Cocaine Nights
JG Ballard
Flamingo, hbk, £16.99; now in paperback
Reviewed by Gerald Houghton (1997)
Looking for precursors, reviewers - and Ballard himself - have sought to present this by way of his odd 1988 novella, Running Wild, which seems too simple. Structurally and intellectually Cocaine Nights is a sequel to the masterly Crash, with the not-quite-so-innocent narrator (Charles Prentice here, James Ballard there) drawn into the bright orbit of a charismatic visionary with an aggressive new take on society. Of course then it was the almost understandable ‘hoodlum scientist’ Vaughan and his eroticised automotive carnage, but there is something wholly appropriate in, twenty something years later, a community surrendering itself to this ‘tennis bum who’s taken an Open University course in Cultural Studies’. Ballard is, again, about to retune the zeitgeist.
Prentice is a travel writer (get this for a pregnant opening salvo: ‘Crossing frontiers is my profession’) who goes to Estrella de Mar on the sun-coast of Spain when his brother Frank is arrested for murder. Worse yet, Frank, manager of the thriving Club Nautico, has confessed to killing five people in a fire. Charles believes the admission no more than the Spanish authorities do and determines to clear Frank’s name, initiating a journey through the wealthy resort’s underworld - ‘where the late twentieth century ran into the buffers’ - and into the mind of the beguiling Bobby Crawford.
So far, so much plot, but, as expected, the thriller element is really a skeleton on which Ballard hangs his thesis. And Cocaine Nights is Ballard’s first novel in a while to have a thesis. Recently, he’s written of realigning London as a Weimar-on-the-Thames, and, slamming our self-appointed moral arbiters, the need for more cultural sex and violence (ironic then that Cronenberg’s movie of Crash experienced some difficulty). Cocaine Nights is drawn from such a wellspring, the work of a chronicler often misidentified as a futurologist. What marks Ballard’s fiction out is that it is one of description over narrative; ‘like’ is his favourite word.
The setting is familiar to Ballard watchers, with its middle-aged participants in their ‘white-walled retirement complexes marooned like icebergs among the golf courses’. And, yes, drained swimming pools. The inhabitants, however, have atrophied on leisure and inaction, content to live under surveillance cameras, with the anaesthetic of satellite TV. Estrella del Mar is ‘Zombieland... One huge liver perfused by vodka and tonic’, writes Ballard, paradoxically utopian and dystopian at the same time. The solution? ‘You won’t find who was responsible by looking for motives. In Estrella del Mar... crimes have no motives.’
Ballard’s thesis is that as a society we need crime. He conjures up Last Year at Marienbad and Pasolini’s Theorem in his defence, and drops brilliant soundbite grenades that bear repeating:
‘Crime... had become one of the performance arts... The only real philosophers left are the police’.
Homemade pornography, amateur prostitution, drug abuse and rape as spectator sport (‘Awful, I know. But it does keep the girls on their toes’) are invoked by Crawford to needle ‘the timelessness of a world beyond boredom, with no past, no future and a diminishing present’.
Cocaine Nights is also, whatever the man’s protestations, a funny book. Not laugh-out-loud funny, but quietly, ironically, blackly so. Frank’s lover Dr Paula Hamilton works at the local Princess Margaret Clinic; the fire at the Hollinger house is sparked during the annual bash for the Queen’s birthday; the revival of cultural fortunes is marked by revivals of Rattigan and Pinter. Ballard’s place as a satirist has yet to be fully defined.
Cocaine Nights is a novel of ideas, one to provoke and stimulate as much as entertain. We know how Ballard operates, and this book is not out to earn many new adherents. However good his last, Rushing To Paradise, it was familiar territory. Ballard, for what feels like the first time in years, has something new and important to say; the effect is disorientating, cruelly logical, and intensely memorable. We ignore him at our peril.