February 2, 1997
Garland's amphetamine-paced first novel plunks some young European expats down on a remote island in the Gulf of Thailand. There, tired of the prepackaged experience available to them in the West, they try to create their own paradise. The narrator is an Englishman named Richard. Born in 1974, he has grown up on popular culture and is a fan of video games and Vietnam War movies. While staying at a creaky Bangkok guest house, he finds a carefully drawn map left by his angry, doped-up neighbor, a suicide who called himself Mr. Daffy Duck. The map points the way to a legendary beach where, it's rumored, a few favored international wanderers have settled. Richard's new friends, Etienne and Fran oise, convince him to help them find the island. But Richard, inspired by sudden anxiety about Etienne, gives a copy of the map to two American backpackers-an act that later haunts him as keenly as the ghost of Mr. Duck. Richard and his French companions find the island: half is covered by a marijuana plantation patrolled by well-armed guards; the other half consists of a gorgeous beach and forest where a small band of wandering souls live a communal life dominated by a gently despotic woman named Sal. At times, Garland seems to be trying to say something powerful about the perils of desiring a history-less Eden. But his evocations of Vietnam, Richard's hallucinatory chats with the dead Mr. Duck and various other feints in the direction of thematic gravity don't add up to much. Garland is a good storyteller, though, and Richard's nicotine-fueled narrative of how the denizens of the beach see their comity shatter and break into factions is taut with suspense, even if the bloody conclusion offers few surprises. 150,000 first printing; $150,000 ad/promo; foreign rights sold in the U.K., Germany, Holland, Italy.
Starred review from December 1, 1996
Garland, a British writer in his twenties, captures all the cynicism and disjuncture of his generation in his gripping first novel. Richard, his narrator, is a chain-smoking wanderer who has discovered that "escape through travel works," especially travel in Asia. Not alone in his feeling of alienation from the orderly world of family and work, he quickly makes the acquaintance of fellow disaffected travelers in Bangkok, including a guy who goes by the name of Daffy Duck. Mister Duck (as Richard calls him) bequeaths a carefully drawn map to our hero just before committing suicide, and soon Richard and a young French couple he haphazardly befriends are on their way to the Beach, a forbidden island paradise. Bold and naive, they barely survive their journey, or the shock of discovering that the island highlands are covered with fields of marijuana guarded by vicious Thai commandos and that the Beach is home to a motley collection of pot-smoking Euronomads enmeshed in their own sinister society. Garland is a wonder; he's able to write unrelentingly suspenseful, downright hallucinatory action scenes, then balance them with passages of chillingly accurate psychology. His intensely imagined tale is, on one level, a brilliant update of "Lord of the Flies," and on another, a wholly original and unsettling depiction of psyches shaped by the bewildering messages of Loony Tunes, "Apocalypse Now," Nintendo, and the age-old cult of oblivion. "The Beach" has cult status scrawled all over it. ((Reviewed December 1, 1996))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1996, American Library Association.)