games. Narrator Charles Prentice is a travel writer who has been summoned to Estrella de Mar by his brother, the manager of the Club Nautico, who has confessed to setting a fire that killed five people in the villa of the wealthy Hollinger family. Charles knows Frank didn't do it, and so does everyone else, so Frank's motivation is a mystery. The delinquent shenanigans around town soon point to Frank's devoted tennis pro Bobby Crawford, who, with the missionary zeal of a sociopath, rouses the anesthetized residents of Estrella de Mar with violence and fear. "You've seen the future and it doesn't work or play. People are locking their doors and switching off their nervous systems. I can free them," Crawford says. Ballard keeps the dialogue snappy and true; however, the leisurely pace, the comings and goings of this Porsche and that BMW, all the swimming and tennis practice sap the novel of any tension. Moreover, Charles is a dud; the charge inherent in one of his first sentences, "My real luggage is rarely locked, its catches eager to be sprung," is never borne out by his actions or the relationship between him and his brother. Ballard's fascination with the illicit plays like a routine exercise, though his bleak picture of trouble in paradise has the ring of truth.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint; 1 edition (June 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582430179
• ISBN-13: 978-1582430171
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #659,210 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ballard is a genius, September 13, 2000

By A Customer

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.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars best ballard i've read - modern & ultra hip dark satire, November 8, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Cocaine Nights (Hardcover)

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.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Bad Boy Ballard Writes Murder Mystery, February 13, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Cocaine Nights (Hardcover)

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.