The beach

Garland, a British writer in his twenties, captures all the cynicism and disjuncture of his generation in his gripping first novel. Richard, his narrator, is a chain-smoking wanderer who has discovered that "escape through travel works," especially travel in Asia. Not alone in his feeling of alienation from the orderly world of family and work, he quickly makes the acquaintance of fellow disaffected travelers in Bangkok, including a guy who goes by the name of Daffy Duck. Mister Duck (as Richard calls him) bequeaths a carefully drawn map to our hero just before committing suicide, and soon Richard and a young French couple he haphazardly befriends are on their way to the Beach, a forbidden island paradise. Bold and naive, they barely survive their journey, or the shock of discovering that the island highlands are covered with fields of marijuana guarded by vicious Thai commandos and that the Beach is home to a motley collection of pot-smoking Euronomads enmeshed in their own sinister society. 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 Lord of 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. --Donna Seaman

Garland's amphetamine-paced first novel plunks some young European expats down on a remote island in the Gulf of Thailand. There, tired of the prepackaged experience available to them in the West, they try to create their own paradise. The narrator is an Englishman named Richard. Born in 1974, he has grown up on popular culture and is a fan of video games and Vietnam War movies. While staying at a creaky Bangkok guest house, he finds a carefully drawn map left by his angry, doped-up neighbor, a suicide who called himself Mr. Daffy Duck. The map points the way to a legendary beach where, it's rumored, a few favored international wanderers have settled. Richard's new friends, Etienne and Françoise, convince him to help them find the island. But Richard, inspired by sudden anxiety about Etienne, gives a copy of the map to two American backpackers-an act that later haunts him as keenly as the ghost of Mr. Duck. Richard and his French companions find the island: half is covered by a marijuana plantation patrolled by well-armed guards; the other half consists of a gorgeous beach and forest where a small band of wandering souls live a communal life dominated by a gently despotic woman named Sal. At times, Garland seems to be trying to say something powerful about the perils of desiring a history-less Eden. But his evocations of Vietnam, Richard's hallucinatory chats with the dead Mr. Duck and various other feints in the direction of thematic gravity don't add up to much. Garland is a good storyteller, though, 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, even if the bloody conclusion offers few surprises. 150,000 first printing; $150,000 ad/promo; foreign rights sold in the U.K., Germany, Holland, Italy. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

A mesmerizing first novel, already a hit in the author's native England, 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. The narrator, Richard, adrift in ``backpacker land'' (i.e., Southeast Asia), craves ``something different,'' the ultimate travel spot unspoiled by his own kind. Like most of the travelers he meets, Richard's bored with the usual dissonance of Thailand and Burma. His problems are solved (or just begin) when a crazed suicidal Scotsman, his neighbor in a Bangkok flophouse, leaves him a map to a new Eden, a beach on an uncharted island off-limits to tourists. With a French couple who also crave new thrills, Richard begins his journey ``in country,'' his lingo drawn from the Vietnam War as filtered through TV and movies. A gruelling trek brings the three to ``the Beach,'' a remote strip of perfect nature reached after forging a dense jungle, crossing a marijuana field guarded by armed natives, and then jumping into a 40-foot waterfall. Once there, the three are welcomed by the strange commune of international drifters who have nurtured their compound over six years, surviving on spearfishing, local produce, and lots of pot. Like characters from an adult Lord of the Flies, the 30 or so inhabitants polarize into groups, and chaos descends after a series of ugly incidents. As nutty as Richard seems to grow, the commune's leader is even crazier in her desire to preserve a glorious isolation. The horrors accrue as the moral ambiguity deepens. 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. (First printing of 150,000; $150,000 ad/promo; Book-of-the-Month Club/Quality Paperback Book Club selection)

Garland's amphetamine-paced first novel plunks some young European expats down on a remote island in the Gulf of Thailand. There, tired of the prepackaged experience available to them in the West, they try to create their own paradise. The narrator is an Englishman named Richard. Born in 1974, he has grown up on popular culture and is a fan of video games and Vietnam War movies. While staying at a creaky Bangkok guest house, he finds a carefully drawn map left by his angry, doped-up neighbor, a suicide who called himself Mr. Daffy Duck. The map points the way to a legendary beach where, it's rumored, a few favored international wanderers have settled. Richard's new friends, Etienne and Francoise, convince him to help them find the island. But Richard, inspired by sudden anxiety about Etienne, gives a copy of the map to two American backpackers-an act that later haunts him as keenly as the ghost of Mr. Duck. Richard and his French companions find the island: half is covered by a marijuana plantation patrolled by well-armed guards; the other half consists of a gorgeous beach and forest where a small band of wandering souls live a communal life dominated by a gently despotic woman named Sal. At times, Garland seems to be trying to say something powerful about the perils of desiring a history-less Eden. But his evocations of Vietnam, Richard's hallucinatory chats with the dead Mr. Duck and various other feints in the direction of thematic gravity don't add up to much. Garland is a good storyteller, though, 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, even if the bloody conclusion offers few surprises. 150,000 first printing; $150,000 ad/promo; foreign rights sold in the U.K., Germany, Holland, Italy. (Feb.)