Cocaine Nights. J. G. Ballard
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villas even look out to the sea, a hundred yards distant. ‘The residents of the Costa del Sol lived in an eventless world … a world beyond boredom, with no past, no future and a diminishing present … Nothing could ever happen in this affectless realm.’ They are ‘refugees from time … needing only that part of the external world that was distilled from the sky by their satellite dishes … already the ghosts of themselves.’ One of the great and disorienting pleasures of reading Ballard – and especially disorienting in an essentially realistic book like Cocaine Nights – is finding oneself at a loss to identify exactly where the surreal or fantastical begins, or if indeed it even has. Passages that read like wild satirical exaggeration solidify, on second glance, into clear-eyed reportage.
Ballard might have dreamed up these deserted pueblos, ‘their architecture dedicated to the abolition of time’, using the de Chiricos and Hoppers his imagination was stocked with, but in fact he knew the resorts of the Costas well. By the time he wrote Cocaine Nights, he’d been making trips to the Mediterranean for over thirty years, taking annual family holidays in Marbella, and then, when the children had grown up, on the French Riviera with his partner Claire Walsh. ‘I’m always much happier in the south – Spain, Greece – than I am anywhere else,’ he remarked, Englishly. These holidays helped generate several precursors to Cocaine Nights, beginning with the abandoned Costa Brava of ‘Low-Flying Aircraft’ (1975) and the Hitchcockianly erotic ‘The 60 Minute Zoom’ (1976) – two little masterpieces – and then a pair of more closely related stories, ‘Having a Wonderful Time’ (1978) and ‘The Largest Theme Park in the World’ (1989).
The former may well be inspired by the collapse in August 1974 of the Court Line group, pioneers of the cheap-and-cheerful package-tour, which left 50,000 Britons marooned on the beaches of the Med, far from the stagflation and three-day week of home. It describes, via a series of postcards sent by a British tourist ostensibly stranded in the Canaries, the clandestine relocation of the economically superfluous classes of Europe to the continent’s beach-resorts, where these unemployables, unaware of the huge experiment in which they’re participating, blossom into creative fulfilment. The later story inverts the idea: Europe’s holidaymakers refuse to return home, creating a militant totalitarian society based around the cult of physical perfection and occupying ‘the linear city of the Mediterranean coast, some 3,000 miles long and 300 metres wide’ – a typically catchy image Ballard had been chewing over and trying out for fifteen years. And throughout Cocaine Nights you can hear the authorial thrill at the sheer infinity-tending scale of this two-dimensional city – ‘a hundred miles of white cement’, ‘the surfaces of a thousand swimming pools’, ‘fifty thousand Brits, one huge liver perfused by vodka and tonic’, ‘a billion balconies facing the sun’. The coastal megalopolis is a zone of infinite repetition, the sort of non-space that barely possesses any geographical reality at all. But it is also therefore a space vulnerable to sudden and rapidly-spreading psychic contagions. This is the sort of place that excites Ballard – since the greater the homogeneity of an environment or the inner-space of its inhabitants, as with the African desert of The Day of Creation or the Shepperton of The Unlimited Dream Company, the greater the potential transformative energy of the eventual psychic dam-burst. That’s the excitement that powers Cocaine Nights, lined with a dismay which perhaps explains why this particular novel’s iteration of that stock Ballard character, the messianic or psychopathic anti-hero intent on waking a community from its slumber, is one of its author’s most sympathetic utopians.
In fact, despite the multiple murders at its heart, this is one of Ballard’s most relaxed works, inaugurating what you might call his late period – that slight flattening of style and deceleration which mark his four last, and four longest, fictions. Artists’ late periods, so the cliché goes, are often signalled by a wintry brevity that denotes either an impatience with inessentials or a general loss of energy; on the other hand, writers (and especially those who flirt with genre-structures) can equally tend to a late-middle-aged spread, a comfortable couple of inches around the narrative waistline. This is Ballard’s beach read, designed to be picked up at an airport, consumed poolside and left, mottled with Ambre Solaire and disintegrating, its binding-glue long melted, on a shelf in the villa between the Dibdins and Rendells it is slyly constructed to resemble. For a novel about leisure – Ballard’s only full-length work explicitly about this lifelong preoccupation – the subtly parodic chunky-thriller rhythms and unhurried mystery-story plotting are a perfect fit: it’s a holiday book satirizing the ritual of the holiday book. Even Cocaine Nights’ title, which the reader will soon realize is barely relevant, functions as camouflage – an artfully slovenly mass-market formulation that ought to be embossed on the cover in gold foil, advertising cheap thrills it has no intention of delivering. (Ballard’s timing is as uncanny as ever: 1996, the date of publication, is pretty much exactly when cocaine-use in Britain could be said to have definitively shifted from a supposedly glamorous drug-of-the-elite to the everyday mainstream.) And the book, Ballard in a slightly mellower key, was a hit – its author’s biggest seller after Empire of the Sun and Crash.
Unforgiving or even uncharitable as the vision of opiate-addicted expats ‘sleeping through the longest afternoon in the world’ may sound, the leavening kindness always audible in Ballard’s prose, that bass-note of decency, occasionally seems to modulate in Cocaine Nights into something approaching tenderness. In Super-Cannes, Ballard takes a moment to allow his two main characters to trade some astutely-chosen quotes from Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave – ‘“Peeling off the kilometres to the tune of ‘Blue Skies’, sizzling down the … Nationale Sept, the plane trees going …” “Sha-sha-sha …” I completed, “She with the Michelin beside me, a handkerchief binding her hair …”’ To a surprising number of British readers of the immediate post-war period, those very sentences were a touchstone expressing the atavistic national yearning to travel south that must at the time have seemed almost like a destiny. The speed with which that thrilling promise of renewal and self-transformation was superseded by a kind of reflex contempt for the Ballardian realities of mass tourism (can any word have been pronounced more sneeringly by the British mouth than ‘Torremolinos’?) has ever since seemed like an obscurely shaming wrinkle in the national unconscious – witness the way the BBC’s early-nineties soap Eldorado, confidently premised on the abiding glamour of the Costa del Sol, was silenced by a collective groan of disgust, and not just because it was so staggeringly boring. Ballard’s memory of the innocence and excitement of the British population’s first collision with the Mediterranean is what gives Cocaine Nights its most intriguing effect – which is that the novel seems to be set simultaneously in the 1990s and the mid-century.
Of course, this effect is a signature of Ballard’s genius, never more richly and bewilderingly used than in the retro-futurism (a completely inadequate term for the intricate swirl of history Ballard blends together) of Vermilion Sands. But in the non-surreal setting of Cocaine Nights, it becomes central to the book’s peculiar and wrong-footing affect. ‘I have often thought,’ Ballard said, casually lapidary as usual, ‘that writers don’t necessarily write their books in their real order. Empire of the Sun may be my first novel, which I just happened to write when I was fifty-four. It may well be that Vermilion Sands is my last book.’ In which case, Cocaine Nights was written some time in the sixties by a young Ballard under the influence of Alistair MacLean and Desmond Bagley. The slightly stilted, thrillery dialogue, with its old-fashioned overuse of the vocative, is peppered with Little Englander near-archaisms: ‘the sheer neck of it’, ‘their parties are rather good shows’, ‘Good God!’ and the cultural allusions of an earlier generation: ‘Chin up. This isn’t the House of Usher’, ‘You could become … the Savonarola of the Costa del Sol.’ Elsewhere, disorientating obsolescences abound: ‘cine-photography’, ‘porno-cassette’, ‘disco’, ‘a signed photograph of a punk rock group’. The anti-hero is dismissed with an incomparably 1970s sentence: ‘The tennis bum who’s taken an Open University course in Cultural Studies and thinks paperback sociology is the answer to everything.’
One could argue that this is simply the way Ballard writes, and that many of his anachronisms are merely ingrained, or oversights, but that would be to miss the lovely conceptual