Beaucoup Bad Shit - Summer Reading #4

If you recall, this was my re-read for the summer. I first read this book in high school, I think I was 15 or 16, and as usual I remembered almost nothing about it except that I lapped up every page. I was curious - the premise is not one that I imagine appealing to me now, but I wondered if my teenage self was really onto something, and a muggy, tropical summer stuck in the city seemed like the perfect time to read about a commune dwelling in a hidden tropical paradise.

The verdict? At about 100 pages, I think I told my better half, "I can't tell if I like it or not, but I am enjoying it." I'm not sure if that actually means anything, but it seemed to make sense at the time. Now, having just finished the book, I can say, yes, I did like it. I liked it a lot. I haven't been able to look away from it and have consumed it within a couple of days.

The backpacker thing is... well, I don't know. I couldn't help but think, isn't this a bit of wild, adolescent, orientalist fantasy? It's hard to argue otherwise, but Garland absolutely knows it. There's a great scene, pretty early on, where Richard (our narrator) and Keaty (another inhabitant of the beach) discuss the notches in their backpacks:

He lit up. "Got a favourite?"
I thought for a couple of moments. "It's a toss up between Indonesia and the Philippines."
"And your worst?"
"Probably China. I had a lousy time in China. I went for five days without talking to one person except when I ordered food in restaurants. Terrible food too."
Keaty laughed. "My worst was Turkey. I was supposed to stay for two months but I left after two weeks."
"And the best?"
Keaty looked around, inhaling deeply, then passed me the joint. "Thailand. This place. I mean. It isn't really Thailand, considering there's no Thais, but... Yeah. This place."

And there aren't any Thais, apart from the armed men who guard the marijuana fields on the other side of the island, and they are really only a plot device. It's a kind of wayward, middle-class, white people fantasy land, and look how horribly wrong it goes. Lord of the Flies, but with career backpackers and a shitload of drugs.

Though I might dislike more or less every single character (including Richard, who starts off as unbelievable, boring on the page but an intrepid adventurer in his own mind), I was completely sucked in, I had to know where they were going to end up (my terrible memory again). I can't resist an unreliable narrator, and Richard is a great example. Mr Duck, Vietnam... the line between reality and pure fantasy is pretty opaque in this universe. And the ending - spoiler alert, kind of - do you think they actually made it back? Can you return to The World, after all that?

A trivial afterthought - I was plagued by the thought that these people spent months, years, on this island without a single book. Isn't that the first thing you would take? Wouldn't you spend months and months re-reading the same novels over again, indiscriminately, until the next run to the mainland brought back some new treasure? Perhaps reading novels not set on the beach would be too great a reminder of the outside world, thoughts of which all characters are eager to banish. If that's the way things roll in this tropical paradise though, you can count me out!