Cocaine Nights

Product Information

In the Spanish upmarket coastal resort of Estella de Mar, and like everywhere in Ballard's future, crimes have no motives. G. Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments. The story is taking place in the worm lieu of a high-class resort for retired central-Europeans at the equator and it involves passions and speculation on the behaviour of human societies.

The problem that Charles seems to miss is that, like the drugs that are circulating, the low-level crime slowly stops being enough. Violence is not necessarily something that we should fear but, rather, it energizes us, make us alive, even as it kills us.

Like High-Rise, Cocaine Nights is about post-industrial communities cut off from the rest of the world, and the power dynamics within. I have books where you can’t see the title or the author’s name until you open the cover) and the premise of the story were enough to attract me to this novel.

Bobby Crawford, a charismatic tennis pro, believes he has identified the link between crime and community engagement. Police exclusion tapes looped along its rails, falling into the water where they drifted like streamers from a forgotten party. By this point the book has ceased being a realistic novel and become a kind of elaboration of Sigmund Freud’s highly questionable anthropological theories.

There, he discovers a lolling leisure class so anesthetized that it takes vicious acts of cruelty to stir its members from their somnolence. G. Ballard, the book design (design and marketing does work, even if all that silver foil ends up on my sweaty little fingers. Ebooks fulfilled through Glose cannot be printed, downloaded as PDF, or read in other digital readers (like Kindle or Nook). And even more obviously, this kind of thing is highly Eurocentric – it describes a world of overwhelmingly white chaps and chapesses from the professional classes who are all very comfortably off, thank you very much – Estrella de Mar is full of retired bank managers and accountants and doctors and property developers. Nobody wants to be told that being rich and living in a paradise on Earth isn’t the greatest fucking thing.