Cocaine Nights

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En un trayecto entre Gibraltar y Marbella, el protagonista comienza a viendo huertas, garajes de tractores, proyectos de mansiones y un parque acuático a medio construir para, al acercarse a Sotogrande, observar que “los campos de golf empezaron a multiplicarse como síntomas de un cáncer hipertrofiado en una pradera”. 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. Enseguida se da cuenta de que, al contrario que la Costa Azul o la de Liguria, “la Costa del Sol carecía hasta de los rudimentos de cierto encanto escénico o arquitectónico (…) Sotogrande era un pueblo sin centro ni suburbios y parecía poco más que un terreno de campos de golf y piscinas dispersas”. The faint scent of bath gel still clung to my skin, the perfume of my own strangulation that embraced me like a forbidden memory. When his Charles arrives to unravel the truth, he gradually discovers that behind the resort's civilized façade flourishes a secret world of crime, drugs and illicit sex.

When this book came out in hardback there was some talk that the Shepperton Shocker had gone all soggy and conventional. The middle class launches a violent revolution in this prophetic satire by the late master Ballard (1930%E2%80%932009). In an act of collective psychosis none of them acknowledged what they were doing, until it began to happen and then it was too late – the fire spread too fast and aggressively for anyone to stop it or the villa’s inhabitants to escape.And even more obviously, this kind of thing is highly Eurocentric – it describes a world of overwhelmingly white chaps and chapesses from the professional classes who are all very comfortably off, thank you very much – Estrella de Mar is full of retired bank managers and accountants and doctors and property developers. Someone has to wean them off the Valium and Mogadon, teach them how to face the day without a bottle and a half of vodka. Better to go deep, I think, and start with something uncompromising like The Unlimited Dream Company.

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.Having met each other they have parties to discuss latest developments, discover they have a taste for amateur dramatics or sports. Ballard's sequel to his autobiographical epic Empire of the Sun treats the subsequent events of his life, offering visceral immediacy and piercing honesty. And this quest to understand takes him down the road we’ve described, until he realises he has become his brother – performing exactly the role in the Residencia Costasol that Frank played in Estrella, a lynchpin in the resort’s social life, turning a blind eye to activities which skirt illegality and, increasingly, veer into outright immorality, but not taking an active part so much as trying to restrain or channel Bobby Crawford’s boyish, unstoppable, amoral appetite for stirring things up. In this book it is the gloomy Swede Andersson, who maintains high powered speedboats which – on investigation – defy the Spanish navy to import hashish and heroin from North Africa.