Shortlisted for the 1996 Whitbread Novel Award.
Part mystery thriller and part novel of ideas, this book starts with the narrator travelling to the Costa del Sol to try to rescue his brother who has been charged with (and pleaded guilty to) arson leading to five deaths. As he probes into what happened, he discovers that the expatriate community in which his brother lived , unlike the others along the coast which are full of people watching television and taking tranquillisers ("Brain-death disguised as a hundred miles of white cement"; Ch 4), is vibrant with theatre groups and tai chi classes and sculpture workshops and ... and at night the staid and mostly retired residents indulge in sex, including amateur prostitution and making pornographic videos, and drugs and partying. The theory sold to him is that it is transgression that provides the spice that keeps people living a fulfilled life; artistic creation needs rule-breaking to thrive (this is the centuries of peace in Switzerland and all it has produced is the cuckoo clock theory).
In many ways this is a typical Ballard: a small modern community of well-of middle-class people appears boring on the surface but underneath there are sinful roots. This theme is reworked in Millennium People, in High-Rise, and particularly in The Unlimited Dream Company. It is a compelling vision but it is the quality of the writing that always impresses.
Selected quotes:
- "Behind me a handsome Spanish woman sat at the wheel of an open-topped Mercedes, remaking her lipstick over a strong mouth designed for any activity other than eating." (Ch 1)
- "Near Sotogrande the golf courses began to multiply like the symptoms of a hypertrophied grassland cancer." (Ch 1)
- "Funerals celebrate another frontier crossing, in many ways the most formal and protracted of all." (Ch 5)
- "The retirement pueblos lay by the motorway, embalmed in a dream of the sun from which they would never awake." (Ch 6)
- "The white facades of the villas and apartment houses were like blocks of time that had crystallized beside the road." (Ch 6)
- "Here on the Costa del Sol nothing would ever happen again, and the people of the pueblos were already the ghosts of themselves." (Ch 6)
- "Cloaks of moonlight lay over the furniture like dust-sheets." (Ch 6)
- "Death had arrived at the Hollingers and decided to stay, settling her skirts over the shadowy pathways." (Ch 9)
- "Above my head sounded the leathery flutter of canvas." (Ch 15)
- "The residents of the Costasol complex, like those of the retirement pueblos along the coast, had retreated to their shaded lounges, their bunkers with a view, needing only that part of the external world that was distilled from the sky by their satellite dishes." (Ch 19)
- "You've seen the future and it doesn't work or play." (Ch 19)
- "The Costa del Sol is the longest afternoon in the world, and they've decided to sleep through it." (Ch 19)
- "We're building prisons all over the world and calling them luxury condos." (Ch 19)
- "One obsessive with a PC and a printer, turning out a residents' association newsletter, is worth more than a dozen novelists or boutique operators. It isn't shopping, or the arts, that makes a community but that duty that we all owe to each other as neighbours." (Ch 22)
- "People need to stop thinking about their own bodies and start thinking about other people's." (Ch 22)
I live in an 'independent living' retirement apartment block in Eastbourne. Some of us stay all day on their own inside their apartments. Others have coffee and cake and small talk with the other residents in the owners' lounge. Most only access the outside world through the television, although many walk for exercise. I am one of the few (there are others) who goes to the local theatre or other cultural events and tries to keep my mind exercised. Cocaine Nights certainly rang a few bells with, although so far as I know there is no drug-taking nor sexual deviance practised in our community.
Wonderful writing. November 2022; 329 pages
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