The Beach Paperback - 1998

Details

• Title The Beach
• Author Alex Garland
• Binding Paperback
• Edition [ Edition: Repri
• Pages 448
• Volumes 1
• Language ENG
• Publisher Riverhead Books, New York, New York, U.S.A.
• Date February 1, 1998
• ISBN 9781573226523 / 1573226521
• Weight 0.7 lbs (0.32 kg)
• Dimensions 8 x 5.1 x 1 in (20.32 x 12.95 x 2.54 cm)
• Ages 18 to UP years
• Grade levels 13 - UP
• Themes
  • Cultural Region: Asian - General
  • Cultural Region: British
  • Cultural Region: Southeast Asian
• Library of Congress subjects Adventure stories, Asia, Southeastern
• Library of Congress Catalog Number 96025033
• Dewey Decimal Code FIC

"A furiously intelligent first novel about backpacker culture in Southeast Asia, a book that moves with the kind of speed and grace many older writers can only day-dream about.  Just as impressively, Garland has written what may be the first novel about the search for genuine experience among members of the so-called X Generation that’s not snide or reflexively cynical.  I suspect many young readers will be deeply grateful for this British novelist’s levelheaded observations and will clutch this book tightly to their chests.  (Look for tattered copies of The Beach tucked into backpacks across the world next summer, right next to the de rigeur Lonely Planet guidebooks.)  The rest of us will just be happy to tag along for the ride.  The Beach combines an unlikely group of influences--The Heart of Darkness, Vietnam war movies,The Lord of the Flies, the Super Mario Brothers video game....The Beach is ambitious, propulsive fiction." --The Washington Post



“What makes The Beach a truly awesome piece of work is Garland’s understated, assured depiction of the perils of pop...Is The Beach a Gen X novel?  I concede to the marketing people on this one and depart here, cowed.” --The Village Voice



“You have in your hands one great book...The Beach will astonish readers.Garland manages to hook in the reader from the first page...The Beach builds to a crackling finale, complete with interesting moral questions.Not since reading Donna Tartt’s The Secret History has this reader been so impressed and taken with a first novel.”--USA Today



“Generation X has its first great novel...The Beach is an awesome first novel that works as an adventure story, an allegory and an explanation for why every human since Adam and Eve has an irresistible impulse to create a perfect world and destroy it.  Garland’s literary antecedents are Lord of the Flies and On the Road, with maybe a little Animal Farm thrown in for extra nastiness, and it is a testament to his achievement that The Beach can hang with those classics on a purely literary level and as a postmodern update of them...A wonderful adventure and allegory that may be the best novel written by anyone currently younger than 30.”   --Sunday Oregonian



“The novel’s detailed account of their journey...is not only suspenseful but surprisingly plausible..Alex Garland...has a clear, engaging storytelling style and a vivid imagination.  Deftly, he uses real-life travel details--smells, optical effects, quirks of language, social rituals--to keep the reader’s disbelief at bay.  For about two-thirds of the way, his novel is a genuine page turner, full of color and menace.  . . . the final chapters are suitably nightmarish and exciting...The Beach is impressive in its group portrait of a new generation of young vagabonds.  Raised in an era of diminished confidence, they have set out in search of something that feels genuine and fulfilling.  What they find turns out to be not utopia but hell.”   --The New York Times Book Review



“Remarkable....astonishingly assured....The Beach is distinguished by Garland’s bracingly transparent prose and tells a classic story of generational envy and displacement.   Echoing Dog Soldier as much as Lord of the Flies, Garland discovers the hell lurking in heaven’s tide pools while delivering as much  karmic payback as anything since Treasure Island.  Primitives vs. sophisticates, nature vs. culture, life vs. art--it’s all here, in language whose gripping and deceptive simplicity masks something dreadful and true.  Garland’s timeless fluid sentences seem to seek the clarity that Hemingway sought, without descending into self-parody for an instant....The book concludes perfectly, with an image as confusingly beautiful as modern primitivism gets....Garland’s deceptively transparent book would have been just as momentous and refreshing if it had been written 20 years ago.  Take it for what it is: a luminous voyage into the dark side of humanity’s increasingly tenuous dreams of paradise.” --Salon



“This much-hyped first novel manages to transcend the P.R. BS.  A riveting read about disaffected twenty-somethings searching for a real-life Eden as they backpack through the pop-culture wasteland of Asia.” --Details



“Generation X meets Lord of the Flies in this ripping good adventure yarn...Garland shows a precociously sure hand in this taut, exotic thriller.  For a young author, he knows too well the peril of finding paradise on earth...a skillful first novel about the demise of an earthly paradise.” --People



“[G]ripping, intelligent and written with a discipline many young writers only grow into."  --New York Newsday



“The Beach makes for a relevant and fascinating read....an excellent critique of the backpacker phenomenon--its nouveau colonialism and its tragically misdirected idealism.” --Time Out



“Garland’s provocative style--somewhere between Joseph Conrad, Bret Easton Ellis, and Stephen King--creates a modern-day Eden where Nintendo Game-boy, "Apocalypse Now," and a drug-trafficking Thai militia blend seamlessly into the landscape.”  --Vogue



“A mesmerizing first novel that manages to be many things at once: a smart look at a generation way beyond mere disillusionment, an anti-travelogue to the most exotic of locales, a study in small-group psychology, and a convincing profile in madness.  All this, and the dynamics of a fast-paced thriller....Garland owes as much to Conrad and Golding as he does to Coppola, Stone, and Warner Brothers cartoons, and it’s that wild mix that helps make for a riveting read." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)



“Garland is a wonder; he’s able to write unrelentingly suspenseful, downright hallucinatory action scenes, then balance them with passages of chillingly accurate psychology.  His intensely imagined tale is, on one level, a brilliant update of The Lord o the Flies, and on another, a wholly original and unsettling depiction of psyches shaped by the bewildering messages of Loony Tunes, "Apocalypse Now," Nintendo, and the age-old cult of oblivion. The Beach has cult status scrawled all over it."   --Booklist (starred review)



“This impressive debut by a 26-year-old British writer could well achieve the cult status of William Golding’s nightmarish 1954 classic, Lord of the Flies, with which it shares a theme--the dark side of human nature that’s exposed when the thin veneer of ‘civilization’ is rubbed off through an encounter with raw nature. . . . [T]he author masterfully manages to maintain the suspense as it begins to boil over.  Highly recommended.” --Library Journal



“This 26-year-old Londoner’s atmospheric debut novel, The Beach, may follow Trainspotting across the pond--and wash up on our shores as the Next Big Thing.”   --Time Out



“Amphetamine-paced...Garland is a good storyteller...and Richard’s nicotine-fueled narrative of how the denizens of the beach see their comity shatter and break into factions is taut with suspense.” --Publishers Weekly



“This exceptional first novel by twenty-six-year-old Alex Garland creates a picture of an ideal society gone awry...An action novel that provokes subtle responses, The Beach takes in ideas about man’s inevitable progress from noble savage to social breakdown–the line of thought followed by Golding and by Aldous Huxley in Island–but it is also concerned with the related tradition of nature versus art.” --The Times Literary Supplement



“At only 26, [Alex Garland] has written one of the most gripping and intelligent pieces of fiction I’ve read in a while...Read it and you’ll want to recommend it to everyone you meet.” --The Bookseller



“The Beach is a gripping adventure and also a fascinating jigsaw...Cleanly written, strongly driven, this is a terrific debut.”  --The Times Newspaper



“Lord of the Flies and The Magus lurk at the roots of this novel, but Garland reshapes them with panache into something terrifyingly new.” --Mail on Sunday