I phoned J.G. Ballard at his home early in September 1996, shortly before the publication of his novel, Cocaine Nights, the murder mystery set in the Costa Del Sol, whose ‘detective story’ format bears much the same relation to the book’s real themes as the skull does to the subconscious.
To put things in context, at the time I spoke to Ballard he was one of only a very few people in the UK to have seen David Cronenberg’s adaptation
The interview was conducted for a short feature on the novel that ran in The List magazine (issue dated 20 September 1996), the Glasgow-Edinburgh events guide that is pretty much Scotland’s Time Out. This is the first time the full transcript of the conversation has been published anywhere.
Damien Love, 2007
Damien Love is a writer, journalist and independent publisher, based in Glasgow, UK.
LEFT: Cocaine Nights: French edition, with a different title, ‘The Hidden Side of the Sun’.
DL: You still live in Shepperton. How long have you been based there now?
JGB: Oh god. Since… 1960. A long time.
And I take it you have no immediate desire to resign to the Costa Del Sol?
Oh, no. I have every desire to. I intend to go fairly soon. I think it’s time I warmed my old bones in the sun.
And settle into the lifestyle you’ve described?
Well… umm… yes. I wrote the book and then thought, well, it sounds rather fun. I must go and live there. I have been there, of course.
What was the genesis of Cocaine Nights?
Well, I think watching the growth of the Costa Del Sol and similar places along the Mediterranean over the last 40 years that I’ve been going there, and seeing a microcosm of a future that’s waiting for us all. You know, these security obsessed enclaves with tele-surveillance and armed guards and smart cards and all, the whole paraphernalia, like a kind of maximum security state, reduced to the size of a village. If you know the States at all, you’ll know there are masses of similar security compounds. And there have been for many, many years. But they’re coming, they’re all over Europe now. You can see them out in the Home Counties where I live, to the west of London. People are obsessed with security, at all costs. And you pay a price for it. And I can see this development beginning to isolate people, more and more, behind their triple-security locks, and they’ll pay an enormous price, in terms of social cohesion, civic life, you know, just to feel ‘safe.’
So, do you see any merits in the radical prescription to the problem prescribed by Crawford?
Well, I the author am not suggesting that we all go out and… burgle our neighbour’s houses, or take up drug trafficking, and the very next day we’ll all be practising our violins and forming chess clubs. But I’m saying that it’s possible that we’re too obsessed with security. Although, anyone who has just been burgled is going to think me an idiot. Quite rightly. But, it’s a matter of realising that, you know, certain things have to be bought at a price, and maybe the price is too high. Maybe, to make a pearl, you need a bit of grit in the oyster shell. I think, probably, that the proposition I’ve put forward in the novel is probably correct.
The novel reminded me of the conversation you had with Will Self
Yes. Kafka with unlimited Chicken Kiev.
LEFT: Cocaine Nights: Russian edition. RIGHT: Cocaine Nights: Italian edition.
The protagonist of the novel, Charles Prentice, is a travel writer, and, as is mentioned, an observer rather than a participant. Why make him so consciously someone who, initially at any rate, observes rather than interacts?
Well, he is an observer. I mean he’s a visitor to this strange place. And as a travel writer, he’s got a trained eye so that he is, as it were, more aware. More aware of the strangeness of this coast where the Brits have settled over the last thirty years, than the average person would be. As you drive along that coast, from Marbella to Malaga, or from Gibraltar to Malaga, you pass all these condominiums and pueblo-style housing estates, and you think ‘Well, they’re a bit odd, I wouldn’t want to live in one myself’. But you don’t realise how odd they are until you go into one, and then you realise that tens of thousands of Brits, along with Dutch and French and Germans and so on — many of them retired there permanently, are all living these very strange lives. I’m not just concerned with the Costa del Sol. What I’m interested in is an emerging psychology where people, for the sake of security or some other social end, are willing to sacrifice a large number of the stresses and strains that are a part of the price one pays for an active and lively and rich cultural mix. I don’t say that crime is necessary to kickstart a culture, I’m just saying that one must beware of extreme solutions.
LEFT: Cocaine Nights: Latvian edition.
Are you — as a person and not a writer, as it were — consciously frightened of a future where people are so obsessed with themselves and their own security, that in a way they cease to be aware of themselves any more?
I think that we’re moving in that direction. As living standards continue to rise, as they have done since the war — and, I’m sure living standards will, on the whole, continue to rise — people have got more to lose. You know, they’ve packed their homes with high-tech electronic gear. It’s worth burgling the average suburban house, now. Many of them are equipped like TV studios, not to mention things like jewellery. So, one gets this strangely interiorised style of living, where you switch off the outside world, rather like it was some threatening television programme. You do this by treble locking your front door and switching on the alarm system, and then you retreat and watch videos of the World Cup. And that’s not a good recipe for healthy society. Looked at objectively, one could say that cinema, the visual arts, the ‘entertainment’ culture generally, are in a worse state than they have ever been this century. The cinema is a shadow of what it was in the forties. There’s scarcely a novelist worth reading. There’s scarcely a painter or sculptor worth looking at. I’m too old to know if the music scene has the vitality that it had back in the 60s, but I don’t imagine that it has. And, you know, we’re in a culture of substitutes — Elizabeth Hurley. They had Marilyn Monroe, we’ve got Elizabeth Hurley. Something’s gone wrong. Is it that we’re engineering a new kind of life for ourselves that has echoes of those that I describe in this book?
I take it that, if presented with the choice, you’d have no difficulty in choosing between living somewhere like the retirement pueblos on the coast or somewhere like Estrella de Mar?
Well, yeah. I would opt for somewhere like Estrella de Mar, where it’s lively. I mean, it’s silly to say this, because I’m not inviting anyone to come and steal my car or burgle my house; but one always assumes that totalitarian states will be imposed from the outside on the average citizen, that they’ll be sort of horrific and threatening. But in a way, I’ve often thought that the totalitarian systems of the future will be actually rather kind of subservient and ingratiating, and will be imposed from within. We’ll define the terms of the TV mono-culture which we now inhabit, and it’s a pretty empty place. I can imagine, 50 to 100 years from now, social-historians looking back at the closing years of the 20th century and saying, ‘My God, it opened with the flight of the Wright Brothers; halfway through they went to the moon; they discovered scientific miracle upon miracle. And then they ended with people sitting in their little fortified bungalows while the tele-surveillance cameras sweep the streets outside, and they watch reruns of The Rockford Files.’
It’s a nightmare vision.
ABOVE: Cocaine Nights: two Spanish editions.
You mentioned earlier the state of the cinema.
Well, there are exceptions, don’t get me wrong…
Of course. And there’s Crash. I take it you’ve seen the film, and reacted favourably?
Oh, very. I think it’s a brilliant film, an absolute masterpiece. Cronenberg’s best film, I think.
Do you think that any of the rest of us in the UK will ever get the chance to see it?
Oh well, I don’t know you see. I don’t know whether we’re mature enough to cope with such a film. I think the powers-that-be feel it may give us a rush of blood to the head. I hope that we get a chance to see it. It opened a couple of months ago in France, where it did extremely well. In its first week it was the top-grossing film at the French box office. Pretty remarkable when you bear in mind that it couldn’t be further away from the world of Twister and Mission: Impossible. I mean, it’s a serious film.
We’re at a very strange cultural state now. We’re so panicky, so frightened. So nervous of everything that goes on. Some ghastly tragedy happens, like the Dunblane disaster or Hungerford, and people feel that there must be an explanation, there’s got to be some kind of larger reason. Similar mass murders have taken place in England, like the Hungerford tragedy of some years ago, when this youth shot about fifteen or sixteen people, including his own mother. Something like that happens and people think, ‘My God, there must be something wrong with our society.’ And so they find the obvious culprits. After Hungerford people immediately jumped to the conclusion that Michael Ryan, or whatever his name was, had been watching all the Rambo films. Turned out that he hadn’t in fact; he didn’t even own a VCR. But people look for desperate remedies to make sense of some desperate tragedy, but it’s often the wrong way. I think that the distributors are frightened that there’ll be a huge outcry when Crash is released and hundreds of over-excited drivers will start crashing their cars into each other. It doesn’t seem to have happened in France. As far as I know. I think the film will have exactly the opposite effect, and calm everyone down.
Of course, we weren’t deemed mature enough as a society to see A Clockwork Orange, in that instance by the filmmaker himself.
Yeah, Kubrick himself, as you know, pulled that one. You can rent it anywhere else in the world. You can buy it. I bought one abroad, a copy of Clockwork Orange. But he decided for reasons of his own. I think he had young daughters at the time and they were threatened, so he pulled the plug on the film as far as Britain was concerned.
LEFT: Cocaine Nights: German edition.
It seems strange that, in both cases, the country where the source material of the movie was generated is deemed unable to handle the film.
I know. But I mean, this country, we’re heavily censored. The sort of films that you can catch on your Adult Movie Channel in any hotel on the continent, we’d never see here in a million years. The sort of videos you can rent freely in the States will never be available here. We’re far too nervous. So many of the films we see are heavily cut, particularly on video. We’re very heavily censored here. People are frightened. Of course, it’s all bound up in the whole political system here — you can’t give the plebs too much freedom in one direction, because they might start asking for it in another. Who knows where it will end? You know. I think the film will be shown. It’s going to be shown at the London Film Festival in November, and then I think the company will distribute it themselves. I can’t believe that a Cronenberg film, starring Holly Hunter and James Spader and Rosanna Arquette, which won a prize at Cannes, is never going to see the light of day.
Your work has now been filmed by two very different directors. Do you think this says something about the work itself, or are Spielberg and Cronenberg similar in some way that might not be instantly apparent?
I don’t think there really are any similarities between Spielberg and Cronenberg. There aren’t any similarities between Empire of the Sun and Crash, of course. They are very different books. But Cronenberg, Spielberg and myself do share something in common, in that we all spent a large part of our careers in our own versions of science fiction. None of us were working in the mainstream SF field, but in a sort of marginal zone alongside mainstream SF, which we made our own, in different ways. I, in a sort of Inner Space direction, Spielberg more in the kind of…I don’t know how I would describe it…that sort of poetic SF almost, with something like Close Encounters, and Cronenberg in another kind of Inner Space of his own. So we have that in common. But I’ve been very, very lucky to have two of the greatest talents in present day cinema adapting novels of mine.
Is it a spurious piece of lazy critical shorthand to draw parallels between the character of Bobby Crawford in Cocaine Nights and Vaughan in Crash, these deviant Messiahs?
No, I think they are rather similar types, now that you mention it. I think they are. They’re kind of… they are deviant Messiahs. They’re sort of well intentioned psychopaths. They’re public-spirited psychopaths, a very curious blend. They genuinely want to do good and show people the truth. I know that sounds like Adolf Hitler. But neither Vaughan nor Crawford really want to do harm, to do bad for its own sake. Their idea is to do good. Take the blinkers off, show the truth. They’re both small-scale redeemers.
ABOVE: Cocaine Nights: audio book (detail).
It struck me that there are a lot of female doctors cropping up in your work. Is this a conscious, self-referential thing?
Well, I dunno how many there are. I mean, I’ve written a lot of stuff… Of course, I trained as a medical student, and I met a lot of young women doctors, who I probably will meet again, when my time is up. I think I’ve always been intrigued by the notion of the woman doctor but… that’s another story. But it’s true, there have been a few. There’s one in Crash and there’s one in Cocaine Nights .
And in Rushing to Paradise, too.
That’s true, that’s the sort of Margaret Thatcher figure. Another Messianic do-gooder. Another public-spirited psychopath.
Not quite as attractive, though?
Oh, I found her wonderfully attractive. I always had a thing for Margaret Thatcher. Until I grew too old for her.
Have you started on another project?
No, I haven’t. I’m moving ideas around, having a bit of a rest.
Do you have any notion of what might be your place in the British Literary scene, how you fit in?
None at all. I don’t fit in. I’m definitely outside the castle walls. I gather you have a fairly tight-knit Scottish literary scene. I don’t think the English one is like that, it’s very scattered. I get the impression that the Scots, rightly, are today very conscious of their national identity, whereas the English are losing theirs. They’re a bit lost. It’s very large and dispersed. I don’t know what part I play in it. I don’t think I play any part, actually.
Well, time’s about up.
Great. You’ve got enough for about seven lines. It’s been a pleasure. Best of luck.
Copyright © 1996 & 2007 by Damien Love
..:: MORE INFO
+ J.G. Ballard Live in London: Q&A transcripts from the same era discussing similar themes.