Cocaine Nights. J. G. Ballard
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of the novel’s charming messiah/psychopath, doesn’t wake up to the present tense so much as a nostalgic dream of the twentieth century’s greatest hits. ‘In many ways Estrella de Mar was the halcyon county-town England of the mythical 1930s, brought back to life and moved south into the sun.’ Ballard’s quietly hilarious emblem of the community’s spiritual awakening and artistic efflorescence is amateur dramatics: everywhere you go in Estrella de Mar you will find a once cutting-edge play – Beckett, Orton, Eliot, Stoppard – being proudly revived as proof of cultural vigour. (‘“A month ago they were dozing in their bedrooms … waiting for death. Now they’re putting on the plays of Harold Pinter. Isn’t that an advance?” “I suppose so.”’) The open-air cinema shows Renoir and classics from the Golden Age. The disco isn’t a mislabelled nightclub, it’s a disco. It is a porno-cassette, not a porn-tape. The whole place is a fondly observed anachronism, and so is the novel in which you’re reading about it. The cliffhangers, red-herrings and misdirections of Cocaine Nights’ murder-mystery structure are so cursory and obvious, and the plot-recaps so obsessively frequent, that they amount to a wry subversion of the novel’s own pretensions to old-fashioned page-turning pleasure: if you aren’t a Ballard devotee, you’ll probably have worked out whodunnit after about a hundred pages. If you are, you’ll know by the end of the first chapter. It’s a book about boredom, or boredom as an outcome of capitalism’s natural tendency to isolate and encourage an obsession with security in its consumers, and about the stimuli required to counteract that. As such the book is happy to enact those stimuli itself. A glance down the list of chapter-titles (and one should always take time to read Ballard’s Contents pages, which constitute introductory poems to his novels) gives you a selection of tawdry but irresistible enticements – ‘The Scent of Death’, ‘The Pornographic Film’, ‘The Lady by the Pool’, ‘Cocaine Nights’ – each one the title of a cheap thriller, good for the beach.
Meanwhile, the novel’s ostensible centre of interest, a Durkheimian interrogation of the importance of transgression and crime to social cohesion, plays out according to a classic Ballard schema: there’s a psychopathic Prospero figure, a protagonist who comes to act as his Ariel, an authorial ambivalence about the violence and uncontrollability of the transformative magic, a climactic blood-sacrifice demanded by the tribe. But this takes place in a more restrained register than usual: armies of robot American presidents do not assassinate the incumbent, birds of paradise don’t throng the Shepperton skies, Alsatians are not on the menu. In truth, this is not brick-through-your-mind Ballard. Instead, it offers the beautiful spectacle of an accurate prophet come face to face with a future he intuited and which is already receding into the past, growing dated. Ballard strolls around the leisureworld of Estrella de Mar (and what a gorgeous name, by the way: like one of those reclusive screen-goddesses who inhabit Vermilion Sands) as if delighted to find himself for the first time in a (pretty much) realistic landscape which contains so many of his imagination’s old obsessions: here are paranoid zones of surveillance, home-made pornography on an industrial scale, blood-spattered tennis courts, avenues of empty villas, universal recreational drug-use and so many swimming pools (both full and empty) he can put one on virtually every page. Even for Ballard, Cocaine Nights is a novel of endless, artful repetitions and reiterations, as if he simply can’t bear to stop taking holiday snap after holiday snap after holiday snap of this place so beautiful it’s like something he once made up.
Paris, 2014
CROSSING FRONTIERS is my profession. Those strips of no-man’s land between the checkpoints always seem such zones of promise, rich with the possibilities of new lives, new scents and affections. At the same time they set off a reflex of unease that I have never been able to repress. As the customs officials rummage through my suitcases I sense them trying to unpack my mind and reveal a contraband of forbidden dreams and memories. And even then there are the special pleasures of being exposed, which may well have made me a professional tourist. I earn my living as a travel writer, but I accept that this is little more than a masquerade. My real luggage is rarely locked, its catches eager to be sprung.
Gibraltar was no exception, though this time there was a real basis for my feelings of guilt. I had arrived on the morning flight from Heathrow, making my first landing on the military runway that served this last outpost of the British Empire. I had always avoided Gibraltar, with its vague air of a provincial England left out too long in the sun. But my reporter’s ears and eyes soon took over, and for an hour I explored the narrow streets with their quaint tea-rooms, camera shops and policemen disguised as London bobbies.
Gilbratar, like the Costa del Sol, was off my beat. I prefer the long-haul flights to Jakarta and Papeete, those hours of club-class air-time that still give me the sense of having a real destination, the great undying illusion of air travel. In fact we sit in a small cinema, watching films as blurred as our hopes of discovering somewhere new. We arrive at an airport identical to the one we left, with the same car-rental agencies and hotel rooms with their adult movie channels and deodorized bathrooms, side-chapels of that lay religion, mass tourism. There are the same bored bar-girls waiting in the restaurant vestibules who later giggle as they play solitaire with our credit cards, tolerant eyes exploring those lines of fatigue in our faces that have nothing to do with age or tiredness.
Gibraltar, though, soon surprised me. The sometime garrison post and naval base was a frontier town, a Macao or Juarez that had decided to make the most of the late twentieth century. At first sight it resembled a seaside resort transported from a stony bay in Cornwall and erected beside the gatepost of the Mediterranean, but its real business clearly had nothing to do with peace, order and the regulation of Her Majesty’s waves.
Like any frontier town Gibraltar’s main activity, I suspected, was smuggling. As I counted the stores crammed with cut-price video-recorders, and scanned the nameplates of the fringe banks that gleamed in the darkened doorways, I guessed that the economy and civic pride of this geo-political relic were devoted to rooking the Spanish state, to money-laundering and the smuggling of untaxed perfumes and pharmaceuticals.
The Rock was far larger than I expected, sticking up like a thumb, the local sign of the cuckold, in the face of Spain. The raunchy bars had a potent charm, like the speedboats in the harbour, their powerful engines cooling after the latest high-speed run from Morocco. As they rode at anchor I thought of my brother Frank and the family crisis that had brought me to Spain. If the magistrates in Marbella failed to acquit Frank, but released him on bail, one of these sea-skimming craft might rescue him from the medieval constraints of the Spanish legal system.
Later that afternoon I would meet Frank and his lawyer in Marbella, a forty-minute drive up the coast. But when I collected my car from the rental office near the airport I found that an immense traffic jam had closed the border crossing. Hundreds of cars and buses waited in a gritty haze of engine exhaust, while teenaged girls grizzled and their grandmothers shouted at the Spanish soldiers. Ignoring the impatient horns, the Guardia Civil were checking every screw and rivet, officiously searching suitcases and supermarket cartons, peering under bonnets and spare wheels.
‘I need to be in Marbella by five,’ I told the rental office manager, who was gazing at the stalled vehicles with the serenity of a man about to lease his last car before collecting his pension. ‘This traffic jam has a permanent look about it.’
‘Calm yourself, Mr Prentice. It can clear at any time, when the Guardia realize how bored they are.’
‘All these regulations …’ I shook my head over the rental agreement. ‘Spare bulbs, first-aid kit, fire extinguisher? This Renault is better equipped than the plane that flew me here.’
‘You should blame Cadiz. The new Civil Governor is obsessed with La Linea. His workfare schemes are unpopular with the people there.’
‘Too bad. So there’s a lot of unemployment?’
‘Not exactly. Rather too much employment, but of the wrong kind.’
‘The smuggling kind? A few cigarettes and camcorders?’