When I was twenty-four a friend and I spent three nights in Khao San Road, Bangkok, mingling with young Westerners with long hair, tattoos, a wide variety of accents and one particular book in their hands - (a book I too had in my backpack – a graduation gift from my father). That book helped us make new friends. A German girl in torn jeans who saw me holding the book told us she had ripped through it in about three days; her friend said he had just finished it. The next day a Cambridge University student kept a finger on the page she was reading and said she was a quarter way through the story, and that her traveling companion planned to read it next.
Staying true to the laws that governed the book - the incurious nature of backpackers - even though we talked a lot with our new friends (about books ,food, places to visit etc) we did not inquire about their lives because Richard, the protagonist of the book we were all reading, didn’t do it either. He confesses on one page, “I’d spent countless hours talking to Keaty, and the only thing I knew about his background was that he used to go to Sunday school. But I didn’t know if he had brothers or sisters, or what his parents did, or the area of London where he grew up … The only talking topic that stretched beyond the circle of cliffs was travel … Even now, I can still reel off the list of countries that my friends had visited...”
If you are a bookworm and between the ages of 35 and 50, you would probably have guessed what this is all about. If you are a movie buff and familiar with Leonardo DiCaprio, you probably remember the movie made from the book in which Leonardo dressed in a pair of beach shorts, jumps off cliffs and falls in love with a French girl.
But, in case you happen to be one of the dozen people left on this small planet who are not familiar with this book of all books, Alex Garland’s debut novel, The Beach, you might still want to know something about it, though much has changed since it was first published way back in 1996.
The story begins when Richard, a twenty-something Brit, arrives on the famous Khao San Road — the first stop on the well-trodden backpacker’s trail. On his first night, the man in the room next to him slits his wrists and leaves Richard with a map to a mysterious beach. Back in the days when there were no Google maps to guide him, along with a French couple, he sets out to find this supposed paradise, where a select community is trying to create their own version of utopia. When they finally arrive, having survived a harrowing swim and some AK-47 toting marijuana farmers, the new visitors are welcomed rather uneasily. I dare not tell you more lest I spoil the story. But if you have read the ‘Heart of Darkness’ and the ‘Lord of the Flies’ you would probably be able to guess the rest.
Keep in mind though, that the book is a sort of antitheses of anything written by Conrad or Golding. This is because Alex Garland has a knack for seeing and expressing things in a very understandable way, and this is no doubt part of his appeal to young readers who are turned off by the so-called ‘classic’ yet impenetrable authors. Garland knows this, and says, “I think if you asked the average literary editor whether they thought my work was equitable with Salman Rushdie’s, they would say no. Well, that’s not something that bothers me very much and I doubt very much that it bothers Salman Rushdie.”
Having written only three novels so far, he wrote Beach when he was twenty-three, The Tesseract when he was twenty-seven and more recently, The Coma, Garland is humble enough to confess he has clay feet. Especially when it comes to writing dialogue. He says he tried to overcome this weakness by studying other writers. “There were a few writers who I took off the shelves simply to, on a technical level, look at how they did it. One of them was Ishiguro, another one was Ballard. Ballard often would not do any attribution of dialogue. It would just be by proximity of the last person mentioned that you would figure out who was speaking. And Graham Greene, I think it was, “he said, she said” every line, and that fascinated me, because it didn’t feel like repetition. The word “said,” why didn’t it feel like repetition? Why does your brain not register it? Very mechanical things like that. And I ended up modeling a section of the dialogue in this first book I was writing, The Beach, on a section of dialogue in Ishiguro’s work because I’d been looking at it to see how he did it, and I modeled it in a self-conscious way.”
And the best thing is, Ishiguro didn’t mind, explains Garland and had no objections to Garland writing the movie script for his novel ‘Never Let Me Go.“It’s this kind of thing you get asked, sub-editors or commissioning editors at newspapers are constantly trawling for new people to drop into their paper to feed the incredibly voracious writing rate that those mediums required, so I got asked, “Will you write about your favorite book? You’re a new novelist. What’s your favorite book?” So I did it about an Ishiguro novel and mentioned that I had stolen this thing, and Ishiguro then wrote me a nice letter, and we had coffee, and became pals.”
Born in 1970, Alex Garland is the son of the well-known and respected political cartoonist, Nick Garland. Growing up in a middle-class and intellectual background, he graduated from Manchester University with a degree in History of Art, and was planning on following in his father’s footsteps before he changed his mind. “I understood enough about drawing to see my precise limitations. So, I ditched the pictures and just stuck with the words.” From then on he turned his attention to fiction, and started writing The Beach drawing on his many experiences of traveling (he first went to India when he was 17, on a school trip, and he now makes several visits to South East Asia per year.)
The Beach was brought out in 1996, with no big promotional push from the publishers, yet within a year, it was a best seller. Rave reviews everywhere from The Mail On Sunday to the New York Times certainly did no harm, but predominantly it was word of mouth that made The Beach a success. Only three years after he first put pen to paper, Garland was being heralded as the new voice of ‘Generation X’ and making Vogue’s most eligible bachelors list.
Yet, for all this publicity he is media shy and has a very low-key approach to what he does. “There is a business side to writing and if you don’t sell books then publishers won’t print them. You’re only as hot as your last novel. I think you can reach a point when you’re not as good as your last novel, you may have written one or even two bad books in a row, and the publishers will hang onto you. But you need to have proved yourself in a long term way before that and I certainly haven’t done that yet. I still feel like I’m doing an incredible bluffing trick and I’m going to get caught out.”
Not yet. In his third novel, ‘The Coma’ which has also been turned into a movie, he got his father, to do all the illustrations. When asked what it was like working with his father Garland gives the answer most of us who are the offspring of artists are so familiar with. “I can’t put the qualities of his work into words. I just know that he’s a more talented and dedicated artist than I’ll ever be. As for what it was like working with him, it was basically easy. I knew how to play to his strengths, because I grew up watching him do this stuff. The only real difficulties we’d get would be because I would on occasion dramatically revert to being a stroppy adolescent, and start yelling about something or another. But he was well used to me being an idiot, so it all worked out okay in the end.”
With many more miles to go as a novelist and scriptwriter cum movie director, Garland has the following advice for first-time writers.
“Show people your stuff, listen carefully to their responses, but ultimately don’t value anyone’s opinion above your own. Be influenced by writers you dislike as well as writers you like. Read their stuff to figure out what’s wrong. Find a balance between the confidence that allows you to continue, and the self-critical facility that enables you to improve. Get the balance wrong on either side, and you’re screwed.”
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