The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Cocaine Nights by J.G. BallardLance Olsen
J. G. Ballard. Cocaine Nights. Flamingo/HarperCollins, 1996. 329 pp. £16.99.
Criminality has become a kind of performance art at the end of this millennium, the protagonist of J. G. Ballard’s wonderful new novel notes, the last real impetus for communal action in a bored leisure society.
It’s no surprise, then, to find the author of twenty-five books, including such cult classics as The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash (the latter now an unnervingly good film by David Cronenberg), turning to the murder mystery genre for inspiration, and, with typical innovative grace, reconfiguring its key narrative elements: Charles Prentice, a British travel writer who enjoys the in-betweenness of his profession, journeys to a town forty minutes up the coast from Gibraltar on behalf of his carefully self-destructive brother, Frank, who has confessed to five horrific killings he apparently hasn’t committed; even the police handling the case aren’t quite convinced he’s guilty, despite the fact they must arrest and hold him for trial since the scant evidence they possess seems to implicate him.
Charles’s quest for the real murderer leads him into the world of safe-zone compounds that stretch along the beaches of the Costa del Sol, fortified antiseptic theme villages and retirement resorts several hundred yards in width and several hundred miles in length, filled with ghostly ad-men and TV execs who have nothing to do with their time except waste it.
Behind those walls’ pristine radically internalized nowhere space of blue kidney-shaped swimming pools and long siestas exists a cloudless land of unreality, a series of Baudrillardian simulacra of the Good Life, and slack-faced monotony—a microcosm of Europe’s future.
And behind that universe with its surveillance cameras and satellite dishes, Charles discovers, Chinese-puzzle-box-like, another more shadowy dimension busy with vandalism, theft, arson, amateur porn films, and a pharmacy of hardcore drugs. In this second-order world, local prostitutes turn out to be the wives of those ad-men and TV execs looking for a little fun, while, just for a lark, residents sit primly in their cars in tidy rows in parking lots late at night and watch the rape of young women in their headlights. Behind what turns out to be a bizarre social experiment stands a charismatic figure who believes such crimes are the only things that keep us interesting, creative, and alive as a culture. The result, as one of the characters comments, “is Kafka re-shot in the style of Psycho.”
Ballard thereby transforms the murder mystery into a philosophical mode of inquiry that explores the conjunction of the imaginative act and the lawless postmodern zone where everything is possible, while suggesting that transgressive behavior might in the end—at least in some cases—actually motivate public good. And he does so with signature panache and intelligence, creating a flawless narrative architecture, the surreal clarity of a town dreamed by Magritte, an unsettling mixture of horror and beauty, and a subtle yet pervasive sense of trespass, his narrative precinct always sheathed beneath a gentle patinated paranoia where final answers lie around the next corner, up the next flight of stairs, and where every one of us is implicated in the spectacular horrorshow called the late twentieth century. [Lance Olsen]