Inspiring Older Readers
Cocaine Nights by J.G. Ballard
When this book first appeared back in 1996, a number of initial reviews were disappointing and suggested that Ballard had fallen back on some rather conventional detective/thriller tropes for a book that lacked the author's usual dystopian signature. Reading the book for the first time almost 25 years on, I’m pretty sure that these critics were wrong in their assessment.
What Ballard has a uncanny knack of doing is making the very everyday seem unaccountably creepy and unsettling. The journalist and author Martin Bright has noted in the past that Ballard’s novels are really fictionalised essays about the state of the world and I think that’s a really excellent way of thinking about not just this novel but his whole output. In the case of Cocaine Nights I think this is especially true and it’s pretty clear that Ballard believed that humanity was in danger of succumbing to the kind of self-destroying decadence that brings down empires.
All of this is wrapped up in a sort of murder mystery. Frank Prentice, manager of the Club Nautico in the Spanish resort of Estrella de Mar confesses to the murder, by arson, of a house full of residents during a party which was attended by all the towns ex-patriot movers and shakers. Frank’s brother, Charles, a travel-writer, turns up to establish Frank’s innocence despite the fact that the confession was made of his own free will. So far, so obvious you might think: these are pretty standard detective/thriller tropes. But with Ballard, nothing is quite as it seems. Estrella de Mar, it transpires, is a modern day Land of the Lotus Eaters where torpid, leisure-addicted residents have to be fed a constant diet of sex, drugs, drink and pornography with a side-order of tennis thrown in for good measure. The more determined Charles is to uncover the mystery behind his brother’s confession for a murder he clearly didn’t commit, the deeper into the Venus Flytrap he is drawn.
This nightmare utopia – a very Ballardian concept – has been constructed and conducted by Bobby Crawford, ostensibly Club Nautico’s tennis pro but in reality the resort’s eminence grise. Crawford is a Machiavellian monster and fringe psychopath who has seized hold of the resort by a mix of charisma and terror.
I won't reveal the ins and outs of the plot because that would spoil the unpeeling of the story that Ballard manages so skilfully. The pace at which the author leads us into the maze and the places in which he abandons us are all part of the book’s fine-tuning.
What is perhaps more interesting is the way in which Ballard speaks to us of Western decadence and what conditions it needs to take hold. Despite its profile as the ideal community, Estrella de Mar can only sustain this image through the collusion of the police and the authorities who are happy to turn a blind eye to the wave of petty crime that it turns out is endemic – house burglaries, car theft, boat theft, vandalism. All of them planned and all of them seemingly accepted as part of the package by residents. In his play of 1919, Heartbreak House, George Bernard Shaw explores the psychology of upper class Edwardian England and concludes that the only thing that brings real emotion to the residents of Heartbreak House are their fears of their own destruction. Ballard has revisited this theme as he was looking towards the end of the millennium and has drawn some startlingly similar conclusions.
However, Shaw was looking back at a time he hoped had been wiped away by the horrors of the First World War but Ballard's vision is perhaps more disturbing because rather than analysing past nightmares he is looking forward to a new millennium in which people would be seeking to embrace theirs. That's the true horror of Estrella de Mar.
Terry Potter
April 2020