Direct from Britain

Alex Garland's The Beach is a sharp debut

by Elizabeth Schmidt

The Beach By Alex Garland. Riverhead Books, 371 pages, $23.95.

"I never really had a burning desire to write a whole book," admits Alex Garland, the 27-year-old author of one of this season's most acclaimed first novels. With his closely cropped jet-black hair, razor stubble, and skater sneakers, he looks more like a thoughtful member of an indie-rock band than England's newest literary star. He's in Boston to begin his eight-city American book tour and perched, a little uncomfortably, on the edge of the ample couch in the Authors Suite of the Colonnade Hotel. Pulling on the second of a chain of countless cigarettes, he says he first started writing fiction five years ago, during his finals at the University of Manchester. When I remark that this seems an odd time to take up an ambitious extracurricular activity, he disagrees: "I'm not academic at all. I wasn't going to get good grades, and so I figured I had to do something."

"Something" eventually led to The Beach, his tale of a 21-year-old backpacker's misadventures in Southeast Asia. The novel opens in a low-budget Bangkok guesthouse where Richard, the narrator, ends up sleeping next door to a crazed Scottish man who rants all night about a "bitch" ("beach" in his accent) and then kills himself the next morning after leaving a treasure map taped to Richard's door. Richard hooks up with a teenaged French couple, and they follow the map to a secret beach in the Gulf of Thailand where a group of about 30 backpackers have set up a self-sufficient community. The book is loaded with references to American Vietnam movies, video games, and TV dramas, which is just the beginning of what distinguishes it from a lot of the high-brow, Oxbridge-ish fiction produced in England in recent years. Garland writes in a clear, direct style that he says comes from comic strips, films, and soap operas -- a style of short sentences and pure momentum that couldn't be further from the complex ironies and syntactical twirls of writers such as Martin Amis or Julian Barnes.

Comic strips were, in fact, the author's first medium. He originally planned to be an illustrator and a cartoonist, like his father, and describes "the exact literal moment" he started writing as the result of a problem with drawing: "I'd just written a long comic strip. I was very fed up with having to draw the pictures and with the fact that if you write dialogue in a comic strip, two pages of dialogue might be 10 or 11 pages of dialogue in a book. I just got annoyed with it and thought, `Right, well, I'm losing the pictures.' " (He still draws, though, and two illustrations that appear in the American edition of the book -- a speared fish on the title page and a mosquito embossed on the book's cover -- come from a series of drawings for the British edition.)

Richard may be the first example of middle-class English slackerdom many American readers have encountered. Unambitious and often disengaged, Garland's narrator is always removed from the novel's action, always scrutinizing his role in a given scene, always painfully embarrassed about attracting too much attention. By the end of the book, Richard is caught up in a pop-culture-infused fantasy that threatens to cut him off from day-to-day life. But Garland has given his character a depth of feeling that goes beyond the emotional flatness usually associated with slackers. On the surface, he's a guy who just wants to hang out, smoke, and play his friend's Game Boy -- but, in fact, this style is a protective front. Most of the novel takes place under the surface, in Richard's head: we're privy to a running commentary about his crush on a girl who enjoys playing mind games, his need to impress people with insanely heroic acts, and his idealistic longing for social justice in the beach's community.

Talking about his writing, Garland seems at first to be as laid-back as Richard. He's unabashed about saying he's "seen way more movies than read books," and that he "thought about the scenes of [the book] in terms of film the whole time." (Three weeks ago, The Beach was optioned to Danny Boyle, director of Trainspotting and Shallow Grave.) Much of the writing, he says, was inspired by music: "Sometimes there were particular tracks from various albums that I've got, where I would stop writing and go and lie on the sofa and listen to them." The English band the Prodigy, for example, was helpful "for some of the slightly weird action scenes," and Tchaikovsky's "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" helped pace the book's incredibly gruesome climax.

Garland seems a little baffled by questions about his literary technique, giving the impression that the book almost wrote itself: "All I knew was that I wanted to set in on a beach," and that "I wanted it to be an anti-travel book. And I knew that at the end of it, I wanted it to go really badly wrong because this is what seemed to me to be the case with most travel locations." From that point on, he says, he "just started writing -- and the development of the plot was really just writing myself into a corner."

When he talks about the book's style, though, Garland becomes much more animated. He leans forward, out of the couch, gestures with his hands, and forgets, for a moment, about his cigarette. His goal, he says, is to make his writing "really easy to read. "I'm very concerned with simplicity and directness," he says. "I've got a set of rules for myself about how I write, and I'm quite rigid about them. The most important one has to do with not tripping over anything. So vocabulary is important. And sentence construction is important, too. I want to be clear. I hate the idea of a reader having to reflect on what I've written."

We go on to discuss irony in particular. Garland expresses irritation about "this obsessive thing about irony -- that everything has to be this sort of aware, slanted sort of thing. It's such a drag. What it does is it robs you of the capacity of getting enthusiastic about something. You're not allowed because you're too aware of it in desperately trying to maintain this ironic front."

He hesitates for a beat, then dives in: "This thing about being clever -- perhaps it's a British sensibility -- but being clever means knowing just a little bit more, and if you know a little bit more, then you can't help being a little bit ironic, and suddenly you're in a trap. It's a crock of shit. It really is. I've been sort of wary of saying this, but I do have a real problem with older British writers. I don't connect with them on any level at all. I think, `You can put together a sentence and a paragraph that is just heaven-sent, it's brilliant. But as a whole, somewhere, it's falling apart. You're not keeping me with you.' "

Garland stresses that his concern with a clear, direct style "isn't me, as it were." It's something he's picked up from other writers. "Empire of the Sun, by J.G. Ballard, strikes me as a truly superb book," says Garland. "You pick it up. You start reading it. And you're immediately drawn into the story. You never think back on what you've just read. You're only gripped by the narrative, apparently, until you finish reading it. That seems like a much more powerful way of getting your point across than creating a sort of lecture with literary fireworks." His writing process is one of continuous, and it seems almost obsessive, reduction: "I write. I take out any words that I think are obtuse or unnecessary. Almost all the editing has to do with paring down, not using too many adjectives. What I'm trying to get across is the meaning. The language is just pure communication. There's nothing else in it apart from that."