Tuesday, Jul 8, 2008
An interview with Alex Garland, bestselling and occasionally controversial author of "The Beach."
Feb 11, 2000 | There was something comforting about the suggestion by Alex Garland that we should meet outside a tube station in London. Pretentious is something he certainly isn't, despite his meteoric rise to fame through the success of his first book, "The Beach" -- a story of backpackers in Thailand who set up an idyllic community on a remote island that ends in "Lord of the Flies"-style disaster.
Published only four years ago when Garland was 26, it has gained cult status -- 700,000 copies have been sold in the U.K., and nearly 300,000 in the U.S. -- and has been translated into 27 languages. And Friday the film adaptation starring Leonardo DiCaprio opens in theaters across the country.
Garland's second book, "The Tesseract," has also become a bestseller. Any author facing such affirmation should be riding the crest of a wave. Any man described as "the man to have" by Vogue would also be justly pleased. What I met was a man who seemed neither excited, confident nor vain. With slightly more weight than in his moody publicity pictures, he looks less pinup and more real. His good looks are rather Mediterranean, tempered by a beard that I can't help interpreting as a disguise.
How has the success of your book "The Beach" and now the commercial hype of the movie affected you?
The success that comes from my books is not something I feel very comfortable with. Past a certain point you have to accept the idea that the success is a lot to do with the timing and luck and that divorces you from it massively. There are aspects of it that I haven't got used to at all. But I've enjoyed some parts of it massively. It relates to the same reason I did a lot of backpacking -- partly for the experience -- it's something to tell my grandkids. It's a weird chain of events to have in your life. I find that very rewarding.
What do you think about travel now?
I like that question because it's very blunt but it leads to such a complicated set of responses. I think in "The Beach," I tried to get across an argument that wasn't polarized -- it wasn't saying it's all good and it wasn't saying it's all bad -- it was saying there's a middle road of common sense that hopefully the book suggests. I think I still feel a version of that. I still really enjoy going away and I do it a lot; in fact I do it more [now] than I ever did really. I went to Asia twice last year and I'm going to Sudan in March to write a short story for UNICEF, which they'll publish in a book with others.
Is Asia still your favorite destination?
Yes, probably.
Do you feel sad going back there -- especially if you see bits that you like gradually being bulldozed?
It depends what happens to the destination and it depends on what you feel about change. Manila has changed massively in the 11 years since I've been going there. And some of the changes I think are a pity and some are good. I generally don't feel depressed when I see a McDonald's has opened in some Southeast Asian town because it seems like part of a stabilizing process to me -- that it's as much about jobs and livelihoods as anything else.
What about tourism in Thailand? Do you think the film will be destructive?
I have absolutely no idea what the effects of the film will be. But on a separate side point, I am wary of viewing a place like Thailand as something delicate that will get stamped on by the West, because it removes any sort of notion of Thailand being complicit in what happens to it. To represent Thailand as a poor disempowered country is misleading. It goes out of its way to attract all sorts of tourism, and the people who are really disempowered in Thailand are the poor -- which obviously make up the majority of the country. But there's a massive middle class there and there's also a ruling elite. They make decisions about their country, as they should, and the effects of tourism are only partly the responsibility of the West and of backpackers. I don't feel comfortable writing Thailand out of that equation.
Has writing "The Beach" changed your perspective on global tourism? Are you positive about it?
No I'm not. But I'm not entirely against it either. The thing about tourism is just that it's incredibly powerful. It's like a gun and it's incredibly easy to be irresponsible with it. And the speed of the impact that tourism can have on a place can be quite breathtaking. It doesn't take years, it takes months. That's how quickly it works. And it can be quite a bleak thing to witness. But I just think there's a toned-down version of it. I don't think tourism, for example, does any damage to Britain. Here we simply benefit from it -- it keeps people employed, brings in a lot of money, is part of the profile of our country. So if a third world country can get some kind of relationship with tourism that approximates the one we have here, then it seems absolutely fine.
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