Cocaine Nights

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If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's œuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours? All these years later, I still marvel at the eerie poetry of Ballard's prose. It lingers like a strange perfume over his concise, matter-of-fact sentences, more heightened in the earlier novels and short stories, but the bottom notes (petrol, anguish, desire, nightmares) are still present in the first three lines of his final and most didactic novel, Kingdom Come: "The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world …" A house fire in the upmarket British expat enclave of Estrella de Mar on the Costa del Sol results in five deaths. Frank Prentice, the manager of the popular Club Nautico, pleads guilty and is charged with murder, but no one believes he committed the crime, not even the police. Frank’s brother Charles travels from the U.K. to investigate the crime and find the culprit. Seventeen novella-like chapters fictionalise the key phases of Ballard's life from 1937 to 1987, starting with his childhood in Shanghai where the rich, perpetually tipsy westerners play tennis, go shopping and sidestep the growing mound of refugee bodies felled by hunger, typhus and bombs. "To my child's eyes, which had seen nothing else, Shanghai was a waking dream where everything I could imagine had already been taken to its extreme." Those last 15 words serve as a manifesto for all of Ballard's novels. Startlingly plain reflections on the classic Ballardian tropes – birds, low-flying aircraft, pool after empty swimming pool – pepper the text. "I … felt that the ruined casino, like the city and the world beyond it, was more real and more meaningful than it had been when it was thronged.""I would see something strange and mysterious but treat it as normal.""The vast lazy planes that floated overhead were emissaries from another world." In the therapeutic reflection not a single person could begrudge him, might Ballard be banalising his own work? Might the cost of this, for the reader, outweigh the benefit?

I think the failure is in subject matter, making a creepy, alienated feeling into a book length murder mystery. I could have done without a lot of the exposition. I just want to read enjoyable prose, or find some kind of recognition in what I'm reading - even a Kafkaesque sort of recognised alienation.Firstly, I'm planning to read The Drowned World, and I listened to My Dream of Flying to Wake Island on The Guardian's fiction podcast, but beyond that this novel is my first foray into Ballardian territory. Wouldn't have been my optimal choice, but it's available for free on the avant-garde storehouse UbuWeb, adapted from cassette(!) If the strangeness of Shanghai is meant to foreshadow Auschwitz, Vietnam and the contextless chaos of modern media, Jim's medical studies in postwar England tell us a lot about Ballard's values as a prose-writer. When he begins to dissect a cadaver, a friend warns him: "You'll have to cut away all the fat before you reach the fascia." It's an appropriate metaphor for Ballard's clinical approach to narrative, an odd mixture of focus and nonchalance. While he liked to set himself apart from oh-so-literary avant-gardists by insisting that he was "an old-fashioned storyteller at heart", he was impatient with the conventions that had underpinned respectable mainstream fiction since the Victorians. Surrealism's emphasis on the inexplicable and SF's tolerance for haphazard characterisation and unnaturalistic dialogue suited his own inclinations, even if some readers might find these things alienating. He doesn’t shy away from the dirty details, which makes for a very heart-centered environment(doesn’t make sense) to read. Cocaine Nights is an important book for anyone wanting to learn more about the dark side of the drug trade. It’s also a great cautionary tale about the dangers of addiction. 4) The Fix: A Narcotics Agent’s Story They were *sorta* right. Its beginning is really nice and you get the feeling that this is going to be such an amazing story and wow-how-much-fun-you're-gonna-get.. but then there's no enthusiasm anymore. It's just.. gone.

Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike...never try to put the author "in his place,"...Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban.

A tale on what it takes to snap us out of a coma

Charles arrives in Marbella following his brother’s trial, who’s pleaded guilty to burning down a house containing five people – killing them all in the process. Charles isn’t convinced by his brother’s plea and sets out to play amateur detective in the case. I've always enjoyed J G Ballard's novels in the past, but this one lost me about three quarters of the way through. Definitely feel the need to justify this rating, and my disappointment with Ballard (who feels like a "writers' writer") in general. Got pretty far into a review using John Updike's nexus of critique, but then the internet happened, and GR decided to erase it all. I'll try and replace the loss soonish.

Crawford. I hated him. I really did. From the very beginning. Too confident, too much of a smart mouth.. And how everyone seemed to give him the prize for Saviour of the Year! Oooh, how cute.. not.Cocaine nights is, in some senses, a precursor to Super-Cannes. Like Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes is set on the coasts of continental Europe and, also like Cocaine Nights, it features British expats living in an enclosed community. However, it is in this second novel where Ballard’s exploration of inner space, violence, and community reaches its peak. He's not selfish enough. Selfish men make the best lovers. They're prepared to invest in the woman's pleasure so that they can collect an even bigger dividend for themselves."

Certainly, Joseph Conrad also lurks around the edges of any Ballard novel, sailing his ghost ship from one chapter to the next.The perfect book, I suppose, has three things going for it: (1) great, realistic characters, who are transformed in believable, often desirable ways, (2) an interesting and perhaps unpredictable plot that holds our attention, not to mention holds water in whatever stream of reality the story finds itself, and (3) eloquent writing. Cocaine Nights is a combination of crime thriller and dystopian fiction, in which the plot provides a context for a study of how crime proves to be a catalyst that transforms a stupefied population faced with unlimited leisure into a functioning, cohesive and vibrant community. Whilst his wife is at work, Paul retraces Greenwood’s footsteps, seeking to understand the inner depths of the man’s psyche. In true Ballardian style, nothing is what it seems. Beneath the tranquil surface, Eden-Olympia is teeming with deviance. Paul finds an underground world of sex, violence, crime, and drugs. The residents of the peaceful sea-side community revel and encourage this behavior; it is their escape valve, their hobby. The violence, crime, sex and drugs allows them to escape their normal lives, break free from the social constraints that bind them in their professional lives, and find meaning outside of work. urn:lcp:cocainenights00ball:epub:046cb292-a4bb-4be6-b330-f4579012c87b Extramarc University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (PZ) Foldoutcount 0 Identifier cocainenights00ball Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t58d0pk6k Isbn 188717866X