Back to The Beach: A Lost Interview with Alex Garland

Travel Interviews: Twenty years ago, Frank Bures chatted with a young Alex Garland about his travel novel, The Beach. Bures recently unearthed the interview--a time capsule from the dawn of global backpacking.

07.23.19 | 7:49 PM ET

In 1999 I was working in the literature section at Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon, when I came across an intriguing title. The novel was called The Beach, and it was about backpackers in Thailand. It immediately sucked me in with its ripping narrative about young, aimless travelers looking for secret places that no one else knew about, and finding more than they’d been looking for.

When I finished the book, I did some browsing and found that the author, Alex Garland, had a new book out called The Tesseract, and that he would soon be coming to Powell’s for a reading. Meanwhile, The Beach was being made into a movie in Thailand starring Titanic heartthrob Leonardo DiCaprio. [I also came across a story about a young backpacker named Rolf Potts trying to infiltrate the movie set. Potts later told me about an exciting new literary travel website called World Hum. Side note: Potts and World Hum co-founder Jim Benning recently chatted about the 20th anniversary of The Beach on Potts’ podcast.]

After Garland’s reading, I sat with him in the bar of Heathman Hotel and set my microcassette recorder on the table between us. We talked for an hour or two. As a beginning writer, I had little idea how to interview anyone, but Garland was funny, thoughtful, sincere and humble about his work. We were about the same age. He seemed much older.

I didn’t know what to do with the interview, so it went in a box. I held on to the tape through five moves (including a year in Thailand) and two decades. In those same years, Garland shifted from books to movies, writing screenplays for films like 28 Days Later, Dredd and Never Let Me Go. Recently he transitioned again, this time to directing (and writing) films like Ex Machina and Annihilation.

The interview has always felt like a kind of turning point to me. Recently, I dusted it off and listened to it for the first time since that night in Portland. The sound was terrible. The bar was too loud. Some of my questions were embarrassingly naive. (We spent way too much time talking about Shakespeare in Love.) But we also talked about Ambrose Bierce, Shiva Naipaul, and The Larry Sanders Show.

The interview exists now as a time capsule, a window on the dawn of global backpacking. The conversation is also a glimpse into the young mind of one of the most talented storytellers of our generation as he talks about the war in Yugoslavia, good people doing bad things, and the problem with comparing The Beach to Lord of the Flies.

Frank Bures: What you think of all of the comparisons people make between The Beach and Lord of the Flies.

Alex Garland: It’s not a comparison I like, really. I feel it’s lazy. I get it, I understand why it’s made. And it’s a book I respect a great deal. Lord of the Flies is one of those books you’re given to read at school at a certain age—14, 15 years old. It’s a classic text they’ll teach you in English [class]. I wouldn’t say I haven’t been influenced by it, or I don’t have a debt to it or anything like that. But I don’t like the comparison because I feel it’s a misunderstanding of Lord of the Flies and also of The Beach, to an extent.

Lord of the Flies would have been a given to any of the characters in The Beach. That is to say most of them would have read it, or been aware of the ideas behind it. Lord of the Flies is saying, if you take a bunch of innocents, a bunch of kids, and put them in an isolated context, which is separate from larger society, they will start to behave in a way that echoes society, and the same sorts of tensions will develop. That is the central theme. Either they were repeating what they’d learned, or it’s central within the human setup, that you’ll begin to create these sorts of patterns, and innocence will be lost, etc., etc.

The characters in The Beach would treat that as a given. and they’re not trying to get away from that. And the book isn’t really about the loss of Eden in that way. Really, it’s just a very old-fashioned morality story. It’s not so much saying bad things will come out of this innocent situation. It’s asking: At what point does doing bad things for a good reason make you a bad person? At what point does Richard [the main character]—who is always, in a funny way, acting with intentions that are reasonable or understandable—at what point do those things make him morally bad?

I feel those are two very separate things. The people in The Beach have a generalized awareness of these issues, but they also blind themselves to them. If people are going to say this book takes its cues from another book, that’s fine, but they’d better get the right book. And for me, that book is Empire of the Sun, by J.G. Ballard.

There’s a highly symbolic scene in Lord of the Flies where the kids are attacking the pig. And it has these colonial overtones, about killing the last vestige of civilization in them, and their descent into savagery. In The Beach, I was wondering if you have any thoughts about the scene where they are attacking the corpses of the dead backpackers who tried to reach the beach, and what those corpses might represent?

Right. In a way, it’s a good parallel to make. because in Lord of the Flies, there’s a symbolic relevance for that scene. In The Beach, that is a character-driven narrative in resonance and intention. The reason they’re attacking the corpses is because of what the corpses represent, which is the threat to their secrecy. They represent the destruction of their way of life. And it’s about how fiercely people will protect their way of life. It’s a manifestation of their frame of mind, essentially. And a lot of the book is about justifying the frame of mind that they get themselves into. Not morally justifying, but justifying in terms of the reader, how it is that people could end up in such an extreme mental condition. And it’s partly about how easy it is to end up in that condition. It doesn’t take a lot.

The mental tricks we play on ourselves.

Right. It’s always struck me that a slight shift of context can change people enormously. And I don’t think it was an accident that at the time I was writing The Beach, the War in Yugoslavia was going on. It was strange the resonances of the Second World War and some of the things that happened there.

Like what?

One of thing that the Yugoslavian war reconfirmed to people in Europe is how context, and horror in that context, will change virtually anybody. You’ll get someone who is basically a decent guy from a village in Yugoslavia, who happens to belong to a particular ethnic denomination, and given a certain context, and a certain situation, that guy will turn into a mass murderer. And not just a mass murder, a torturer, the most sinister and terrifying and bloodthirsty kind of person. And when that context resolves itself, he’ll suddenly be left feeling like, “What has just happened to me? What have I done?” During the War Crimes Tribunal, you see these guys who were sitting in the dock, being tried as they absolutely should be tried for crimes they’d committed. And not with all of them, but you just saw these shattered, destroyed men who couldn’t really understand how this thing had happened to them. And I hated what they’d done, but I felt a funny kind of sympathy for them. Because I thought, this is what people do when they are put in this terrible situation. They do terrible things.

When you were traveling, did you find yourself in that sort of situation, where you were changing because of a group dynamic?

Yes and no. When I first started doing it, I found that I incorrectly reset some of my moral values in a funny kind of way. The Beach was slightly written out of disgust with the way I’d done that. But it was part of sort of a subculture that I wasn’t really aware of in many ways. Certainly, one of the reasons I wrote the book is that I’m very mistrustful and slightly frightened of groups of people. And whenever I hear an opinion expressed by a group of people, my immediate instinct is to be very wary of it, and to try to step away. Even if academically I agree with what the group is saying, I just want to get the fuck away from it. Because there’s something infectious about the group. And even if you, loosely speaking, agree with what the group is saying, you’ll find yourself compromising more subtle positions. And it’s in the nature of compromising small positions, that it can have a large, knock on effect down the line.

Like the witch hunt, when you’re outside of it. I was reading through some interviews, and you said drawing cartoons sort of informs your writing. I was wondering if you can explain that.

It influences the way I write in two ways. My first experience with constructing a narrative was with a comic strip. And I think probably the first early lessons, they stay with you in one way or another. I retain a story-board-like element in the way I write. It’s almost like you get camera angles, and you see a close and then a panning shot, and an establishing shot. It sometimes gets described in the reviews as cinematic. It isn’t really cinematic. It’s comic strips. Comic strips bear a resemblance to cinema, so there is this kind of indirect connection.

What’s the second way?

One thing is that it’s made me a big fan of story. It made me comfortable with putting the emphasis on narrative. By and large, comic strips are explicitly just stories. I love stories, and a good story has value in itself. To be artistically worthy, it doesn’t necessarily need anything else beyond the story. A good story is artistically valid. If it’s a good story. I think personally I like stories and themes, but I make a big effort to convey my theme only via the narrative. I try to exclude anything that interferes with the storyline, such as an authorial voice, or sentences that try to draw attention to their construction.

But to tell you the truth, a lot of that is to do with being British, because there’s a huge school of British writers that is a lot to do with making sure we are constantly aware of what sort of games they can play with language.

Personally, when I read a book, I don’t want to think about the author. I might want to think about him later. But ideally, I just want to think about the story and the characters, and subsequently think about the themes. You’ll have the themes sort of infect your unconscious. But in an unknown way, and then later think about them.

Right at the end of the line, I want to think about the author, if at all. I’m a huge fan of Salinger and J.G. Ballard and Varlam Shalamov. And I know nothing about them. I don’t know when they were born. Shalamov I think is dead. The others I think are still alive. But I couldn’t care less if they’re alive or dead. All I’m interested in is reading the book.

I noticed The Beach takes a lot of images from popular culture. Things that have become global phenomena: Nintendo, the Vietnam War, video games. But The Tesseract doesn’t have almost any. Was that something you did consciously?

It wasn’t conscious at all. In one of the answers to a question at the reading, I said I feel uncomfortable with some of the praise I get that I don’t feel I deserve. And one of the things I thought I didn’t deserve was the sort of documenting of pop culture. The reason there are pop-culture references in The Beach is because I’m writing from the point of view of a 19-year-old Westerner, and so he grows up around video games and pop culture, as I did. So if you’re writing from his perspective, it’s going to be included in the narrative, because it belongs there.

In The Tesseract, there isn’t that much stuff there because if you’re writing from the point of view of a Filipino woman in her early 30s who is remembering a love affair she had when she was 15, pop culture isn’t really going to play a part. It’s irrelevant.

What do you think about people saying The Tesseract is more literary than The Beach?

Well The Beach was, in intention, a literary novel, if you define literary as a novel that has subtext and themes and arguments beyond the narrative. By intention, The Beach is a literary novel. It may not read like a literary novel. But it’s sort of like, what are you going to do? you write your book, and you want it to be a literary novel. And you’re trying to write a book with themes and subtext and things like that. But do you have to write in a way that doesn’t have the voice of a 19-year-old Westerner and all the sort of enthusiasms that that guy is going to have? No. Of course not.

I don’t know about in America, but certainly from the point of view in England, what I feel gets defined as literary and non-literary is nauseating. The great defining thing, on a yearly basis of what is literary and nonliterary, is the Booker Prize. And when I look at the books that are chosen year after year for that, I just think, what sort of books are these? It’s like the little old British literary elite, patting each other on the back once a year. And anything that isn’t written by them isn’t literary. Or anything that doesn’t aspire to be written like them isn’t literary. If you come up and make a self-conscious attempt to write like them, you’ll get included in the club. Well, fuck that. It’s ridiculous.

Would you have preferred a quiet start to your career, that didn’t bring all the commercial pressure and high expectations?

That’s a complicated question. In some ways yes, and in some ways no. I think that you are in a better situation, you’re more likely to have a long-lasting career if you start quietly and build it up. The chances are you’ll still be around in 10, 15, 20 years’ time, writing books that people will read, and that publishers will give you publishing deals for, and so on and so forth.

Having said that, right at the moment, I need to pay my mortgage, and I would not have the flat that I have if The Beach hadn’t sold a bunch of copies and the film deal hadn’t happened. And the critical praise I’ve had—apart from being gratifying, and it is gratifying—I read reviews and I take them seriously, because I think they’re opinions, and some of them are well-argued and reasonable—I feel like all of that gives me a flat, and I feel lucky to have that.

I’ve got a friend who’s a writer and he’s just about to published his third book, and when I look at him, I think he’s in a very, very good position. And I think he’s got a better shot at longevity than I do. I think if you build it up, you’ve got a better shot a long career.

But I don’t know if I’d change anything. I feel lucky that I got The Tesseract written, and it’s come out and it’s had good reviews and it’s sold well. And I figure, if The Tesseract had bombed, I’d be in a lot of trouble right now. As it is, I’ve got another shot. I’m allowed to write another book. If The Tesseract had bombed, I feel like it would be over.

You wrote two books for yourself. You put your heart into them. Now, in the back of your mind, are you worried about reviews when you’re writing?

Two things about that. One is that I haven’t just had good reviews. I’ve had really bad reviews. I’ve had people say “This book sucks. It’s no good. This guy can’t write.” He’s pretentious, or inept or whatever. So I feel like I can survive bad reviews, because that happened already. When you are settling down to write, you’re basically just on your own. I’m sure you know that. Very quickly, whatever other influences might be out there sort of rattling you, you come up against the same sorts of problems you’ve been coming up against since you started. Which is just that writing is pretty tough. I know that now, having written The Tesseract without pressure. I realize that whether you’ve got pressure or not, it’s still going to be a struggle. And ultimately, when you’re sitting on your own, you have two things to worry about. One is am I going to get good reviews. And the other is: “Is this paragraph any good or not? And what can I do to make it better?” The review thing becomes completely irrelevant compared to how much you’re struggling writing that paragraph.

So you think you can push that aside?

I think I can now. If I hadn’t already had The Tesseract written, I think that would be difficult.

You’d worry that you were just lucky.

Exactly. I do think I’m lucky. But I feel more comfortable about being lucky. And to an extent you make your own luck.

What’s next?

I knew that I didn’t want to immediately write another book set in Southeast Asia. But I say I want to write a book set in Europe, just to answer that question. Because I get asked that all time. So I just say it. But the true answer is the one I gave at the reading. What tends to happen is that you answer truthfully in readings, and you bend the truth in an interview. Because in an interview it’s sort of set in stone and your publisher is going to see it. You know what I mean? So if I said to my publisher, “To tell you the truth, I don’t have a fucking clue what I’m going to write next,” they might get a bit worried.

***

Frank Bures is a long-time contributor to World Hum. His story, Test Day, was included in The Best American Travel Writing 2004. His piece, How to Use a Squat Toilet, won a Lowell Thomas Award in 2007. He is the author of the author of The Geography of Madness: Penis Thieves, Voodoo Death and the Search for the Meaning of the World’s Strangest Syndromes (2016) and editor of Under Purple Skies: The Minneapolis Anthology (2019).



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