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Summary: Is there such a thing as a perfect place?
Review: This is the perfect book for those of us constantly searching for a better place, a better life. In this novel, this utopia consists of a secluded beach off the beaten tourist path of Thailand. Backpackers from different parts of the world assemble here and form their own distinct society, away from the pressures of every-day modern society. Except that in Garland's novel, this perfect world soon comes crashing down and dissolves into a tale of madness, revenge and drug addiction.Garland's use of first-person narrative is very engaging and he has a writing style that makes for fast and easy reading. The Beach is a great ride, especially for backpackers, travellers and free spirits.
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Summary: Suspenseful, and a good read
Review: This is one of the best books I've read in a while. It really kept my interest, and I was annoyed when I had to put it down. The story is infinitely better than the motion picture (as is usually the case). It was easy to hate the main character, Richard, in many ways since he did inhumane things without regard to others. The irony is how he survives the end of life at the beach, which was largely caused by his actions. There's an implied sense of justice against those in charge at the beach when Richard and his friends flee. This is also ironic since he has basically crashed in on the life they've so carefully made for themselves.
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Summary: Alex Garland Blows
Review: This book basically chronicles the adventures of a 21 year old British "traveler" (our protagonist) and his discovery of a hidden unspoiled island commune somewhere in Southeast Asia. Basically the guy is in Thailand staying in a youth hostel when the creepy Scottish guy next door (aka Mr. Duck) leaves a map to "The Beach" taped to his door before he promptly kills himself (by wrist slashing-which means we can look forward to annoying blood and suicide metaphors throughout the rest of the book- too bad he didn't just jump off something tall). But Mr. Duck ain't dead yet folks, he comes back in the form of about 127 annoying dream sequences in which he advises our hero while dripping blood from the wrists everywhere and making a general nuisance of himself. But I'm jumping ahead of myself. Said protagonist sets off to find this mystical place, accompanied by an annoying French couple. They find it, are accepted into the community, but find there are sinister undertones to this supposed Utopia (what a shocker). I'm about 2 chapters away from finishing this thing and it's yet to kick into high gear. Author Garland prefers to write everything from the first person perspective, so not only do we get to hear every insipid conversation the character takes part in, we get to see into his thoughts as well, and believe me folks there ain't a hell of a lot to see in there. Mostly we get to hear his internal mental struggle on if he should light another cigarette, will he be able to get more cigarettes, and should he try and make it with the French chick while her boyfriends not around. We also get his mental commentary on which members of the commune he likes or dislikes on that particular day. Unfortunately it is hard to agree or disagree with him since there is little or no character development focused on anyone other than the protagonist (who is basically an annoying self centered twit). I can't say this book completely sucks since I did manage to get through it ( I guess I was waiting for something interesting to happen). Call it the literary equivalent of a Tab Cola. If you want to read a book that you will completely forget about within a week, pickup "The Beach" by Alex Garland. Otherwise try reading something by an experienced author instead of a first timer.
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Summary: We were backpackers once, and young
Review: Okay, I loved the Leonardo DiCaprio's portrayal of Richard in the film version of 'The Beach', but (as with most adaptations) the book kicked the Hollywood arse. The story's the same, basically. A backpacker in Thailand, Richard, meets a guy named Daffy who gives him a map to a hidden island, then commits suicide. Richard takes up with two fellow travelers, though they're French. They make it to the island and find a small community living in secrecy. They dive right in and start wonderful new lives but it doesn't last. The differances range from minute details like the fact that Garland's Richard is English, to the way they end. But the ways in which the book is superior are the simplest, but most noticable. The use of Vietnam-war references gives a much more detached feeling to Richard, and the persistance of Daffy's 'ghost' is really interesting. Though the book lacks the really cool lines of the movie ('For mine is a generation that circles the globe in search of something we haven't tried before' or 'I still believe in paradise, but now I know that it's not some place you can look for...it's how you feel for a moment in your life. And if you find that moment, it lasts forever.') the extra time on the beach, as well as the deeper exploration of the rivalry between Richard and Bugs makes up for it. Another thing I liked was the fact that Garland didn't have the sexual content of the movie. Francois stays true to Ettienne, and likewise does Sal (short for Salvester) stay true to Bugs. I was kind of hoping that Garland's Keaty would love Cricket, I was hoping for an explanation on how it's played/scored, but Tetris was a fine substitute. I must say though that I liked the books ending a lot better than the movie's. Even though the movie's end, with Sal pulling the trigger on Richard not knowing that it's empty, drives the idea of 'How far would you go to protect paradise?' really well, the book asks a differant, and (I think) more important question: 'What would you do if paradise was ripped away from you?' Thus the ending, which really illustrates the question well, would be differant and more poiniant. I suggest seeing the movie then reading the book, just so you can get both elements of the story without being disapointed in the content. After reading this book, I can't watch the movie, and I loved that movie.
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Summary: Compelling Look at X Gen
Review: Alex Garland's first novel takes a look at 20-something backpackers in Southeast Asia fighting to get off the beaten trail to find the ultimate real 'something' that cannot be found among pop culture-stained modern civilization . The story follows the first person narrative of Richard as he stumbles upon a hidden utopia on a remote island of Thailand and what he discovers while living there. This book was fantastically written - there is a nice balance of compelling plot and insightful commentary, so on one hand, you don't feel as if you are reading one-dimensional mindless [stuff], and on the other, it doesn't feel heavy-handed. Garland does a terrific job at developing the ecclectic mix of characters, and he writes from the heart, from experience, so the dialogue and places are real. Though the book itself is pop culture incarnate, it rises above the other English novels of its kind, as it introduces many questions never brought up before. I wish there were more types of these books written - on backpacker culture, the motivations behind travel, the discoveries revealed from it, and the unending search for that something, whatever It is. But I suppose if there were other books out there like this, this book would lose the quality that makes it so unique. Another note - the book is so much better than the piece of garbage film.
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Summary: Fine Literature is Alive and Well on The Beach
Review: Skipping the synopsis, I'll just tell you why I liked the book so much. It seems that in the book world today we are caught up with Tom Clancy's terrorists and Anne Rice's vampires, and we have forgotten what real literature is. Literary devices like symbolism and dramatic irony may have been lost in place of guns and blood, but these are found in plenty in Garland's masterpeice The Beach. This book can be read by the casual reader who likes tropical settings and an exciting storyline(both of which Garland utilizes expertly), or the hardcore lit buff who wants to read it and re-read it looking for subtleties and messages. I have personally read it three times so far and I'm pleasantly suprised with a new meaning each time. Garland will not vanish from the world of books, he will be very famous one day.
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Summary: How can I say this nicely...
Review: It s-u-c-k-s, but is fabulous if your into superficial plots, guts and vomit. I give it 5 stars in shock fiction, sensationalism and anything to sell books mentality. Oh, and did you know that Alex "how else can I mis respresent Gen. X" Garland did not even visit Thailand before he wrote this book, dispite what he has repeated in many interviews. Its a throw together, boring, sickening, childish piece of hack, and its a testement to the generation, to which I belong, that it was such a hit. It's fame to me is something akin to pompous people who expound endless metephors to look like they know art, when all they are looking at is a urinal... get it? So, if you feel like wasting money, reading about people pooing on themselves and wait 235 pages for a plot to develop... go for it. Don't say I didn't warn you:)
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Summary: Exceptional First Novel
Review: Alex Garland's debut novel, "The Beach," is possibly one of the strongest first books from a writer in the 1990s. Published in 1996, it combines a psychological thriller, a travel story, and a portrait of why young people decide to leave home for months on end and travel around the world. While any and all of these themes could become (and have become, in other books) cliché in a matter of pages, it is a testament to Garland's skill as a writer and as a thinker that he manages to create a book that rises above stereotypes and actually concerns itself with the characters involved, and their real-world counterparts. Richard is a British student who packs his backpack and heads to Thailand, looking for adventure. His head full of Vietnam-era stories of war and post-Vietnam era stories of untouched paradises that lie just around the next corner, he finds Thailand to be simply an extension of the overcommercialized world he left behind. When a suicidal maniac in the hotel room next door leaves Richard a map to a beach rumored to be like Eden, he sets off with a pair of French lovers to find out if the stories are true. What he discovers is a place with natural beauty, but with a society of backpackers who, like himself, are trying to escape civilization for as long as possible. He fits in with Beach culture, but the relative isolation and his conflicts with one of the other residents eventually lead Richard to take up residence more in his mind than in the real world. When things start to fall apart, partially because of forces Richard helped create, he struggles to hold on not only to his life, but his sanity. People have compared "The Beach" to other survival-style novels like "Lord of the Flies," and accuse it of being many things it is not. Both are unfair. The people at The Beach are really little more than a bunch of potsmoking rich kids whose main forms of recreation include playing the Gameboy and smoking marijuana: that is precisely Garland's point, and it is, in a way, an indictment of both the backpacker culture in general and the optimism of youth that leads kids of that age to seek utopia without leaving the civilization they claim to hate. Garland is fully aware of the contradiction, and this is one of this main points, and one he does not shy away from. Although many fans of the book did not like the movie, one of the things the film portrayed accurately was Richard's enormously skewed point of view: he sees the world as a place to be compared with video games and movies, because that's really all he knows. He's a character that the reader is not supposed to like. It makes him no less responsible for what happens, but it's an interesting look into the psychology not only behind the traveler/backpacker culture, but into the general disaffection of world youth. Why, when we are promised that things are supposed to be a certain way, do they not turn out such? Garland weaves a fantastic book with "The Beach," and its gentle meanderings, gut-wrenching tension, and ferocious violence are worth a read or two. Here's hoping Garland's new screenplay, "28 Days Later...", is as interesting. Final Grade: A-
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Summary: a thrilling & thought-provoking début
Review: Alex Garland's novel "The Beach" is not only a great summer reading but also a work about the deeper insights of the human being.
Richard, the protagonist, comes across a map of a remote island in Thailand which seems to be like a paradise. Together with a French couple, Françoise and Etienne, he undertakes the adventurous trip to the Beach where he finds a bunch of travellers that have established their own little community with rules and regulations. Sal, the leader of the group, says "we're trying to make a place that won't turn into a beach resort" and it is thus the most important thing for the "beachers" as they call themselves, not to give the location of the Beach away to strangers. Richard loves the life on the Beach, he works in the fishing detail and finds friends. But as soon as the group faces some unexpected difficulties, the community seems to fall apart. Because there is no institutional system, the "beachers" are forced to look after themselves, which soon turns out to be a problem when they have to deal with death. And as soon as the group is forced to face new difficulties, the
community falls apart and they learn that they can neither escape the influences of Western society on some remote island nor escape the corruption and selfishness of their human nature.
The utopian motif of a new form of life on a remote island as we already know it from Platon's "Atlantis", Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travells", Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" or William Golding's "Lord of the Flies" is being followed in Garland's début. The island as an earthly paradise a garden eden that turns into hell.
Golding questions the thesis that the human being is originally good and that only society is the cause of the corruption of the human soul.
One aspect that I did not like about "The Beach" was the long introduction. It took me a while to get into the story, because Garland explained every detail of the setting, but once the "real" story started I could not put it down anymore. It really hooked me and Garland's colloquial style made the reading fun for a non-native English speaker.
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Summary: Spoiled children run away from home
Review: Somehow--I don't know how--/The Beach/ managed to stay engaging enough to keep me reading until the end, but the more I think about it the less I like it. Author Alex Garland has crafted a retooled /Lord of the Flies/ targeted at a small subset of alternative hipsters in their 20s, the sort of people one sees rioting against the World Trade Organization and vandalizing Starbucks franchises. They are people who cannot live without the comforts of Western Civilization but nevertheless despise it. If you are familiar with the genus species you can understand how taxing it must be to read an entire novel populated with nothing but them. The book's characters rebel against the West by traveling to the Third World. They don't know what they are looking for there and don't do much except swim, lie on the beach, and work on their tans--as though such things are somehow nobler pastimes in Thailand than in the Hamptons. In a telling narrative, Richard, the book's slacker protagonist (is that an oxymoron?), admits that he travels to the Third World in search of extreme poverty. For him and his fellow-travelers, poverty equals authenticity. They barely seem to notice that real people live in such degradation and suffer lives that are poor, nasty, brutish, and short--to Richard and the other pampered Westerners, such misery is just a prop that exists only to reinforce their illusions, no more real to them than the cardboard sunset on a movie stage. Their recurrent complaint about the various vacation destinations they discover is that more tourists soon follow, shattering the supposed authenticity of the cultural experience. Once a village makes it into a travel guidebook, they lament, it's finished. This theme, repeated ad nauseum throughout the story, is a mildly more sophisticated version than the tendency of people you knew in high school to stop buying albums of any band that became popular among their less enlightened fellows. In /The Beach/, however, these folks have happened upon a solution to that quandary. They settle a deserted island as a refuge from civilization, although as it happens nobody except other disgruntled Westerners actually lives there among them. On this island, they stock up on batteries and cigarettes, play a communal Nintendo Game Boy, ride a motorboat to the mainland whenever they need to stock up on food which they are incapable of growing for themselves, and otherwise do everything short of actually constructing a McDonald's franchise, all the while deluding themselves into thinking they have discovered an authentic exotic land. In truth, of course, it is more like Disney World than Xanadu. Garland does an adequate job communicating these themes and tells a reasonably suspenseful story, although none of the things about which it keeps readers in suspense are ever actually resolved. The plot lulls during dozens of torturous dream sequences in which the disembodied spirit of a minor supporting character returns and appears to drive the narrator insane but mostly just acts like a pathetic, unintentionally comic swipe of Obi-Wan Kenobi's posthumous appearances in the /Star Wars/ trilogy. I didn't know whether to laugh or wretch, so I usually just skipped pages.
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