On the leisured coast, only crime can arouse

Author: By Andrew Frisardi

Date: SUNDAY, June 14, 1998

Page: C2

Section: Books

blooded lust. Although it starts as high-quality light entertainment, it simply doesn't have enough emotional content to deliver the Deep Psychological Insight it later intends.

The story is told from the perspective of Charles Prentice, an English travel writer who has gone to Spain's Costa del Sol because his brother, Frank, is in jail. Five people have been murdered in a house fire and Frank has confessed to the crime -- though Charles is certain he is innocent. Charles stays on to investigate; he takes up residence in his brother's apartment at a club Frank managed in Estrella de Mar, gets acquainted with Frank's friends and colleagues, and begins sleuthing. One bizarre detail after another unfolds, and the town itself is at least as mysterious as the murder. Why is everyone at the club so casual when a woman is nearly raped in the parking lot? Was the Swedish maid Bibi Jensen -- who died in the Jacuzzi with Mr. Hollinger, the film tycoon whose house burned down -- pregnant with his child? What does Frank's ex-girlfriend Paula know about the crime that she isn't telling Charles? And above all, even though everyone in town seems to believe Frank is innocent, why are they all so passive about finding the killer?

Only gradually does the reader realize that the murder is just another mystery in the generally enigmatic Costa del Sol. Estrella de Mar contrasts sharply with other communities along the coast. While most of the towns are the apotheosis of the bland monoculture Ballard is fond of satirizing -- resorts with ``memory-erasing white architecture,'' an ``affectless realm, where entropic drift calms the surface of a thousand swimming pools'' -- Estrella de Mar is full of people reading The New York Review of Books in cafes (``cultural power-dressing''), taking sculpting classes in their spare time, going to wild parties, and in general being oh-so-chicly intellectual.

All of this is undeniably fun; Ballard is often a vivid and blackly humorous writer. But he is also known for being inept at developing his characters, using them as insufficiently fleshed-out pretexts for the concepts he wants to communicate. Just over halfway through this book, one of the flat characters lets us in on the Ballardian moral to the story: ``Leisure societies lie ahead of us, like those you see on this coast. . . . Only one thing is left which can arouse people . . . and force them to act together. . . . Crime, and transgressive behavior.''

Ballard's point is true enough; sure, bestiality festers under the veneer of technological sophistication and conventionalized apathy. But the sociological preaching that dominates the rest of the novel -- introduced as it is in the middle of an amusing but basically shallow story -- comes across as distinctly tedious.

Still, there are some entertaining elements in the last third of the book. By this point, it's clear that Charles is staying on to ``investigate'' the power brokers of Estrella de Mar only so he can do things he wouldn't ordinarily allow himself to do. One of the head honchos of the club Frank managed is Bobby Crawford, a former tennis pro who, to put it mildly, is in charge of keeping things lively in Estrella de Mar. After Charles accepts a position as manager at a new club in Residencia Costasol -- the newest ``mentally embalmed'' local community Bobby and his friends have decided to shock back to life -- he accompanies Bobby on his various crime sprees. Bobby burglarizes houses, sabotages satellite dishes so the locals can't watch TV, and spray-paints garage doors and surveillance cameras -- all, supposedly, to shake people out of their apathy and wake them up to one another. Meanwhile, Charles starts to believe that Bobby is really a kind of psychopathic saint, whose vocation it is to save people from sterile leisure and passionless security.

Again, some of this is quite funny: ``We're moving into the age of security grilles and defensible space,'' Bobby tells Charles, and then adapts a famous epigram about servants from the 19th-century French Decadents: ``As for living, our surveillance cameras can do that for us.'' But the story would be more engaging if Ballard didn't insist on being so serious about his farce:

`` `Sadly, crime is the only spur that rouses us. We're fascinated by that `other world' where everything is possible.'

`` `Most people would say there's more than enough crime already.'

`` `But not here! . . . Not in the Residencia Costasol, or the retirement complexes along the coast. The future has landed, Charles. . . . The Costasols of this planet are spreading outwards.' ''

Ballard obviously wanted to surprise readers by starting the novel as a conventional detective mystery, only to toy with the expectations that genre sets up. There is now a significant body of postmodern fiction that has used a similar strategy: Borges, Eco, Robbe-Grillet, Auster, and others are well known for such ``anti-detective'' stories. But Ballard is too heavy-handed to pull it off. He intended ``Cocaine Nights'' to be a critique of Westerners ``sealing themselves off into crime-free enclaves,'' and an exploration of the ambiguous role of vice in society, but ends up trying the reader's patience with a fictional ``demonstration'' of his pet theories.