[In the following review, Roberts makes a positive evaluation of Cocaine Nights.]

British writer J. G. Ballard leads us once more into the dystopian future. Cocaine Nights, recently released in the United States, presents a world of leisure with a distinctly sinister side.

Because so many contemporary novelists are identified with the movies made from their books rather than the books themselves, they benefit or suffer from cinematic interpretations that have little relation to their body of work. Certainly this is the case with British writer J. G. Ballard, author of Empire of the Sun and Crash, dissimilar novels whose differences are exaggerated in their film versions.

Ballard's autobiographical Empire of the Sun, published in 1984, recounts the author's boyhood in Shanghai during the Second World War and his internment in a prison camp in Japan. Steven Spielberg turned the book into an affecting if sentimental movie. Ballard's autoerotic Crash, a psychosexual fable published in 1973, explores the dysfunctional but seductive relationship between people and technology. David Cronenberg directed the sexually explicit but aesthetically insipid film.

Of the two books, Crash is far more typical of Ballard's work than Empire of the Sun. The novel, as well as much of his science fiction, evokes a dystopian world that seems both hyper-real and grotesquely surreal. In this book and others, Ballard's characters live in impersonal and occasionally malevolent high-rises that surround modern cities—those lonely outposts looming above highway interchanges amid airports, commercial strips and industrial lots. These affectless characters struggle—consciously and unconsciously—to regain their identities, to recapture emotions that have been leveled by a ubiquitous barrage of advertising, media and other modes of communication that substitute for human interaction.

Though these scenarios might seem cliched, Ballard has the advantage of style—his fictional worlds are purely literary creations that come alive through language. Ballard is a precise writer who takes inspiration from technical manuals, turning jargon into poetry. He often conflates such terminology with sexual imagery, stripping the words of their eroticism even as he imbues them with a morphologic sensuality.

“The posture of her hands on the steering wheel and accelerator treadle, the unhealthy fingers pointing back towards her breasts, were elements in some stylized masturbatory rite,” Ballard wrote in Crash, describing a car wreck involving a young woman. “Her strong face with its unmatching planes seemed to mimic the deformed panels of the car, almost as if she consciously realized that these twisted instrument binnacles provided a readily accessible anthology of depraved acts, the keys to an alternative sexuality.”

Cocaine Nights, Ballard's new novel, follows in this tradition although, as British critics have pointed out, it's one of the author's most accessible novels—a crime story more plot driven than his earlier work. Travel writer Charles Prentice has been summoned to the Costa del Sol in southern Spain, where his brother, Frank, has been charged with five counts of murder. When he arrives, he learns that Frank, manager of an athletic and social club attached to a resort known as Estrella de Mar, has confessed to firebombing the home of an elderly couple, killing them, their niece and two employees. Charles is convinced of his brother's innocence, so much so that he launches his own investigation into the horrible deaths. And the more he learns about life in this staid retirement community, the more he senses a palpable evil lurking beneath its placid surface, a hidden world of drugs, illicit sex and violence.

One of the charming aspects of Cocaine Nights is Ballard's ability to turn what appears to be a mystery novel into an exploration of human nature. As Charles wades through the murky waters of Estrella de Mar, he not only uncovers a dark conspiracy that implicates the whole community but also receives an education in the nefarious philosophy supporting its lifestyle—a philosophy expressed by the resort club's tennis pro, Bobby Crawford.

Crawford is another of Ballard's obsessed charismatic villains, much like Crash's Robert Vaughan, the hoodlum scientist with a “strange vision of the automobile and its real role in our lives.” Crawford too has a vision, that of a future filled with leisure, a world in which people work only for short periods, the majority of their lives spent in self-indulgence.

“They're refugees from time,” Crawford tells Charles about the residents of Estrella de Mar, these people who are pioneers in the pursuit of pleasure. “Look around you—there are no clocks anywhere and almost no one wears a wristwatch. … It's the fourth world. The one waiting to take over everything.”

Crawford has seen the future and learned to manipulate it, for he understands something else about leisure—that it stifles and smothers life. The professionals and their spouses who retired to the Costa del Sol had become shut-ins, staring unseeingly at muted television sets, bleary from the tranquilizers they swallowed by the bushel. “How do you energize people, give them some sense of community?” asks Irwin Sangar, a dissipated psychiatrist who sees through Crawford's sophistry. “A world lying on its back is vulnerable to any cunning predator.” Politics and religion no longer will excite people with too much free time and too little energy to use it. “Only one thing is left that can rouse people, threaten them directly and force them to act together.”

That thing is crime, “crime and transgressive behaviour” as Sangar puts it, “by which I mean all activities that aren't necessarily illegal, but provoke us and tap our need for strong emotion, quicken the nervous system and jump the synapses deadened by leisure and inaction.”

The novel, by this point, has jettisoned all pretense of being a whodunit. Ballard is as swept up by his charlatan's cruel altruism as much as the characters in his novel. Suffice to say that the tennis pro and his cronies intend to convert the whole of Costa del Sol—and the rest of the world, if they can—to a life of shared guilt, “transgressive behavior for the public good.” And they are willing to use any means toward that end.

The subversion of Freudian tenets (Ballard studied psychiatry before turning to writing), the glamorization of antisocial behavior, the suggestion of impending apocalypse, all are familiar Ballardian themes. Crawford, again like Vaughan in Crash, has a polymorphous sexuality that finds its full expression in sadomasochistic ritual, another reason that Cocaine Nights will further Ballard's reputation as an author of shock fiction.

But for all the superficial, almost parodic intimations of pornography in his prose, and despite his undisguised admiration for his devilish villains, Ballard seems more moralist than nihilist. His books paint an alarming picture of the present, not to mention the future, suggesting that Western society would do well to reexamine its values and rethink its direction. If longtime followers of his work have noted a shift in his political leanings from liberal prankster to reactionary satirist—perhaps it's because as he and the world grow older, the ironies taste more bitter.