The Beach

Without trying all that hard I can make Alex Garland's cult novel serve as a metaphor for my own experience of finding and then losing the dotcom Eden: A small band of us with a set of broadly compatible ideals discovered − by luck really − an unspoiled niche in the otherwise bespoiled business world that would allow people like us to strive (and thrive) in apparently protective isolation.

We were committed to our commercial idyll and to each other, and for approximately eighteen months it felt rather like employment paradise. But beyond the founding group, each new arrival − whatever their various personal qualities as individuals − somehow represented a degradation of this utopia, until 1998 when Johnny-come-latelies with an entirely different outlook and agenda were arriving by the boatload.

The Canadian authors of The Rebel Sell: How the Counterculture Became the Consumer Culture see The Beach as illustrative of the delusion at the heart of countercultural philosophy: "Travellers, especially those who are most in search of the exotic, notoriously spend a great deal of time with each other, not interacting with the locals...the pleasures of apparently exotic travel are sullied by the realisation that the ongoing search for authentic connection by escaping modernity is not a solution to the problem, but its cause."

As a critique of backpacker culture it works better than the Hostel movies, but not that much better really. Both are stand-out examples of plots best remembered for their set-up rather than their payload. And when it came to adapting the book for the screen John Hodge took Garland's less than satisfying second half pickle and made one of his own, re-jigging some of the central relationships and easing up on the final apocalypse, but still not really finding a narrative course capable of amplifying the messages one can readily deduce from the story outline alone.

And as a literary experience I found it uneven. If in places it seems that Garland has a solid knack for dialogue, for characterisation, for imaginative and evocative writing, in others it seems to have deserted him completely. The scene where Richard and his cherms swim the gap between two islands is one of the most bizarrely non-descriptive in the novel.

Yet it does have plenty of ideas and incidents that take me back to my own backpacking days: crazy long-haired yanks, sordid wooden hotels, Vietnam fantasies in the rainforest, unrequited love, well signposted moral grey-areas and thrown-together, multinational groups seeking affirmation in the flames of a beach bonfire. But can I believe that a bunch of Thai marijuana farmers would risk mass-culling western travellers in order to protect their secret plantations. Not really. And where are the Sloanes?

For me the most resonant moment was more exquistely realised in the film than in the book. For on Caye Caulker in Belize, late into the evening of my twenty-first birthday, an English volunteer teacher that I found charming on all sorts of levels suggested that we leave the Black Coral bar and go for a swim. I concurred and she led me to a miniature bay on the east-facing side of the atol where soon found ourselves swishing our arms through a phosphorescent sopa de mariscos.

My forty-year-old self now looks back with utter dismay on the reticence of my twenty-one year old self, who through a combination of moral rectitude, loyalty to a companion and overall inexperience, let slip a romantic opportunity that had really been served up to him on a plate. (Perhaps the plankton bath had also unnerved me.) Needless to say Leonardo de Caprio's Richard tucks straight in, but in the novel the character fails to have his way with either Françoise or its altogether more sinister version of Sal. Indeed Garland's Françoise is but a placeholder for every young Englishman's idealised French teenage nymphette and Hodge went some way to rectifying this with the part he crafted for Virginie Ledoyen.