Cocaine Nights

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In a Christie novel it’s often the gamekeeper or family retainer who turns out to have his own secrets. En un trayecto entre Gibraltar y Marbella, el protagonista comienza a viendo huertas, garajes de tractores, proyectos de mansiones y un parque acuático a medio construir para, al acercarse a Sotogrande, observar que “los campos de golf empezaron a multiplicarse como síntomas de un cáncer hipertrofiado en una pradera”. This narrowness of plotting, and the narrowness of vocabulary, are central issues in critiquing Ballard’s work. Ballard has a wicked turn of phrase, a wry sense of humour and the unerring ability to observe the commonplace from a skewed, but nonetheless illuminating, perspective.

And in fact, to his dismay, his lover Paul Hamilton who finally reveals all this to him, also reveals that Frank did in fact play a key role in the arson. When Frank's brother Charles arrives, intent on unravelling the mystery, gradually he uncovers the secret world behind the resort's civilized image. Various guests tried to smash in the patio doors or windows, but they were fire-sealed and security-locked. But party by accident he was involved in some petty crimes and observed that it pepped the victims up no end. Whilst humorous, cool and controlled and loved by the ladies, there was something altogether terrifying about him.Ballard is routinely trotted out as a ‘prophet’ or ‘futurologist’, but this strikes me as plain wrong. Money-rich, time-poor is an expression which arose in Britain at the end of the 20th century to describe groups of people who, whilst having a high disposable income through well-paid employment, have relatively little leisure time as a result.

Although it’s longer than almost any of Ballard’s other novels, Cocaine Nights feels like a nice easy read, an airport or poolside thriller with an increasingly psychotic edge. These include passive sex and drug use, empty swimming pools, perspectives on consumer culture, violence as entertainment, and a grab at prescience by setting his work in a very near but off-kilter future. Ballard’s Costa del Sol (which, deep down, I think, is the real one) is no place I’d ever like to take a holiday in. The sun shines all day long and there is a marina full of unused boats, swimming pools that haven't seen a ripple, and various other activities and clubs that have no members.

Estrella de Mar is one of those Spanish resorts for British expatriates where all care has been erased: a leisure-driven paradise whose ageing occupants divide their time between tennis, amateur dramatics and adultery, while their money makes them money elsewhere. Raging against social inequities and the impunity of rich people has been a very popular topic on social media in 2019. Certainly, Joseph Conrad also lurks around the edges of any Ballard novel, sailing his ghost ship from one chapter to the next. Police exclusion tapes looped along its rails, falling into the water where they drifted like streamers from a forgotten party.

His 1984 bestseller ‘Empire of the Sun’ won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. The first thing Charles notices when he arrives in Estrella de Mar is the feeling of heavy stillness among the residents.As the customs officials rummage through my suitcases I sense them trying to unpack my mind and reveal a contraband of forbidden dreams and memories. But I do appreciate your insights and will reply to each in turn when I'm back online after my nuptials. Over time Charles becomes increasingly immersed in resort life and less concerned with his brother’s plight. The answer to the Estrella de Mar mystery lies between the residents’ monolithic boredom and the unexplained surges of violence that happen increasingly more often at the novel goes on.

Although excessive vices happen within the disco’s walls, it’s more hinted at and referred to, so the reader isn’t given a grand tour or even a short reveal of the inside. To find out Charles decides he has to move into Estrella de Mar itself, so he checks out of the hotel up the coast where he’d been staying (the Los Monteros Hotel) and takes up occupation of Frank’s now-empty apartment, and starts digging deeper into the place and its inhabitants. He runs over to rescue the woman, the man makes a getaway out the other door, but the woman, although obviously assaulted, with her knickers round her ankles and bleeding from the mouth, shrugs him off, pulls herself together and walks away. His autobiography ‘Miracles of Life’ was published in 2008, and a collection of interviews with the author, ‘Extreme Metaphors’, was published in 2012. When Charles finally manages to visit Frank at his Spanish prison he discovers, to his bewilderment and consternation, that Frank is going to plead guilty.

The entire community felt bound together by collective guilt, like members of some primitive tribe who kill, cook and eat their chief.