Cocaine Nights

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This new novel by the celebrated nihilist who brought us such underground classics as Crash and Concrete Island is fairly mild by Ballard standards. I have books where you can’t see the title or the author’s name until you open the cover) and the premise of the story were enough to attract me to this novel. The entire community felt bound together by collective guilt, like members of some primitive tribe who kill, cook and eat their chief.

It’s also one of his novels that aged the best given the issues of exclusivity and inequity it explores.This behaviour is necessary to set Charles on his mission to solve the mystery himself, and thus instigate the novel’s action, but it is a huge contrivance: this never feels organic to the world or circumstances that Ballard has created. At once an engrossing mystery and a novel of ideas, 'Cocaine Nights' is a stunningly original work, a vision of a society coming to terms with a life of almost unlimited leisure.

The frankness of her erotic response, the unashamed way in which she used her sex, seemed to unsettle Crawford.Paula Hamilton, who seems to know more about the night of the fire than what she is willing to share. The terrifying thing about Ballard is his logic; is this science fiction or history written ahead of its time? FIRST EDITION, super octavo, black heavy boards, silver gilt lettering to spine, 329pp, VG+ (sl bruising to spine extrems, light to moderate tanning to page edges, spine sl cocked) in d/w, VG+ (light creasing to edges, light chafing to covers, sl tanning to edges of flaps). This is Kafka reshot in the style of Psycho‘ and then moving on to make comparisons with chess games .

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. The literary distinctiveness of Ballard's work has given rise to the adjective "Ballardian", defined by the Collins English Dictionary as "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. The first half is a little bit of a paint-by-numbers mystery, but the structure eventually collapses and it becomes…uh, quite Ballardian? There was a criminal fire that killed five people and the local sports club manager Frank Prentice immediately claimed responsibility for it. 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.The Spanish resort of Estrella de Mar (which should surely be Estrella del Mar) is a retirement community for rich British expats, who do the things that these people do – tennis, boating, parties, putting on plays. A similar sense of bafflement surrounds descriptions of the fateful fire which killed the Hollingers. That is something we learn throughout the course of the novel, as we are introduced to the seamier side of life (drugs, pornography, prostitution, burglary, violent crime and murder) in the apparently idyllic resort and the masterminds behind the whole crime spree. That the repetitions not only of plot, but of specific words and phrases, adds to the sense of stylisation which accompanied, in the old days, coronations and religious rituals, and in our media age, define the camera angles and gestures of movie actors.

I climbed a pathway of blue tiles to a grass knoll and looked down on an endless terrain of picture windows, patios and miniature pools. Ballard gives us drugs - a whole load of drugs - both prescribed and illegal, along with sociopathic violence, porno tapes, dodgy psychiatrists, a self-policed fortress-like housing complex (the Residencia Costasol), transgressive sex, and of course, satire. The retirement pueblos lay by the motorway, embalmed in a dream of the sun from which they would never awake.And the setting, so it turns out, is not the ’70s, but the ’90s, so it doesn’t really have anything to do with the intriguing, chilling debauchery of the disco culture of the ’70s. Better to go deep, I think, and start with something uncompromising like The Unlimited Dream Company. It seems these folk want nothing more than to stay in the dark like vampires and watch TV in-between the daytime napping. The main character, Charles, is a likable character that I can easily see Ewan MacGregor starring as if there was a film made out of this.