A vicious tennis machine firing balls across empty tennis courts becomes the central image in J.G. Ballard's latest pornographic morality play, Cocaine Nights (Flamingo, £16.99 in UK). Initially the novel appears to be a straightforward detective story. Charles Prentice, a travel writer, has arrived at the resort to assist his brother, Frank, the manager of the sports club, who is under arrest for a multiple murder.
But J.G. Ballard, one of the most blackly visionary of writers, has never been interested in conventional narrative. Bizarrely maverick and perverse, he deliberately lurches between high literature and flat, trash prose. His offbeat, obsessional imagination operates in a surreal world in which swimming pools, motorways, deserted shopping malls and vacant aerodromes are all potential death traps in a society which has lost the ability to live. Sleaze and corruption are the codes by which his characters, many of whom are either insane or depraved - often both - exist.
In some ways Ballard represents a distortion of Graham Greene's universe of guilt and sin. Ballard explores extremes in a deceptively neutral tone created by heavy, exact, though often lumpy and very English prose, frequently salvaged by breathtaking surreal images. The Spanish coastal resort he creates is populated by bored ex-pats, most of whom have their own seedy histories. Sex, violence and drugs have been called upon to the point that only drugged, violent public sex and carefully-staged sex attacks can produce the kind of thrills Ballard's living-dead require.
Big brother Charles has yet again come to the rescue of his younger brother. It is the pattern of the life they shared as children when trying to make sense of their mother's pathetic life and death. Charles knows his brother is not the arsonist responsible for the death of five people; but Frank has confessed. As Charles begins his investigations, the dialogue between the two brothers is so absurdly stilted as to be comic. "It's always good to see you, Charles," announces the accused with the formal politeness of a professional host. "You looked after me when mother died and in a way you're still looking after me. How long are you staying?"
Hardly surprisingly, we learn that Charles the travel writer has an ambition to write a book on the great brothels of the world. Of course, this may be a family joke, but it is probably true. " I remember you talking about that at school," remarks Frank, "You used to say your only interests in life were opium and brothels. Pure Graham Greene, but there was always something heroic there. Do you smoke a few pipes?" Does anyone really speak like this?
Like an adult variation of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the novel becomes curiouser and curiouser. Frank is frightened, determined to be guilty. On leaving him, Charles reflects: "Frank was innocent, as virtually everyone involved in the investigation accepted. His plea of guilty was a charade, part of some bizarre game he was playing against himself, in which even the police were reluctant to join."
Considering the wackiness of the case it can only be of help that Inspector Cabrera "seemed more like a young college professor than a detective, a hundred seminars on the psychology of crime still fresh in his mind."
The resort complex is an artificial haven sitting in the middle of a dead landscape already invaded by the sterile leisure complexes. "The mountains had withdrawn from the sea, keeping their distance a mile inland ... the golf courses began to multiply like the symptoms of a hypertrophied grassland cancer."
When Frank arrives at the club itself, even the most innocuous images acquire a sinister quality; "Rainbows rode the rotating sprinklers, slipping in and out of the spray like wraiths on a skipping-rope." The "untidy water" of the pool is "swilling" below the diving board. The young woman swimming in it has "a crescent-shaped bruise" running "from her left cheekbone to the bridge of her strong nose, and the apparently, swollen gums of her upper jaw".
This is the first appearance of Paula Hamilton, yet another of the many disturbed drifter-doctors who feature in his fiction.
"A pigtail of long black hair" follows her "like a faithful water-snake". As a doctor she personifies Ballard's central image of disease and dis-ease. The images are strange and violent while all of the characters are engaged in deranged games which invariably revolve around menacing public sex. As Charles remarks: "the only real philosophers left are the police".
Underlying the peculiar activities is the idea that here is a society unable to deal with leisure. Bobbie Crawford, a tennis pro and destructive visionary, sees himself as a saviour, exciting the doped-out residents of this sick Never-Never Land with his wild crimes. Crime, he believes, creates a commmunity spirit. Patrolling the area both as vigilante and as vandal, he mesmerises Charles, who observes to another character: "Crawford charms people ... he graces their lives with the possibilities of being genuinely sinful and immoral... I followed him this afternoon - he could have been arrested a dozen times. He's a genuinely disruptive presence, running a network of drug-dealers, car thieves and prostitutes." It is Crawford's madness which sustains the resort.
Since The Drowned World (1961), Ballard has pioneered a fiction of utterly moral amorality culminating in the pornographic underground classic, Crash (1972). For all their extremes and decadence, his novels are cautionary fables - weird, improbable and sensational, and invariably original.
Charles arrives at the resort to save his brother only to be quickly recruited as the manager of an alternative resort venture. The entire novel is a metaphor for a complex form of corruption practised by people who would rather be healed. Paula the doctor, herself highly corruptible, increasingly begins to resemble "a mendicant physician wandering through the kingdom of health in search of a single sick patient". This crazed thriller-turned-parable is yet another instalment in Ballard's apocalyptic race towards a future which has become the present.
