Bobby Crawford, the tennis pro at the club, nearly stupefied with boredom may be the spark who shatters the peaceful tranquility. Despite these drawbacks, the book has atmosphere, and the ending surprises the reader, even if the reveal of the mystery doesn’t. As you might expect, Charles discovers a videotape in the melted VHS player of the burned-out villa – which the police have somehow overlooked – and takes it back to Frank’s apartment to view. Ballard has a wicked turn of phrase, a wry sense of humour and the unerring ability to observe the commonplace from a skewed, but nonetheless illuminating, perspective. The main character, Charles, is a likable character that I can easily see Ewan MacGregor starring as if there was a film made out of this.

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. 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. You miss the whole basic psychology of the piece -- the relationship of children and parents and individuals and society.He has long conversations with Frank himself, on his visits to him in prison, but his brother is infuriatingly vague about what happened or who is to blame. By this point the book has ceased being a realistic novel and become a kind of elaboration of Sigmund Freud’s highly questionable anthropological theories. The narrator's brother, Frank, has indicated that he will plead guilty to criminal charges of arson and murder. G. Ballard—I’ll most likely be back for more of his strange, transgressive writing—but in the end I can’t really recommend this book to fans of honest and well-structured fiction. His novel Empire of the Sun was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize and James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.

If he is to understand his brother’s attitude, Charles senses that he must first unravel the mysteries of Estrella de Mar. Running Wild is about a luxury gated community for top professionals which is the scene of a massacre and turns out, on investigation by an outsider, to conceal very dark depths. Taking the road that led to the Club Nautico, I passed an elegant tea salon, a bureau de change decorated with Tudor half-timbering, and a boutique whose demure window displayed a solitary but exquisite designer gown.Violence is not necessarily something that we should fear but, rather, it energizes us, make us alive, even as it kills us.

Whether this was Ballard's attempt to slow the conversion of Charles Prentice down a little (it does seem a little fast even then) or not I don't know, but I quite liked the speed with which Charles was won over. As everyone never tired of saying, Estrella de Mar was a true community, with schools for the French and British children, a thriving Anglican church and a local council of elected members which met at the Club Nautico. Particularly liked his romanticism of Crime, Its definitely something that he shares with Burroughs, as well as Genet (another Burroughs favourite)but played out here in a distinct fashion. G. would cock his eyebrow at, but would shake his head in doubting wonderment as he poured himself another few fingers of bourbon. I think it’s more the former, that the hammering away of the same vocabulary is like a miner hammering away at a coal seam underground, relentlessly chipping away at the same pressure point to try and achieve a breakthrough into a new way of seeing.And so part of the pleasure of reading the book comes from watching Ballard navigate the fine line between acuity and pretentiousness, between vivid originality and something a little more clumsy. Charles Prentice arrives in the Spanish resort of Estrella de Mar, an exclusive enclave for the rich and retired British, hot on the heels of news he has received that his brother Frank has pleaded guilty to the murder of five people in a house fire. Charles stoops and picks up the small handgun which killed him, moves Bobby’s head, gets blood all over his shirt and hands… just as he hears the siren of the police car, looks up to see Inspector Cabrera, who had investigated the original arson attack, who had quizzed him at length about his brother, who had watched his character slowly transform… Inspector Cabrera walks towards him across the court and in the last sentences Charles realises that he, Charles Prentice, will take the blame, take the rap, plead guilty of Bobby’s murder… for the greater good of the community. Crawford may end up lying among his bloodied balls but his death will energize and bring together a community. In one of Picador's first hardcover titles, Ballard (Crash) offers another of his tautly imagined experiments with 20th-century pathology.

Crime would always be rife, but Crawford had put vice and prostitution and drug-dealing to positive social ends. It seems these folk want nothing more than to stay in the dark like vampires and watch TV in-between the daytime napping. Rather than have the two brothers hash the whole thing out right then and there, Ballard makes Frank aloof and cryptic in a very artificial and unbelievable way.

This narrowness of plotting, and the narrowness of vocabulary, are central issues in critiquing Ballard’s work. Ballard came to be associated with the New Wave of science fiction early in his career with apocalyptic (or post-apocalyptic) novels such as The Drowned World (1962), The Burning World (1964), and The Crystal World (1966). I've got this far and haven't even mentioned the narrator Charles Prentice yet, who is out to clear his brother's name for five arson murders. They are people who achieved what their consider to be the highest possible goal: build paradise on Earth. I understood how [Frank] had fallen under Crawford’s spell, accepting the irresistible logic that had revived the Club Nautico and the moribund town around it.