Cocaine Nights FROM THE PUBLISHER
In Cocaine Nights, the setting is the Costa del Sol, and the stylish resort of Estrella de Mar, where young retirees from Europe's chillier climes bask in a lifestyle of endless leisure. Into the queasy beauty of this artificial environment steps Charles Prentice, a travel writer from London who has come to visit his brother Frank, manager of the resort's Club Nautico - tennis and swim club by day, coked-up discotheque by night. Frank is in jail, having confessed to setting an explosive fire that has taken five lives. Certain that the confession was coerced, Charles wants to launch his own investigation. But Frank isn't interested in salvation, and the Spanish police don't want their open-and-shut case corrupted by a meddling Brit. Charles insists on continuing his crusade, though his life is threatened.
FROM THE CRITICS
Scott McLemee
There's a fine line, sometimes, between feeling tranquil and being tranquilized. Still, there is a difference. Tranquillity usually proves fragile and short-lived -- taking a Valium, or watching MTV for a few hours, creates a certain momentum of stupefaction, not so easily broken. J.G. Ballard's most recent novel is set in a resort enclave on the Mediterranean coast, populated by British and French expatriates who have made their money and retired while still young enough to enjoy themselves. Estrella de Mar offers its residents a utopia of leisure and comfort. But utopia is boring. Tranquillity has gotten out of hand.
Anyone familiar with Ballard's vision -- as it has taken shape, over the years, in a highly accomplished and often unnerving body of work, most of it in science fiction -- knows what to expect next. Psychic numbness and jaded tastes require extremes of stimulation. Sometimes it takes a good dose of barbarism just to get through the day. Cocaine Nights is not a sci-fi work; but as characters in the novel remark on a few occasions, Estrella de Mar offers a taste of what a "leisure-dominated future" might be like.
The narrator is Charles Prentice, a travel writer who has come to this "residential retreat for the professional classes of northern Europe" not to report on it, but to help his brother Frank, a nightclub manager the Spanish police have arrested in a case of arson that killed five people. Frank has confessed, but no one quite believes him. Charles investigates, hoping to clear his brother, and finds that Estrella de Mar had been a sleepy place until recently. It's undergone a kind of cultural renaissance: There are amateur productions of Harold Pinter plays, and people read Le Monde and the New York Review of Books between screenings of Hepburn-Tracy films at the local theater. There is also a little crime and seediness now, too. All of which appeared on the scene not long after the arrival of a charming tennis instructor, Bob Crawford.
If, at this point, you have deduced that Crawford set the fire -- well, not so fast. The novel gradually peels back layers of corruption and complicity; but this is not a detective story, exactly, and "guilt" is a fairly problematic concept in Ballard's universe. It does not give too much away, though, to note that the tennis pro is an amateur sociologist of a kind. Too much security yields cultural entropy. So Crawford figures that a bit of transgression (petty crime, random violence, some amateur pornography) is vital for the social ecology. As Charles' efforts to clear Frank bog down, he joins Crawford in applying this principle to a boring luxury resort nearby -- another little utopia of narcosis.
The experiment works. A little depravity really is the spice of life -- for perpetrator and for victim alike. "Someone shits in your pool, ransacks your bedroom and plays around with your wife's underwear," Crawford explains. "Now rage and anger aren't enough. You're forced to rethink yourself on every level, like a primitive man confronting a hostile universe behind every tree and rock. You're aware of time, chance, the resources of your own imagination ..."
This is not a moral vision in which the concept of innocence proves all that viable. And step by step, the plot closes in on the characters -- trapping everyone, the narrator included, in the remorseless logic of Ballard's thesis. It certainly disrupted my tranquil day. Time to go shit in the pool. -- Salon
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.
Kirkus Reviews
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 localsþforeign nationals, most of them, who've come to regard the paradisiacal resort as much better than homeþmakes 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. Forall Ballard's air of jaunty abstraction, his tawdry com�die 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.
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