Cocaine Nights

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It’s all as slick and stylised as the dialogue in a Noel Coward play, mingled with a pleasant stream of sub-Wildean paradoxes. Sometimes Ballard describes this with the seriousness that the premise of a fable requires, but other times he is wonderfully acute and funny at describing the strange limbo world of these kind of over-heated ex-pat resorts. The person who provides this excitement – the psychopath as saint – is reviled but secretly welcomed. I think it’s Frank playing his strange games again, like those peculiar chess problems he’s always making up.

In a Christie novel it’s often the gamekeeper or family retainer who turns out to have his own secrets. He decides to launch his own amateur investigation because the police, with a confession in pocket, are not really interested in muddying the crystal clear waters of a slam dunk conviction. 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. Rife with descriptive prose and replete with similes and satirical observations, Cocaine Nights explores how society might fragment in a dystopian near future, a recurring theme in much of Ballard’s writing, and one which the author tackles adeptly.Charles decides to launch his own investigation and is drawn into the community of Estrella de Mar – its residents, its clubs and committees, and its surprising underbelly of exciting crime.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry describes Ballard's work as being occupied with "eros, thanatos, mass media and emergent technologies". Although excessive vices happen within the disco’s walls, it’s more hinted at and referred to, so the reader isn’t given a grand tour or even a short reveal of the inside.And 3, because it supposedly has to do with a wild disco overflowing with drugs and illicit activity.

Now, drawing on the beguiling storytelling skills behind compelling novels like Empire of the Sun and Rushing to Paradise, and the imagination that produced such startlingly original works as The Crystal World, Crash and High-Rise, he has created Cocaine Nights – at once an engrossing mystery and an unnerving vision of a society coming to terms with a life of unlimited leisure. however, I don't think this sibling shuffle is enough to ruin the overall story, which, of course, has nothing to do with solving the crime and everything to do with JG's ideas about a little deviance being the spice of life. Unfortunately, though, Cocaine Nights is undone by painful leaps in plot and its own internal implausibility. And in an age of think-tank humbuggery this is a vision of what a communitarian dreamland would really look like.You miss the whole basic psychology of the piece -- the relationship of children and parents and individuals and society.