Cocaine Nights

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Crime would always be rife, but Crawford had put vice and prostitution and drug-dealing to positive social ends.

His natural aloofness shaded into some unhappy emotion that I could only glimpse around the bony corners of his face.When Paul Hamilton tells him that Frank’s much-delayed trial is about to start the next day, Charles brushes it off. This whip-smart repartee mixes oddly with Ballard’s very limited set of emotional responses, and then again with the off-hand references to hard drugs or kiddie-porn or BDSM sex. To an outsider, the retired British residents of the Spanish coastal resort of Estrella de Mar belong to an idyllic community, enjoying a lifestyle of constant cultural and sporting activity – based around the thriving Club Nautico. It’s all as slick and stylised as the dialogue in a Noel Coward play, mingled with a pleasant stream of sub-Wildean paradoxes.

The faint scent of bath gel still clung to my skin, the perfume of my own strangulation that embraced me like a forbidden memory. 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. The terrifying thing about Ballard is his logic; is this science fiction or history written ahead of its time? And that’s before you get to the dire condition of the underclass, which I was reading about recently.This edition is part of a new commemorative series of Ballard’s works, featuring introductions from a number of his admirers (including Neil Gaiman, Zadie Smith, John Lanchester and Martin Amis) and brand-new cover designs. Topics Afghanistan Africa America Ancient history ancient Rome art Augustus book Britain British Empire British Museum China Christianity Cicero civil war Cold War colonialism comedy Communism drama Egypt exhibition Feminism fiction First World War France Germany Great War H. As you might have predicted, ‘shadowy figures’ try to warn Charles off, starting with a half-hearted attempt to strangle him on the balcony of Frank’s apartment, which is arranged to frighten him but not to actually hurt him. There wasn’t really a central mastermind or fixed plan, but some of the people he’s met got hold of petrol and ether, others filled the villa’s air conditioning with this flammable mix.

The novel is written in Ballard’s trademark style—the vast, sweeping diction, the plumy vowel usage, the grand blasts of description. I've always enjoyed J G Ballard's novels in the past, but this one lost me about three quarters of the way through. Posing as a whodunnit, or perhaps more accurately a whydunnit, Cocaine Nights is a tale awash with drugs, violence, pornography, and the odd psychiatrist.

These strips of no man’s land between the checkpoints always seem such zones of promise, rich with the possibilities of new lives, new scents and affections. Someone has to wean them off the Valium and Mogadon, teach them how to face the day without a bottle and a half of vodka. Eventually you need a larger event to push the community over the edge and into a permanent state of activity and creativity.