Cocaine Nights

_Cocaine Nights_ is what you get when a writer of the caliber of J.G. Ballard develops what could have been just another novel of murder and suspense into an "immorality tale" of hero worship that goes terribly wrong.
Bobby Crawford is a handsome and talented tennis instructor who wants to transform the sleepy retirement village of Residencia Costasol, situated on the coast of Spain, into an artistic, theatrically oriented, and civic minded community as a front for a den of drug dealers, pornographers, prostitution, and thieves. Crawford previously did the same for the Spanish resort of Estrella de Mar, home of Club Nautica, managed by Frank Prentice, a Brit recently jailed after he confessed to setting ablaze the home of the elderly and wealthy Mr. and Mrs. Hollinger that snuffed out their lives and those of three other people. Charles Prentice, a travel writer and Frank's older brother, believes in Frank's innocence, despite the latter's repeated protestations to the contrary. Charles goes to Estrella de Mar to investigate the matter.
Charles is slowly sucked into the charming and cunning Bobby Crawford's web of corruption, as are many others in the book. They believe that Crawford is basically a do-gooder, in spite of his penchant for petty and not so petty crimes, to which the police repeatedly turn a blind eye.
I was caught in the grip of this unbelievably suspenseful tale of a later day Sodom and Gomorrah that just never lets up. I could not help comparing the character of Bobby Crawford with that of the late Jim Jones of the Jonestown Massacre infamy. Jim Jones was a handsome, charismatic man of many talents who led his naive followers into the promised land of Guyana. Like Bobby Crawford, a cult of personality formed around Jim Jones, and like Bobby Crawford, Jim Jones was a psychopath. Each man believed he was the Messiah, but it was Jim Jones, if not necessarily Bobby Crawford, who eventually proved to be the Angel of Death.
Let me just say that the climax of _Cocaine Nights_, despite my Bobby Crawford/Jim Jones analogy, is quite unexpected. I do promise that the irony of it will leave your mouth gaping.

"Cocaine Nights" is a return to Ballard's psychological preoccupations. We're ushered into the quintessential Ballardian scenario: the microcosmic "culture" of the wealthy and retired. We quickly learn that all is not well, and follow the quasi-hard-boiled narrator as he succumbs to the community's visceral core. Bloody and provocative, "Cocaine Nights" is an excellent compliment to Ballard's other "landscape" novels ("Crash," "High-Rise," "Concrete Island"), in which he plumbs the apocalyptic interface between desire and environment, turning the psyche inside-out with the steely objectivity of a lab tech. "Cocaine Nights" is vintage Ballard psych-noir and won't disappoint.

Not a bad story, with the usual Ballardian ideas. But that is the problem: J.G. Ballard is getting lazy. Okay, so exposing the tedium, the superficiality, the pointlessness of bourgeouis life is the point of his writing (isn't it?)... but Ballard's books are getting more and more similar. This is just Vermillion Sands but less fantastic, Running Wild running on empty (and much less economical and experimental in form). All Ballard's characters, from The Drowned World to Cocaine Nights, are like millenial parodies of people out of a Noel Cowerd play - 'how frightfully dreadful, and pass me another cocktail, darling...'. Ballard is probably right ot say that unfortunately this homogenous, leisured, airport lounge, gated-communities culture is the future in a globalized, Americanized world, but surely there are different ways of approching it than to write the same thing, in the same way, over and over again?