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Cocaine Nights

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Okay, let's look at this: Marc Bolan recorded "Dandy In the Underworld" which had lyrics which referred to 'cocaine nights'. There, he discovers a lolling leisure class so anesthetized that it takes vicious acts of cruelty to stir its members from their somnolence. Over time Charles becomes increasingly immersed in resort life and less concerned with his brother’s plight. Then, as he uncovers more about Estrella’s secret sub-culture, he put off seeing his brother until he understands more. But then, an arson attack kills five people and though Frank Prentice, the manager of the exclusive Club Nautico, confesses to the crime, no one who knows him believes he is capable of murder.

It’s as if he seamlessly steps into the life of his brother, fulfilling a role that would be missed once Frank goes to jail. He runs over to rescue the woman, the man makes a getaway out the other door, but the woman, although obviously assaulted, with her knickers round her ankles and bleeding from the mouth, shrugs him off, pulls herself together and walks away. What I found within these pages first off was a very drawing and pleasing atmosphere that reminded me of a modern Dashiell Hammett story.

I think it’s more the former, that the hammering away of the same vocabulary is like a miner hammering away at a coal seam underground, relentlessly chipping away at the same pressure point to try and achieve a breakthrough into a new way of seeing. I shall mark it with four stars, having in mind that I am fond of Ballard's writing and that this fondness increases with familiarity. When he learns that his kid brother Frank has been arrested and will be going on trial in Marbella, in the south of Spain, Charles flies to Gibraltar, hires a car and drives up the Spanish coast. He was perfectly happy believing in anyone, so long they gave him the answer he was secretly hoping to hear. In one of Picador's first hardcover titles, Ballard (Crash) offers another of his tautly imagined experiments with 20th-century pathology.

He has long conversations with Frank himself, on his visits to him in prison, but his brother is infuriatingly vague about what happened or who is to blame. When Paula told him anything that would counterfeit what he was previously thinking, he was happy to believe it. Before reading this, I read a lot of reviews about it and most of them said that yes, it starts well and the pace picks up a bit, but then, some 80 pages in, it starts to lose it.While a young Frenchwoman topped up my tank I strolled past the supermarket that shared the forecourt,where elderly women in fluffy towelling suits drifted like clouds along the lines of ice-cold merchandise. In a Christie novel it’s often the gamekeeper or family retainer who turns out to have his own secrets. The disco scene and its disturbing excesses always inspired a kind of quiet horror within me that I find intriguing, like witnessing a car wreck, only hopefully no one is hurt or killed. 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. Similarly, some prostitutes arrive but Charles is stunned when he realises some of the women tottering in high heels, micro-skirts and boob tubes are wives of well-to-do residents.

It starts with petty crime and then escalates into arson, when a wealthy industrialist’s house goes up in flames, claiming five lives. Although it’s longer than almost any of Ballard’s other novels, Cocaine Nights feels like a nice easy read, an airport or poolside thriller with an increasingly psychotic edge. You miss the whole basic psychology of the piece -- the relationship of children and parents and individuals and society.

A house fire in the upmarket British expat enclave of Estrella de Mar on the Costa del Sol results in five deaths. 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. This will be the first of three reviews that center around a world that has lost its moral and ethical compass.

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