Cocaine Nights

Product Information

These include passive sex and drug use, empty swimming pools, perspectives on consumer culture, violence as entertainment, and a grab at prescience by setting his work in a very near but off-kilter future. however, I don't think this sibling shuffle is enough to ruin the overall story, which, of course, has nothing to do with solving the crime and everything to do with JG's ideas about a little deviance being the spice of life.

So that when the any of the other characters tell Charles to ‘calm’ himself, we remember Jim in Empire of the Sun continually being told by the adults to calm down. 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. Hollinger even proposed a loyal toast to the Queen from his balcony, before going back inside (he was, Charles is repeatedly told, patriotic but aloof and rather pompous). These 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. A moment’s reflection on the condition of the population of either China or India (combined populations 2.It reminds me of the Matrix movie when a perfect society was built and people killed themselves in alarming numbers, so the designers added strife back into their lives, and everyone was happier. Half-reluctant but intrigued, Charles allows himself to be persuaded to become the manager of the main nightclub in the resort down the road.

With all the interesting atmosphere the book brings, the reveal is pretty much spelled out in subvert ways about midway through, and this is why I give it a lower rating.At once an engrossing mystery and a novel of ideas, `Cocaine Nights' is a stunningly original work, a vision of a society coming to terms with a life of almost unlimited leisure. While the story is delightfully clever and sociopathic, the book does feel a little slow in some of the middle sections. 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.

The terrifying thing about Ballard is his logic; is this science fiction or history written ahead of its time? The problem that Charles seems to miss is that, like the drugs that are circulating, the low-level crime slowly stops being enough. As Charles becomes more and more enamored with the charismatic Crawford, he actually starts to believe that Bobby might be onto something. The sun shines all day long and there is a marina full of unused boats, swimming pools that haven't seen a ripple, and various other activities and clubs that have no members. When he learns that his kid brother Frank has been arrested and will be going on trial in Marbella, in the south of Spain, Charles flies to Gibraltar, hires a car and drives up the Spanish coast.

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. In his later writings Freud speculated that early human societies were bound together through the ritual murder of The Father, and claimed to have found evidence for this in ancient mythology, from the Greeks to the ancient Israelites. I've been meaning to respond to the first but I'm actually getting married this weekend and things are a little hectic. While a young Frenchwoman topped up my tank I strolled past the supermarket that shared the forecourt,where elderly women in fluffy towelling suits drifted like clouds along the lines of ice-cold merchandise.

When he arrived at Estrella da Mar he found it as torpid and somnolent as all the others he’d been at. Después se acuerda de Arcosanti, una urbanización de los años 70 de Arizona construida por el arquitecto Paolo Soleri, que fue un laboratorio contracultural, visionario y utópico de fusión de arquitectura a escala humana y ecología, pero sin embargo tiene claro que todo lo que ve allí es el futuro de Europa, “una especie de limbo largamente deseado”. Charles Prentice arrives at Estrella de Mar to rescue his brother Frank, who has been wrongfully imprisoned for the starting a house fire that killed several people in the resort.

This is a clever, very educated and very literary book, with an enormous amount of pleasure to be had from Ballard’s often inspired way with language and his endless stream of acute insights and vivid turns of phrase.