Cocaine Nights – JG Ballard

“Cocaine Nights”, one of the last novels by English writer JG Ballard, is a rich, ravishing, blackly comic indictment of modern times.

“Selfish men make the best lovers” – JG Ballard

Born in Shanghai in 1930, JG Ballard led an extraordinary life, including two years in a Japanese internment camp from 1943-5. His autobiographical Empire of the Sun, recounting that experience, is a terrific read.

Ballard’s fiction covered a dazzling range of genres, from sci-fi to savage social satire. His early sci-fi novels, such as The Drowned World and Terminal Beach, made a big impression on me when I read them in the early ’70s. In 1974, Concrete Island explored a man living on the traffic-divider island of a motorway. His 1973 Crash followed the adventures of a gang of car-crash fetishists and was filmed in 1996 by David Cronenberg. Ballard died in 2009.

Cocaine Nights: the plot

I came across Cocaine Nights in a second-hand bookshop and bought it on the strength of Ballard’s reputation. Published in 1996 and one of Ballard’s last novels, it did not disappoint. The protagonist, Charles Prentice, travels to Estrella del Mar, a (real) resort in Spain, after his brother Frank is arrested for an arson attack that kills five people. Frank, inexplicably, has confessed to the murders.

My battered copy of “Cocaine Nights”

As Charles investigates the killings, he is drawn into the dark world beneath the glitzy surface of the resort. This has a profound impact on his state of mind and behaviour. No spoilers here. But Estrella del Mar acts as a vehicle, or metaphor, for an excoriating condemnation of the mundanity of the way most people live their lives. We are all, Ballard writes, too passive. His solution is a scary one.

Cocaine Nights: a recipe for redemption?

Charles is a superb, maddening, unreliable narrator – always leaping to conclusions that seem to make no sense. His ability to forget about his imprisoned brother for months at a time is baffling; his gradual corruption chilling. Ballard seems to argue that the only release from mundanity is violence and sexuality – especially violence. Charles’s decline and slide into violence is frightening.

Philosphical underpinnings

Many of the characters in Cocaine Nights express strong opinions about how life should be lived – frequently in exquisite prose. Narrator Charles is a documentary film-maker who is constantly travelling. Asked whether he ever arrives anywhere, he replies:

• ‘It’s hard to tell – sometimes I think I’ve made jet-lag into a new philosophy.’

Other characters decry the settlements of expat Brits in Spain:

• ‘Have you seen the pueblos along the coast? Zombieland. Fifty thousand Brits, one huge liver perfused by vodka and tonic. Embalming fluid piped door to door.’

Shady guru Bobby Crawford suggests such settlements are the future. But he argues he must help “free” people to live a more active life. It’s a spooky, totalitarian prescription:

• ‘Town-scapes are changing. The open-plan city belongs to the past – no more ramblas, no more pedestrian precincts, no more left banks and Latin quarters. We’re moving into the age of security grilles and defensible space. As for living, our surveillance cameras can do that for us. People are locking their doors and switching off their nervous systems. I can free them, Charles.’

Cocaine Nights: language

Ballard is a fine writer. Here are some quotations about the Spanish coast, the setting of Cocaine Nights:

• Something new and strange happens when the sea meets the land.
• Tennis players swung their rackets as they set off for the courts, warming up for three hard-fought sets. Sunbathers loosened the tops of their swimsuits and oiled themselves beside the pool, pressing their lip-gloss to the icy, salty rims of the day’s first margaritas. An open-cast gold mine of jewellery lay among the burnished breasts.
• ‘What’s going on? This is Kafka re-shot in the style of Psycho.’
• Dominating all the other craft in the yard was a fibre-glass powerboat almost forty feet long, three immense outboards at its stern like the genitalia of a giant aquatic machine.
• [In a supermarket] The wall-to-ceiling display of wines, spirits and liqueurs was almost cathedral in its vastness, and a primitive cortical life seemed to flicker as the residents and their wives fitfully scanned the prices and vintages.
• [Of Hong Kong] In that world of corrupt border officials and thieving villagers, a young English lieutenant with a taste for violence would have fitted in like a pickpocket in a Derby Day crowd.
• The kidney-shaped pool resembled a sunken altar reached by the chromium ladder. Votive offerings of a dead rat, a wine bottle and a sun-bleached property brochure waited for whatever minor deity might claim them.

Powerful characters

Ballard creates powerful, richly-drawn characters. Here are a few examples:

• [Elizabeth Shand] Her eyes surveyed the mourners with the ever-watchful but tolerant gaze of a governor at a light-regime prison for executive criminals.
• [Dr Sanger] He smiled in a tender but almost remote way, like the owner of a dead pet briefly remembering their happier days together.
• [Bobby Crawford] I stared at him through the dressing-table mirror, noticing that his features were almost perfectly symmetrical, as if his face’s asymmetric twin was hiding somewhere behind his eyes.
• [Elizabeth Shand] As she gazed at the scene around her, like a silken cobra sated after digesting a succulent goat, I could almost see the accumulated cash totals flicker pasts her eyes.
• [Dr Sanger] He seemed blanched and shrunken, as if emerging from a bath of formaldehyde…

Sex and relationships

Finally, Ballard basks in sex and relationships:

• [Paula] ‘Selfish men make the best lovers. They’re prepared to invest in the woman’s pleasure so that they can collect an even bigger dividend for themselves.’
• ‘You’re very frank, Paula.’ ‘Ah… but that’s the artful way of hiding things.’

“Cocaine Nights” and “What a Carve Up!”

By a coincidence, another book I recently bought from a charity shop and greatly enjoyed was Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve-Up! published in 1994. Like Cocaine Nights, it is a ferocious attack on the way we live now. But whereas Ballard attacks modern lifestyles in general, Coe’s anger is focused on 1990s Britain. I recommend both.

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