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The Beach |
Author: Alex Garland
Published: 1998-02-01 |
List price: $15.00
Our price: $10.20
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As of: November 19th, 2008 06:14:08 PM
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Customer comments on this selection.
 The Beach - Alex Garland
Writing Style - 4/5
Characters - 4
Storyline - 3
Resonance - 3
The Not-Too-Revealing Synopsis
A tourist, - no - a traveler who is a trek junkie searching for the next pristine, exotic, faraway land comes across a madman offering him just that. This is a hip, edgy-toned story of the journey, the findings, and the effects.
The Review:
This read was, throughout the book - disagreeable, annoying, shallow and boring while simultaneously amusing, gratifying, intricate and surprising. Garland has a certain carelessness with sentence structure and thought processes that mirrors the nature of the main character (both annoying and amusing). The conceptualization of Utopia was hardly desirable but the considerations of human fallibility were wonderfully related (disagreeable, gratifying). The main character alone is memorable; the others, though distinctive were place holders necessary for some drama (intricate, shallow) and while I was sure that around the half-way point this was going to be a 2 out of 5 star, the character development in the last half knocked it up to a solid 4 (boring, surprising). There is much to be forgiven, even disregarded throughout the read but the final story is worth all the distractions. I recommend this book.
P.S. I saw the movie eight years ago or so when it came out. I don't remember much about it save the video game sequences and that I hated it. I don't it influenced me much on the read - if anything I had low expectations for the book because of the impressions I recalled from the movie.
A good read...
for any one, any age who has done a tour in SE Asia. Or not done a tour and wants to.
 Ok, but not as good as I hoped.
I bought this to read while in Thailand. I was staying on the beach in Chawaeng, thinking this'd be a great read. The best I can say is that it's an ok holiday read. It seems to take itself a little too seriously - like it's trying to become great literature, but needs just a little more. The dramatic point comes a little too late and is too obvious in coming - so the tension doesn't build as it should. Also, it seems like there was a storyline that got dropped entirely - there was a whole bunch of foreshadowing, but nothing ever came of it. I guess this might have been the authors attempt at a "twist", but it came off feeling more like "oops, forgot that one" :(
Ah well - it's still worth reading once and provided an interesting fictional context to where I was staying. I never got out to the lagoon cos it was raining and high swell - yep, it exists and yep, you can go there on the tour.
Maybe next time will be better. ;)
This Beach is not too shallow and not too deep.
The Beach is an easy book to read that should leave any traveller nodding their head in recognition, dismay, or both.
While it doesn't explore the complexities of the modern, post-colonial relationship between "east" and "west" to a great extent, it does explore that relationship just enough to keep the book interesting.
It's not really a thriller; it's written in the fast-paced, easy-flowing style of a thriller and it contains a lot of violence, but the narrator's perspective is too focused on the mundane aspects of things for the book to really be called "thrilling."
Richard, the protagonist is not really that "shallow," "immoral," or a "slacker," as people have commented. But he is simple. He's a lonely person who travels and does drugs - two very primitive sources of stimulation, really - because more grounded, consistent ways of life don't seem to work for him. He's not a rebel nor does he have much angst. Like many travellers, he hides from himself by putting himself in unfamiliar surroundings.
Many travellers may complain about the protagonist's "narrow" view of the world, but they are missing the point. Richard reveals a truth about travel that many readers may be afraid to face: no matter how much we talk about "experiencing another culture," and "getting to understand the world," most of travel really consists of hanging out with people like ourselves, and what we ultimately like about travel, more than any kind of deep learning, is excitement and fun.
But, yes, Richard's level of consciousness is ultimately quite shallow (Perhaps Garland's is as well?), and sometimes I, too, found myself disappointed by that fact: sometimes, I wished that the book would offer more insights into the problematic relationship between backpackers and their destinations and the ultimate silliness of the Western desire to find "unspoiled," "natural" places, and I wished for more interesting sentences (I appreciate the simplicity and straight-forwardness of the narration, but there are many simple writers who still manage to create great sentences, and Garland is not one of them, nor do I think he wants to be.)
But I was grateful for the absence of something else from the book: pretentiousness. In recent years, and even moreso in the 1990s, "depth" consisted of vague pop culture references and poetic, ironic, self-congratulatory writing.
Garland's voice, on the other hand, is so modest as to be almost boring, and his pop culture references are done without any irony: he talks about video games merely because they are a big part of his life. He doesn't attempt to comment on the nature of pop culture, he just talks about it a lot. He doesn't say that pop culture has "shaped" our "postmodern" culture, or "replaced" anything "real"; really, video games are just one of the many things that influence his life.
The Beach, for its lack of pretentiousness in dealing with potentially "big" subjects (the relationship of east and west, pop culture, alienation), would almost merit five stars.
It is refreshing that The Beach doesn't seem to be trying to "add up to much," but it is nonetheless frustrating that it doesn't add up to much. When the narrator references Vietnam movies and draws superficial parallels between The Beach and the Vietnam war, the result is just that: superficial. Garland did not develop this motif enough for it to be interesting, nor did he keep it minimal enough for it to not get annoying.
The constant barrage of phrases along the lines of "This is Vietnam, boy!" are neither as silly nor as scary as they should be.
At times, it appears that The Beach will become either an action-packed adventure story or a profoundly developed reflection on the world, but it does not really deliver on either of those levels unless you ignore certain aspects of it or put too much energy into reading between the lines.
In the end, however, The Beach is a satisfying, commendable novel. It is an easy-to-read piece of pseudo-travel lit that, if it does not define a generation, certainly does, to a small extent, define a certain type of traveller that existed in that generation.
Soul inspiring
Reading this book really made me think. As someone who has suffered from wanderlust my entire life this book hit home. Its a great adventure story but its also about self exploration and friendship. Great Book.
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