The Beach

What would you do if confronted with paradise?

Maybe nothing. Maybe you're in the small but existent minority that believes the world we have now is paradise. Or perhaps you're in the much larger minority that believes paradise can't be found on the mortal coil, so any approximation of it is just about as useless as living in a crappy apartment somewhere.

For the rest of you, then: what if you could go to a place that was as close to a perfect paradise as you will find on Earth? Would you go? What would you do when you got there? Could you wake up every day and go to bed every night knowing that it really doesn't get any better than where you are? Or would you slowly drive yourself insane tinkering with your life and seeking more and more intense sensory experiences as you cool down to the point of numbness in your heart? What would happen?

Those are the central questions at work in Alex Garland's The Beach, an evocative novel about human disintegration. The narrator, Richard, meets a crazy mystery man known only as Daffy Duck, and before Daffy commits suicide, he shares with Richard a map to a beach where life is allegedly perfect. There's a community there of travelers; they all came in search of a tourist experience beyond the usual in Thailand, and they all stayed to live in paradise.

Richard shows the map to Francoise and Etienne, two French travelers he's met on his journeys in the Orient, and the three decide to chance it and travel to the island. Through a grueling journey, they make it there and are welcomed into the community. It's then that the baggage Richard has brought with him to the island--nothing physical, just a loose mix of obsessions and preoccupations, mostly with death and experience--slowly seeps into his mind and drives him insane.

The reader watches this transformation take place through a deeply compelling first-person narrative that subtly depicts Richard's slow descent into the depths of madness. First-person narratives are always a dicey proposition; they can sometimes be an escape route for lazy writers, who feel more comfortable simply stating a character's feelings rather than depicting them through actions, descriptions and attitude. But a great first-person narrative, like Nick Hornby's in High Fidelity and Garland's in The Beach, doesn't simply state how the narrator is feeling. It also depicts those feelings through behavior and through the subtleties of descrepancy between the narrator's words and the reality that exists behind those words.

With a third-person narrator, you get one voice; with a first-person, you ironically get two, the voice the narrator uses with the reader and the voice he uses with other characters. Then there's also a third entity, the narrator inside the narrator himself, and the greatest challenge lies often in hearing that narrator speak through the haze constructed by narration and dialogue. In his narrator Richard, Garland creates a character who's complex enough to reveal all three of those personalities. A writer's challenge is to evoke complexity when writing a first-person narrative, and Garland meets that challenge and conquers it.

Through Richard, Garland might be offering a commentary on twentysomethings at the bridge between centuries. He could be suggesting that we've become numb to experience by our media-drenched culture, and that when we're confronted with the opportunity to explore real experience, we might be compelled to take it too far because like Richard, life may as well be a video game or a movie about Vietnam. Life is movies is video games is TV and nothing is really real.

He could be saying that--that seems to be the popular critical consensus, at least--or he could be just presenting one man's disintegration in an intense, compelling way. Either way, The Beach presents a story that will draw you into one man's mind and take you on his journey toward madness. Whether that man represents all of us twentysomethings or not is a question you'll have to answer for yourself.