Book Review : J.G Ballard - Cocaine Nights (1996)
Raging against social inequities and the impunity of rich people has been a very popular topic on social media in 2019. But so are starting your own business, becoming rich, successful and not suffering from financial anxiety for the rest of your life. The rich we love to hate are the rich who are already rich. Those who are already in privilege, whether they earned it or not. But why is that so? What makes the wealthy and privilege so disconnected from us? This is the question iconic British author J.G Ballard is trying to answer in his little known 1996 novel Cocaine Nights.
Cocaine Nights is a mystery novel set in the fictional private resort town of Estrella de Mar. There was a criminal fire that killed five people and the local sports club manager Frank Prentice immediately claimed responsibility for it. His brother, travel writer Charles Prentice, travels to Estrella de Mar, hoping to find the culprit and save Frank, but he’s instead ushered into a strange and exclusive world of exquisite pleasures and unexplained violence by resident tennis pro Bobby Crawford. Because, of course, any privileged enclave NEEDS its own tennis pro, right?
The first thing Charles notices when he arrives in Estrella de Mar is the feeling of heavy stillness among the residents. They are people who achieved what their consider to be the highest possible goal: build paradise on Earth. So, they don’t long for anything, anymore. Except to protect their exclusive piece of real estate. Their paralyzing, sun-soaked boredom become their most prized possession. The privileged of Cocaine Nights are both victims and perpetrator of their own fate. If you consider to have achieved “perfection on Earth”, you can only go down from here.
So, the only threat to Estrella de Mar is the residents’ boredom. Another thing Charles quickly notices is that the resort town is everything, except boring. It is constantly shook by strange, inexplicable drama. For example: early on, Charles gets strangled until unconsciousness by an unknown intruder; he witnesses a rape attempt on a drugged girl in the parking lot, etc. The answer to the Estrella de Mar mystery lies between the residents’ monolithic boredom and the unexplained surges of violence that happen increasingly more often at the novel goes on.
In good J.G Ballard fashion, it’s not the mystery of Cocaine Nights that makes it interesting. It’s everything else, but especially his portrait of boredom and impunity among the rich and privileged. They have nothing to look forward to, except their own self-destruction. They have no dreams left. They long for nothing at all, except for these moments of instability that feed local gossip. J.G Ballard had once again nailed it twenty years before it would become a thing: the privileged are easy to hate because they live the dream and don’t feel any grateful for it.
I doubt that anyone would, to be honest. So Cocaine Nights works as a funhouse mirror reflection of our own desires. It’s probably why the novel wasn’t a big hit. Nobody wants to be told that being rich and living in a paradise on Earth isn’t the greatest fucking thing.
Cocaine Nights turned out to be one of my favorite J.G Ballard novels. I’ve read seven of them and liked them all, but it’s easily top 3. The first half is a little bit of a paint-by-numbers mystery, but the structure eventually collapses and it becomes…uh, quite Ballardian? In the best possible way. It’s also one of his novels that aged the best given the issues of exclusivity and inequity it explores. Cocaine Nights is also a great, easygoing gateway into J.G Ballard’s weird and off-putting universe. Not his best work, but his most accessible and eerily pertinent for 2019.
8.3/10
