The Beach (Nova Audiobooks)

Rating:
Summary: An excellent novel
Review: I was highly suspicious of reading The Beach, having heard of it being 'a great film with De Caprio in it'. Not being a fan of Leonardo (this was before he starred in Catch me If you Can' etc etc.), I was going to give this a miss, before I got stuck in an aeroport and was forced to read it.

Garland creates beautiful scenery, great scenes of psychological and mental exploration, while touching on the ideas of the past, peace and ostricisation. The main character can be seen in many different lights; as both an idiot and a hero, as insane or perfectly normal, driven by a force stronger than himself.

So why not five stars?

In parts of the book, Garland does tend to drag out the sequences with Mr. Duck (read to understand!), and at the end I found myself wondering about what certain characters were actually like; his development of the background characters could have been better.

Despite these downfalls, Garland creates an excellent, fast-paced novel with an extremely sinister and well created ending. Definately worth a read

Rating:
Summary: An Excellent read...
Review: If you saw the movie (you know, the one with Leo), try and put it out of your head, and above all, don't let that be the reason you don't read the book (unless you went to see the movie BECAUSE of Leo). The book is said to contain elements of 'The Magus', and 'Lord of the Flies', and if you have read both those books, you will certainly feel their influence. In a nutshell, The Beach deals with living in an apparently utopian community, how human nature reaserts itself the minute things start to go wrong, and studies the effect of living appart from society and it's laws. The shocking and gritty ending says it all.

The narrator, Richard, is given a map to a place called the beach, one night in a hostel in Thailand, and decides to try and find this legendary place with two fellow travellers. They succeed in finding the beach, a little corner of paradise ringed by cliffs, and are eventually welcomed by its inhabitants, a motley selection of characters who for various reasons have shunned the real world. Shortly thereafter, Richard, a fan of Vietnam war movies, begins to lose touch with reality in a rather sinister way.

I started reading this book around 8:00pm and finally put it down at 3:00 in the morning, 30 pages shy of the end, because I couldn't keep my eyes open. I think the reason this tale is so appealing because it speaks to most human being's yearning for a simpler life. Who wouldn't want to spend every day in the sun, sea and sand with nothing to do but enjoy life, fish and gather fruit and grow their own vegetables? (not to mention getting stoned everyday...oh, did I forget to mention the marijuana field on the island?)

Ok. Maybe not everyone's cup of tea, but still, this is a very gripping read.

Rating:
Summary: Don't Believe the Hype and You're In for a Nice Read.
Review: The Beach does not live up to the hype reviews on its back cover: "GenX has its first great novel," "A Lord of the Flies for GenX," "Reads like a comet," etc. This book is a slow 436 pages of little action and seemingly endless repetition (swim, smoke dope, and play Game Boy while orbiting closer and closer to danger). Brilliant MTV style speed found in books like, say, Less Than Zero actually do "read like a comet." (And Garland does seem derivative of Bret Easton Ellis at times -- but, hey, who can blame him). The Beach reads more like the sun slowly moving overhead as you're sitting by the pool in sunglasses. Pleasant but not earth shattering. The Beach also reads much slower than Lord of the Flies, which has more action and well defined, sweeping themes like; anarchy vs. order, nature man vs. civilized man, and good vs. evil. Garland's covers the themes of Yank encroachment, McEverything, and environmental destruction pretty darn well. But so do Beavis and Butthead every few minutes and they don't get media raves. USA Today writes on the back cover: "Garland shows that our global popular media has saturated (GenXers) brains." USA Today? No irony there. Ellis and Lord of the Flies are off the charts. Garland is good. If you don't let the saturation media hype raise your expectations you're in for a really nice read. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy The Beach.