Product Description

The Khao San Road, Bangkok--first stop for the hordes of rootless young Westerners traveling in Southeast Asia. On Richard's first night there, in a low-budget guest house, a fellow traveler slashes his wrists, bequeathing to Richard a meticulously drawn map to "the Beach."

The Beach, as Richard has come to learn, is the subject of a legend among young travelers in Asia: a lagoon hidden from the sea, with white sand and coral gardens, freshwater falls surrounded by jungle, plants untouched for a thousand years. There, it is rumored, a carefully selected international few have settled in a communal Eden.

Haunted by the figure of Mr. Duck--the name by which the Thai police have identified the dead man--and his own obsession with Vietnam movies, Richard sets off with a young French couple to an island hidden away in an archipelago forbidden to tourists. They discover the Beach, and it is as beautiful and idyllic as it is reputed to be. Yet over time it becomes clear that Beach culture, as Richard calls it, has troubling, even deadly, undercurrents.

Spellbinding and hallucinogenic, The Beach is a look at a generation in their twenties, who, burdened with the legacy of the preceding generation and saturated by popular culture, long for an unruined landscape, but find it difficult to experience the world firsthand.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #33257 in Books
• Published on: 1998-02-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781573226523
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From the Inside Flap
The Bookcassette® format is a special recording technique developed as a means of condensing the full, unabridged audio text of a book to record it on fewer tapes. In order to listen to these tapes, you will need a cassette player with balance control to adjust left/right speaker output. Special adaptors to allow these tapes to be played on any cassette player are available through the publisher or some US retail electronics stores.

About the Author
Alex Garland was born in London in 1970. The Beach, his first novel, received great critical acclaim. It was a national bestseller in the UK and hit many regional lists in the US. He lives in London. The Tesseract is also available from Brilliance Audio.

From AudioFile
Before committing suicide, a deranged Scot gives Richard a map of "the beach," an Eden on an island near Thailand. Richard and a French couple find the place and begin a communal life--of work, sun and drugs--with about 30 others until a series of events causes it all to unravel. Michael Page adeptly captures Michael's world-weary cynicism, as well as the often extreme emotions of the beach's inhabitants. His first-person narration, while on target in conveying Richard's personality, also manages to differentiate the other characters--no small task. This is a trip no listener will forget. M.A.M. (Also available abridged from Nova/Brilliance.) (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Customer Reviews

An adventure you'll never forget...
Ready for some excitement and adventure? Pick up The Beach and lose yourself on a tropical island...

Richard, a twentysomething backpacker who spends most of his time searching for bigger and better places to see, finds his way to Thailand for a little R&R. But something is definitely different about this trip and most of it comes in the form of his crazy hostel neighbor, Daffy, who talks incessantly and angrily about a beach. Tucked away in a remote and off-limits part of Thailand, the beach Daffy speaks of is considered a utopia, a perfect world that is unspoiled by tourists, a prize at the end of a tiring quest. Naturally Richard is curious, so he sets out with a French couple, Etienne and Francoise, and a map drawn by Daffy in search of this pristine fantasy land.

The island commune in The Beach would definitely pass for a secret Woodstock hideaway. Richard's journey is like no other; a riveting and spectacular adventure. Reading this book was the next best thing to swimming in their private lagoon, spearing fish and viewing the underwater corals. Island politics and the obsessive desire to keep the island's secrecy plays a heavy role in this novel and is also a prime example of how, even in paradise, one can somehow manage to destroy it.

Dark and sinister, as well as sarcastically funny, The Beach is a fast and furious novel that transports readers to another place in the blink of an eye. Alex Garland's writing is razor-sharp and indicative of his amazing storytelling talent. The movie cannot begin to touch the depth and fascination of this unforgettable novel.

Beyond Travel Writing
Here's the quick synopsis: Richard, a 24 yo Englishman, escapes heartaches and realities at home by backpacking in Thailand (and it's written in the 1st, and told as if he's sitting around, writing a biography). He hooks up with a French couple and they travel to a legendary beach on an island in the Thai Marine Park (where they join a colony). Richard talks to a dead man, lusts after Francoise, and recons the dope farmers who live on the other side of the island -- things quickly go wrong (surprise, surprise). It's like watching war films and listening to the doors ... throw in a bit of discontented 90s youth and there you go.

When I recommend this book, I quite often get the "Oh the Leo Beach movie" stare of disdain. It's very much more than that. This is an intelligent novel that examines the intersection of Vietnam war films on a generation of people who have lived without war, the elite repulsion Westerners have for the "Disneyification" of Third and Second World nations, and the ethnocentric enclaves created within "foreign" territories.

This book functions on two levels: as an enjoyable quick read for someone who is looking for a pop culture punch of action and as a text that deserves a closer observation.

Paradise and its discontents
It's telling that Alex Garland's debut novel has become a cult favorite among the same vacuous subpopulation of travelers that he spends much of this book lambasting. There's something impoverished about The Beach: reading it fails to provide the kind of "authentic experience" for which Garland's 20something characters are questing. Though I launched into this book looking for a subtext about rootlessness and the search for purpose among the gypsy backpackers that symbolize ALL of us GenXers, that idea went undeveloped. No idea, no theory, undergirds this book to give it structure or purpose. Undeveloped too are Garlands characters; they descend into madness and their lives hang in the balance, ho hum. You can't gasp when you don't give a damn. Finally, The Beach fails to portray a paradise that is very compelling: the commune that is the focus of this book is more of a tropical work camp, no one has interesting conversations or does much save for get stoned and play Tetris, and most of the members don't seem to get along. Though I'm two years younger than Garland, I felt that this book was somehow aimed at a teenage audience, or for some generation coarser and more emotionally stillborn and lobotomized than my own. Life's a beach, indeed....