Cocaine Nights

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It does not. Stand down. The book reveals secrets. It answers questions. But by a strange dialectic of exegesis and opacity, it and they remain oblique. "I think now," Ballard says, almost owlishly, "that the drained pool represented the unknown." And with that he gently, politely, glosses everything and nothing. He fills the empty pool with emptiness. Firstly, I'm planning to read The Drowned World, and I listened to My Dream of Flying to Wake Island on The Guardian's fiction podcast, but beyond that this novel is my first foray into Ballardian territory. Wouldn't have been my optimal choice, but it's available for free on the avant-garde storehouse UbuWeb, adapted from cassette(!) All these years later, I still marvel at the eerie poetry of Ballard's prose. It lingers like a strange perfume over his concise, matter-of-fact sentences, more heightened in the earlier novels and short stories, but the bottom notes (petrol, anguish, desire, nightmares) are still present in the first three lines of his final and most didactic novel, Kingdom Come: "The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world …"

Charles arrives in Marbella following his brother’s trial, who’s pleaded guilty to burning down a house containing five people – killing them all in the process. Charles isn’t convinced by his brother’s plea and sets out to play amateur detective in the case. Seventeen novella-like chapters fictionalise the key phases of Ballard's life from 1937 to 1987, starting with his childhood in Shanghai where the rich, perpetually tipsy westerners play tennis, go shopping and sidestep the growing mound of refugee bodies felled by hunger, typhus and bombs. "To my child's eyes, which had seen nothing else, Shanghai was a waking dream where everything I could imagine had already been taken to its extreme." Those last 15 words serve as a manifesto for all of Ballard's novels. Well, it's hard to find a comparable author. Maybe a crime writer like Raymond Chandler? Maybe after The Drowned World, I'll have a better grasp of what I'm dealing with. In truth, Ballard's basic decency was always there, even in his most outrageous tales. It is a measure of how obtuse the guardians of public morality continue to be, that Ballard was ever accused of being a nihilistic pervert or a champion of orgasmic car crashes. Like all satirists, he assumed that humans should behave compassionately and morally. Grieved by their failure to do so, he expressed his alarm – not with earnest handwringing, but by ushering us straight to a dystopian fait accompli. In short, he shanghaied us.

4. You keep having nightmares

If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's œuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours? I think the failure is in subject matter, making a creepy, alienated feeling into a book length murder mystery. I could have done without a lot of the exposition. I just want to read enjoyable prose, or find some kind of recognition in what I'm reading - even a Kafkaesque sort of recognised alienation. Cocaine Nights follows Charles Prentice, a famous travel writer based in London, in his search to find out what happened to his brother Frank. His mission takes him to Estrella de Mar, a retirement community on the Spanish Costa del Sol. His brother, the former president of Estrella de Mar’s sailing club, is being held in prison after he confessed to an arson and multiple murders. Ballard was prescient about the world of the future in his fiction. However, once the premise of this novel resolved into how the expatriate British, French, Swiss and German residents of gated communities on the idyllic Mediterranean coast of Spain turned to crime (hard drugs, both taking and dealing, prostitution and pornography) to overcome their leisure-induced boredom, I felt that it became more far-fetched and improbable than insightful or persuasive. Written in 1996, the novel presents us with another glance into the future by Ballard, who described himself as "a kind of investigator, a scout sent on ahead to see if the water is drinkable or not."

After enjoying High Rise so much, we went on a bit of a spending spree and bought several Ballard novels to follow it up. In part because it was recently the work book club choice (although I'm not actually a member) Cocaine Nights was the first one out of the pile. As with High Rise this is the tale of something we think we know, British ex-pats moving to Spain, but somehow corrupted beyond our expectations by some trigger event. With High Rise it was the loss of power; with Cocaine Nights it is the presence of the tennis coach – Bobby Crawford. On the surface, Cocaine Nights is a whodunit and a race against time, but as it proceeds – and as preconceived conceptions of good and evil begin to dissolve – it evolves into a thoughtful, faintly frightening look at under-examined aspects of 1990s western society. As is his wont, Ballard confronts his readers with some faintly outlandish hypotheses unlikely to be embraced by many, but which nonetheless serve to provoke both thought and a bit of paranoia; it’s a method that Ballard has developed and refined on his own, and as usual, it propels his novel along marvellously. On to Charles, the main character of this work. I felt like he believed them too much. And by them I mean anyone. When Paula told him anything that would counterfeit what he was previously thinking, he was happy to believe it. When Crawford told him he didn't set fire to the Hollinger's house, he believed him. I’d find it hard to get aerated about people who’d smoke dope with their kids. I’d wonder who on earth would want their children to see their coked-up personality. I can see Kureishi’s point that MDMA is like a truth serum, so certainly best to avoid if you wouldn’t take one of those en famille. Boomers and generation X don’t really understand ketamine, so that would have to be the kids’ idea. I know drug technology has moved on a lot, but I still cannot in a million years imagine taking LSD with your treasured offspring, not least because it would result in intense anxiety about what you’d just done to their psychic ecosystem.

8. You don't want to see your mates

The story bears very little resemblance to the human trajectory in Miracles of Life, but the calm candid tone, the matter-of-fact surprise at the quotidian in Miracles of Life, is the same as B's sedate astonishment at the empty city. The city in the emptiness of which, at last, contentedly, B could begin his work. The travel writer Charles Prentice goes to the resort of Estrella de Mar because his brother Frank is there in prison having confessed to setting fire that killed five people. Charles is sure his brother is innocent, and tries to prove it. urn:oclc:224334758 Scandate 20101007213522 Scanner scribe1.sanfrancisco.archive.org Scanningcenter sanfrancisco Worldcat (source edition)