The Beach

The Beach is a fine title for a summer read and being in the middle of summer in the most important part of the world, the south, it would be churlish of me not to read a book devoted to Surfers Paradise.

I actually dug this out of one of the neighbourhood libraries during a walk and for some unknown reason began it immediately. Something about it being a cult book according to the front cover blurb. I know it was a film that I never watched. I have actually enjoyed the book.

GR has 91,345 ratings 4,090 reviews and I have not read one of them nor really read much about this beach book or film that I can recall. So, here's my take.

And that take is that the first-person narrator, Richard, is an unreliable one. My take further is that he is a junkie in a Bangkok hotel room who has occasional earworm and a hell of a lot of junk filled dreams about a guy called Daffy Duck and a trip to an island to hang out on a beach with a bunch of hippy surfer dudes who are all very individualistic except when they're not. (Just like the rest of the western world, in my opinion.) They have a kind of commune that has each individual going to work and once the work is done, they can do what they like be that play computer games, go smoke pot, throw frisbees and play beach footy. But there is no sex. A bunch of 18-year-olds to mid-30's, I presume, make up the people of beach and I would have thought that they would have been rutting like randy rabbits, but no, Richard has no libido, so therefore no one else does. The junkie hallucinations of Richard include, among others, firebombing airfix models, pretending he is in Vietnam and playing hide and seek with armed guards of a marijuana plantation. He has plenty of these dream sequences but as with all junkies it ends all ends in tears and the final hallucination has this insane kind of murderous mayhem that him and his backpacker pals have to escape from via a raft.

As he is coming down from his junk hallucinations his backpacker pals take him back home to England and as he says in the last line, he has the scars. These scars are that backpacking and junk is not all Surfers Paradise and that some in paradise are sufferers, and that may be the moral of the book.

I saw a mouse!
(Where?)
There on the stair!
(Where on the stair?)
Right there!
A little mouse with clogs on
Well I declare!
Going clip-clippety-clop on the stair
Oh yeah!

I enjoyed it a lot I think.

You ever look back at something you read 15 or 20 years ago and have that “A-Ha” moment.
Not the ridiculously good band from the eighties A-Ha, but the mind-altering epiphany moment when you realize that a plot point that was salient to the whole freaking novel zoomed right the hell over your head. Yup, I had one of those.

I read this book when I was right out of high school and entirely in love with the idea of a wild wonderland of paradise filled with gorgeous people and no responsibility. I wanted to see, do, and experience life. I still do, but those ideas are now tempered with age, trust, hopefully, some integrity. When I saw the Leonardo movie when it came out and thought what an incredible view plus the utterly kick-ass soundtrack helped. Anyone like the group VAST? Still one of my favorites. I thought to myself that this was entirely a must read. It will change my life, and maybe I could envelop a little of this wild abandon that I so desperately yearned for.The problem was that when I read the novel, I was left unsettled and feeling dirty. It felt like someone had taken my brain and used it to scour pans for an afternoon. The book was like a beautiful Honey Crisp apple sitting on a shelf, but when you cut into it.The apple had a rotten core filled with maggots. It had not lived up to my fantasies. I felt gypped and thought it poorly written drivel. What was actually weak, was my perspective and understanding of life beyond my hometown. “The Beach” has nothing to do with paradise, but the outlook on what actually constitutes paradise and the darkness in people and the lengths of which one would go to protect it. It is a smart book, and subtle in its narration. Its overall gravitas was not something I could appreciate at the time, but it is something that I can look back on now and understand. One of the key things that garland does it keep the undercurrents flowing within the language of the everyday life of the travelers. He describes the day to day tasks that they need to accomplish; Fishing, farming, and partying. While subtly hinting at the darker parts of the characters psyches. Reminds me of a much less ham-fisted and more eloquent “lord of the Flies,” but for a much older audience. In the end, the characters are scarred both mentally and physically. If you are looking for a book that tears you up inside a bit, look no further. It is worth the second read, especially if you have some life experiences behind you.