Cocaine Nights

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A bristling thriller pastiche from the surrealistic novelist (Rushing to Paradise, 1995, etc.) and peripatetic social observer (A User’s Guide to the Millennium, 1996). Travel writer Charles Prentice, who seems to be carrying a lot of Ballard’s baggage, is a man on a mission: to get his brother Frank out of a Costa del Sol prison. It won’t be an easy job, since Frank, who managed the wildly successful Club Nautico, has already confessed to setting the fire that burned down the Hollinger home, with three family members and two hangers-on inside. Every question Charles asks the locals—foreign nationals, most of them, who’ve come to regard the paradisiacal resort as much better than home—makes him more suspicious of Frank’s confession. Where would Frank have gotten the mixture of petrol and ether that was used to start the fire, and how did he know how to introduce it into Hollinger’s air-conditioning system? Why was Hollinger in bed with the pregnant Swedish maid, and his wife Alice the same with longtime secretary Roger Sansom, when the fire broke out? In fact, since an enormous party was clearly in progress at the time of the fire, why did no one in attendance make a move to rescue any of the victims? And if Frank wasn’t responsible, why has he confessed—and then refused to see the brother who’s convinced he’s innocent? Classic mystery questions, all, but knowing readers who can see that Ballard is less interested in solving the mystery than in using it as a parable of the modern social contract won’t be surprised when Charles, instead of closing in on the solution, finds himself insensibly sliding into the comfy, doomed place his brother has vacated. For all Ballard’s air of jaunty abstraction—his tawdry comedie humaine seems to be viewed through the wrong end of a telescope—his prophetic eye for the ties that bind is as sharp and unsparing as ever. James Graham "J. G." Ballard (15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009) was an English novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Ballard came to be associated with the New Wave of science fiction early in his career with apocalyptic (or post-apocalyptic) novels such as The Drowned World (1962), The Burning World (1964), and The Crystal World (1966). In the late 1960s and early 1970s Ballard focused on an eclectic variety of short stories (or "condensed novels") such as The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which drew closer comparison with the work of postmodernist writers such as William S. Burroughs. In 1973 the highly controversial novel Crash was published, a story about symphorophilia and car crash fetishism; the protagonist becomes sexually aroused by staging and participating in real car crashes. The story was later adapted into a film of the same name by Canadian director David Cronenberg. Many writers of the past century have expressed anxiety over people of the future breaking from natural human values and slumping into a man-made hell. Whether it’s the all consuming terror of Big Brother thought control in Orwell’s 1984 or the conditioned reality where a wonder drug called Soma substitutes emotion in Huxleys Brave New World, post-WWII intellectuals prophesized the future growing bleak and depressing.

Like all good dystopian fiction High-Rise, Cocaine Nights, and Super-Cannes draw a line between a terrifying future that is not quite here and the seemingly innocuous developments of the present. The setting for High-Rise, written in 1975, for instance, was inspired by the brutalist masterpiece Balfron Tower in Poplar, East London, completed in 1967. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2010-09-15 21:18:54 Bookplateleaf 0003 Boxid IA127614 Boxid_2 CH129925 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City Washington, D.C. Containerid_2 X0008 Donor 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. A book so Ballardian that it almost falls into its own category. Charles Prentice arrives in Spain to see his brother, Frank, who has been arrested following a fire in the exclusive resort of Estrella de Mar. Upon Charles’ arrival he becomes submerged in a world of drugs, violence and perverse sex that swallows him and transforms him into the very thing that he set out to destroy. This Estrella De Mar place, or Residencia Costasol, these seem to be such fake places that even I wouldn't believe them. Yes, it's dystopian, and by definition it should have an unrealistic feel to it, but that's a bit too much. I mean, come on, it's just not possible!

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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." The perfect book, I suppose, has three things going for it: (1) great, realistic characters, who are transformed in believable, often desirable ways, (2) an interesting and perhaps unpredictable plot that holds our attention, not to mention holds water in whatever stream of reality the story finds itself, and (3) eloquent writing.

The early sections put me in mind of High-Rise. I suspect my hazy recollections of this book are now better informed by the wonderful cinematic adaptation directed by Ben Wheatley. Like High-Rise, Cocaine Nights is about post-industrial communities cut off from the rest of the world, and the power dynamics within. What I really did like about this book, actually what I like about Ballard, is the language usage. He is one fine writer, from the technical point of view. Maybe he doesn't have his story all set up, but his expressions are priceless and his jokes are so subtle and beautifully crafted! Really, really nice writing! There’s a dark cloud covering Marbella. Unlike the concrete underpasses of Crash, the roads here seem to lead to dead-ends. Nobody is willing to talk, and even fewer vacate their retirement homes for more than a couple of hours. When it came to anything by Ballard, genre really did not matter to me; his fiction could have been filed under "Tales of Alien Abduction" or "Marsh Plants" and I would have hunted it down. Despite our difference in generation, gender and literary purpose, it was clear to me that he and I were both working with some of the same aesthetic influences: film, surrealist art and poetry; Freud's avant-garde theories of the unconscious. I was just starting to write but Ballard made me feel less lonely. Perhaps more significantly we shared the dislocation of not being born in Britain. Home was the imagination. I too was attracted to the paintings of De Chirico and Delvaux, with their dreamplaces – empty, melancholy cities, abandoned temples, broken statues, shadows, exaggerated perspectives. urn:oclc:224334758 Scandate 20101007213522 Scanner scribe1.sanfrancisco.archive.org Scanningcenter sanfrancisco Worldcat (source edition)

Posing as a whodunnit, or perhaps more accurately a whydunnit, Cocaine Nights is a tale awash with drugs, violence, pornography, and the odd psychiatrist. Bobby Crawford, a charismatic tennis pro, believes he has identified the link between crime and community engagement. By committing a series of low level crimes, the citizens of the sleepy, fortified Spanish Costa del Sol communities awake to re-engage with each other and the world. But, inevitably, there's a price to be paid including the odd scapegoat. Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival. Give enough direct quotation—at least one extended passage—of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste. In Estrella de Mar, Prentice meets Bobby Crawford, the sailing club’s resident tennis coach. Since his arrival at Estrella de Mar, Crawford has revitalized the community. Whereas the sailing club was previously empty and moribund, it is now a hive of activity. However, during his investigation, Charles discovers the tennis coach is not who he seems.

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.urn:lcp:cocainenights00ball:epub:046cb292-a4bb-4be6-b330-f4579012c87b Extramarc University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (PZ) Foldoutcount 0 Identifier cocainenights00ball Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t58d0pk6k Isbn 188717866X He imagines a self-policed post-civilised society in which the citizens steal, vandalise, commit rape and arson, prostitute themselves and deal drugs as a series of leisure options. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike...never try to put the author "in his place,"...Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. 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.