Cocaine Nights

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The Residencia Costasol wasn’t thrown together by some gimcrack developer; it was carefully planned to give people the chance of a better life.

By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. And so is Charles’s nightclub, doing a roaring trade, with people staying up late partying to the dance music.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. As we stood together I placed my hand on her breast, my index finger following the blue vein that rose to the surface of her sunburnt skin before descending into the warm deeps below her nipple. To find out Charles decides he has to move into Estrella de Mar itself, so he checks out of the hotel up the coast where he’d been staying (the Los Monteros Hotel) and takes up occupation of Frank’s now-empty apartment, and starts digging deeper into the place and its inhabitants.

Like High-Rise, Cocaine Nights is about post-industrial communities cut off from the rest of the world, and the power dynamics within. The first half is a little bit of a paint-by-numbers mystery, but the structure eventually collapses and it becomes…uh, quite Ballardian? Under the light crust of gentility lies a familiar Ballard landscape of sociopathic violence, transgressive sex and the inevitable pornographic web that lies in between.

A swanky holiday house overlooking the resort was set on fire in an act of deliberate arson, and the retired British couple who lived there, the Hollingers, along with their niece Anne, an au pair and the male secretary, Roger Sansom, were all burned to death in the arson attack. When his Charles arrives to unravel the truth, he gradually discovers that behind the resort's civilized facade flourishes a secret world of crime, drugs and illicit sex. Half-reluctant but intrigued, Charles allows himself to be persuaded to become the manager of the main nightclub in the resort down the road.

And 3, because it supposedly has to do with a wild disco overflowing with drugs and illicit activity. Part spellbinding story, part fable for our time, Ballard's new novel is a vividly cinematic but nightmarish vision of a corrupted world. As the tennis pro at Club Nautico, Crawford has become something of a messianic figure who has turned crime into a performance art. And so part of the pleasure of reading the book comes from watching Ballard navigate the fine line between acuity and pretentiousness, between vivid originality and something a little more clumsy.

It starts with petty crime and then escalates into arson, when a wealthy industrialist’s house goes up in flames, claiming five lives. Ultimately, for most of the novel, it walks a thin line between allegory and farce, but towards the end it transgresses a little too overtly towards the farcical. The novel is written in Ballard’s trademark style—the vast, sweeping diction, the plumy vowel usage, the grand blasts of description.

Protagonist Charles Prentice arrives in Spain to investigate his brother's involvement in the death of five people in a fire.

However, once the premise of this novel resolved into how the expatriate British, French, Swiss and German residents of gated communities on the idyllic Mediterranean coast of Spain turned to crime (hard drugs, both taking and dealing, prostitution and pornography) to overcome their leisure-induced boredom, I felt that it became more far-fetched and improbable than insightful or persuasive. The club manager, Frank Prentice, pleads guilty to charges of murder – yet not even the police believe him. I've always enjoyed J G Ballard's novels in the past, but this one lost me about three quarters of the way through. A house fire in the upmarket British expat enclave of Estrella de Mar on the Costa del Sol results in five deaths.