Paperback of the Week: Cocaine Nights

Estrella de Mar is one of those Spanish resorts for British expatriates where all care has been erased: a leisure-driven paradise whose ageing occupants divide their time between tennis, amateur dramatics and adultery, while their money makes them money elsewhere.

But then, an arson attack kills five people and though Frank Prentice, the manager of the exclusive Club Nautico, confesses to the crime, no one who knows him believes he is capable of murder. His brother, Charles, a best-selling travel writer, arrives on the Costa del Sol in a last-minute attempt to persuade him to retract his confession, but finds himself drawn into the torpid pleasures of Estrella de Mar.

Cocaine Nights comes at you like a conventional 'all-is-not-as-it- seems' whodunit. But all is not as it seems. Under the light crust of gentility lies a familiar Ballard landscape of sociopathic violence, transgressive sex and the inevitable pornographic web that lies in between. And at its centre stands Bobby Crawford, at once a deeply comic and utterly terrifying character one of Ballard's best monsters. As the tennis pro at Club Nautico, Crawford has become something of a messianic figure who has turned crime into a performance art.

While Frank stews in a Spanish prison cell, Charles sets about tracking down the real arsonist. He discovers that, far from shattering the peace of a dead-eyed expat community, the fire was part of a crime wave carried out by the occupants of Estrella de Mar for their own entertainment.

JG Ballard does not so much write novels as lightly fictionalised essays on the state of things. And in an age of think-tank humbuggery this is a vision of what a communitarian dreamland would really look like. The well-heeled stare from impregnable safety pods and unhappiness is what happens to other people.

And then what? asks Ballard. What happens when the boredom sets in? What do you do when the good life starts to look like a living death?

He imagines a self-policed post-civilised society in which the citizens steal, vandalise, commit rape and arson, prostitute themselves and deal drugs as a series of leisure options.

There is nothing quite like a J. G. Ballard novel. When this book came out in hardback there was some talk that the Shepperton Shocker had gone all soggy and conventional. Don't worry, it was nonsense.