This new novel by the celebrated nihilist who brought us such underground classics as Crash and Concrete Island is fairly mild by Ballard standards. All this has taken place by about page 70 – chapter 6 of the book’s 28 chapters – and the rest of the novel describes what he finds out. You should visit the Fontainebleau Sud complex outside Paris – it’s a replica of this, ten times the size. The Drowned World describes an apocalyptic society, with a hero that ushers in the destruction of the world. Things are thriving at the Residencia Costasol but Charles picks up more and more signals that another extreme event is in the offing, though he can’t discover what it is, and for a while the reader is alarmed that he himself might be the target, or his erstwhile lover, Paul Hamilton.

I shall mark it with four stars, having in mind that I am fond of Ballard's writing and that this fondness increases with familiarity. 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.

People are always needing to be ‘calmed’, because something is ‘unsettling’ or over-exciting them; many of the characters or situations are described almost from the start as ‘deranged’ or ‘demented’; the narrator does no end of ‘sensing’, ‘sensing’ that people know more than they let on, ‘sensing’ that he is unwelcome, ‘sensing’ that characters really mean this or that secret motive. Because it appears to be, from both the cover and the synopsis, a noir novel at heart, which I thoroughly enjoy. Constantly being manipulated while he thinks he is finding the truth, Charles soon finds himself out of control and at the nexus of certain disaster, at which point he finally begins to understand just what happened to his brother. Having met each other they have parties to discuss latest developments, discover they have a taste for amateur dramatics or sports. At once an engrossing mystery and a novel of ideas, ‘Cocaine Nights’ is a stunningly original work, a vision of a society coming to terms with a life of almost unlimited leisure.

Ballard has all this, of course, but he is also interested in exploring the future and the future for him is how to keep these early retirees amused. Ballard was reading from a script first devised in the 1970s, which looked forward to a utopian leisure society in which we’d all struggle to fill our countless hours of pampered idleness. He runs over to rescue the woman, the man makes a getaway out the other door, but the woman, although obviously assaulted, with her knickers round her ankles and bleeding from the mouth, shrugs him off, pulls herself together and walks away. When Paul Hamilton tells him that Frank’s much-delayed trial is about to start the next day, Charles brushes it off.His 1984 bestseller Empire of the Sun won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. But so are starting your own business, becoming rich, successful and not suffering from financial anxiety for the rest of your life.