What in the name of the Jolly Green Giant is this? Five star review after five star review on Goodreads, and I'm left wondering if I read a different novel than anyone else. I haven't seen the movie based on this book, so I know I'm not carrying over any impressions from that.

The major characters spend most of their time on the beach (billed as an Edenic paradise, but feels more like Survivor without Jeff Probst) stealing marijuana from the pot farm on the other side of the island and getting high. Perhaps this is the author's idea of Eden; it's not mine.

Richard, the main protagonist (although he was very hard to empathize with), is losing his mind. Why? Who knows? He continually hallucinates a dead guy, who is actually the most interesting character in the story. The author can't distinguish between Thailand in the 1990s and Vietnam during the 1960s, and so muddies up the whole plot with some sort of Vietnam War themes. Why? Who knows?

I'm a firm believer in "the book is always better than the movie", but in this case, I might have to watch Lenny DiCaprio's film, just to see if it's the exception that proves the rule. Ugh.

Probably one of the less interesting books I have read. There was no tension in the tale. The plot was ridiculous - a group of drifters find their Nirvana on a Thai island, the only problem is they share the island with a Thai drug gang (and they are surprised when the gang wants them to leave). The tensions in the group are childish. The only common link between these strangers was some sort of joint love of "The Beach", a love that surpassed any reality including the incredulous decision to leave two of their members to die rather than to seek medical attention.

This is one of those novels that I had been waiting to read for years. Circumstances just always prevented it, even after I'd seen the movie three or four times. I could never find a copy in China where I was living, I'd forget about it each year I came home and wouldn't order it from Amazon. But finally, I picked this up for my Kindle (bootleg, as it doesn't seem to have an official Kindle release) and dove right in. I started it at the perfect time, too: on a bus ride through central Malaysia, on the way to a beach on the east coast of the country!

With all that said...maybe it's just been built up too much for me. Lord of the Flies for Generation X? If this is the modern take on it, then please send me on a time machine back to the Golding days (pun intended) when LotF was released.

Other reviewers are correct about the storyline itself: the book just breezes by. Because I had it on Kindle, I never knew how many pages it was in paperback. I read this book in three days, a feat usually reserved only for Michael Crichton novels and travel books. So I will hand Garland that. The guy can certainly spin a yarn, and there were times when this novel was genuinely exciting, especially en route to the island and beach themselves.

But this novel has so many things that just bugged me in the end, both as a reader and author. On the technical side, Garland's dialogue is just full of adverbs in the quote tags and ellipses in the speech, two things I consider poor writing and have other greater writers to back me up on. The chapters (if you can call them that, as they're more like segments or something, and only last a few pages each, like an early Ellis novel) often have immature or outright pretentious titles. Come to think of it, the novel itself seemed rather juvenile at times, with gratuitous foul language and pop culture references, as well as video game motifs that did not fit in with the book at all (much like the video game sequence in the movie).

Now on to the plot itself. Spoiler alert...

The frequent lapses into Mister Duck hallucinations and sidebars got old for me, fast. And then they just stop the moment he leaves the island? Garland steams ahead to an ending that seems both bizarre and unlikely, with a "blood orgy" of sorts involving a bunch of crazed, stoned (only on weed and palm wine) islanders tearing some tourists' bodies to shreds, then attacking the narrator. Did I mention this is all during Tet? And that a bunch of dope farmers have shown up? It just all seemed contrived and a bit improbable to me. I didn't like the movie's ending much either, but it actually met with less incredulity from me!

But again, I finished this in three days. I couldn't finish one of my own novels in that short a time. Garland can weave a tale, no question about it.

Only a few weeks ago I realized that the Alex Garland who wrote this book was also the Alex Garland who wrote and directed Ex-Machina and turned Annihilation into a film. What a man. Minutes after this epiphany I bought this book and dived straight into a reading experience that I won't forget anytime soon.



Richard is your typical backpacker - young, reckless, and looking for an adventure in East Asia. In Thailand, he is given a map that promises utopia on an unknown island. What he finds there exceeds his wildest dreams, but it doesn't take long for him to realize that heaven on Earth is something that just can't last forever.

n  "If I'd learnt one thing from travelling, it was that the way to get things done was to go ahead and do them. Don't talk about going to Borneo. Book a ticket, get a visa, pack a bag, and it just happens."n

Alex Garland nailed the writing. Rarely have I come across a character so real like Richard is a narrator. The young British dude is exactly what you'd expect him to be. He's just an average dude who isn't old or wise enough to understand everything that is happening to him, he feels a lot, but can't understand everything. He likes to think about the girl he fancies just as much as he likes to play with his Gameboy. Likely to think about himself first and also probably thinks he's a lot smarter than he actually is.

It just doesn't get boring. There just always is something rummaging, something happening. The chapters are short and so engaging that I caught myself multiple times thinking I would just "read one more" and then still find myself reading an hour later. It's also extremely atmospheric. I felt like I was on that beach as I was reading it. (Which gave me summer holiday cravings, unfortunately, considering summer is still a good few months away...)

This was a smart, dark and engaging novel which I have now read twenty years after its first publication. And it holds up, oh it holds up so very well.

Richard is a guy looking for adventure and is hoping to find it backpacking across south east Asia. On his first night he is left a map by a fellow traveller and so his journey to find The Beach begins. The Beach is a local legend and its rumoured that a small select community live there in seclusion away from the outside world however The Beach may not be as idyllic as first thought.

I read the book first then saw the film with a very young looking Leo, the book is better the film does not do it justice 4/5.

My all-time favorite summer read. I wouldn’t ever read this novel in any other season, but almost every summer I get an irrepressible craving for it and then I must re-read it without much delay.

A beach read - in the sense that I like to read this while lying on the shore of some kind of water. In all other senses, it's not a beach read - it's much too dark and haunting and screwed up for that.

The hero of the novel is Richard, an English backpacker tourist (oh well, not a tourist – a traveler) traveling in Thailand. At the beginning of the novel he just arrives in Bangkok, occupies his shabby room in a cheap hostel and sets out to enjoy life. But during the first night of his stay, the man living in the neighboring room commits suicide and leaves a map to Richard which shows the way to a mysterious island, a kind of earthly paradise not yet destroyed by the crowds of tourists. Richard shares his secret map with a French couple living in the same hostel, and the three of them are soon on their way to find the island.

Their adventurous and not exactly safe quest is a success, and although the island they find really feels like Eden at first, of course things take a turn for the worse and soon the island no longer seems the most marvelous place on earth.

I guess simply the word „island” (and all its connotations) strikes some chord in everyone’s soul. An island is everything and the opposite of everything. An island is mysterious, exciting, appealing and somewhat dangerous; an island is quiet, it’s a safe haven, a place where you can hide from everything and everybody. An island is shut off from the rest of the world, and this implies a quiet rest far from the madding crowd and terrible loneliness at the same time. And Alex Garland plays with these duplicate meanings both as regards the concrete description of and the implied „meanings” suggested by the island.

As regards, for instance, the depiction of the island, it is in a national park and it cannot be legally visited by tourists. So it seems that, ironically, the earthly Eden can only be created by illegal means, and it cannot be created at all at a place where other people are present. The heroes of this novel manage to create their own little paradise by ignoring the rules, but their perfect place is in fact not that perfect: one half of the island is ruled by grim and cruel Thai men who are also happy to exploit the opportunities arising from the seclusion of the island, and they cultivate a huge, secret marijuana plantation; and then there are tensions within the traveler community, too.

And as regards the behavior and the emotions of the islanders, there's also a lot of double-meaning here: the people on the island have a good time and they live in a seemingly harmonious community, but, as Richard mentions more than once, the place seems to exert a hypnotic and maddening force on everyone. Stepping on the island, everyone forgets about the outside world, and since they don’t have to fear any consequences, people tend to act irrationally while they carefully repress their fears and the memories of their past.

The collective madness invoked by the island doesn’t spare anyone, least of all Richard. Although he has very good physical and mental abilities and he perceives before anyone else that all is not well on the Beach, he can't free himself from the strange influence of the island, and as time passes, he starts to behave in an exceedingly irrational, irresponsible and inhuman way.

By the way, Richard is quite an intriguing character, and the way others see him is just as interesting. Richard considers himself to be a smart outsider on the island: he only wants adventure, he doesn’t want to tie himself down forever, and even though the others accept him quickly, he keeps his distance from everyone. Due to his standoffishness, he can see what’s going on from an outsider’s point of view, he can see how power is distributed and he can also see where the weak points of the nicely woven island routine are.

But Richard is also the one who is the most fully immersed in every value and ideal the Beach stands for, partly because he seems to be singled out by the man who commits suicide in the beginning and who was one of the three founding fathers of the Beach. This man, Daffy often comes back later to haunt Richard in his dreams (and later even when he is awake), and the other islanders start to consider Richard to be a copy of Daffy because both his appearance and his role on the island gets more and more similar to those of Daffy.

By the way, even though my previous existentialist wonderings might suggest otherwise, The Beach is not a tedious novel at all: the chapters are usually no more than four or five pages long, there are no long descriptions or soul-searching digressions, things happen at a wild pace and there is quite a lot of tension in the story. A typical beach read, looks like. But the novel is also full of unsettling elements, some of which I wrote about earlier: the way mass psychosis and isolation are depicted; the duality (or rather: the split) which characterizes both the island and its inhabitants; or the constant dilemma faced by every single person in the novel: the wish to find and possess unique, unspoiled treasures and the equally strong wish to share the beauty they found with others, which of course means that no unspoiled treasure will remain untouched for long.

And I like it a lot when a novel is like this and offers this kind of choice: I can enjoy it for the story and I can go deeper and look for its hidden themes.
And despite having read this for about 10 times now, I'm still not bored with it and still feel there's more to see.

I never saw the movie version but for some reason I thought this was going to be a completely different type of story than it ended up being. I thought there would be a lot of chases, hiding, and threat of violence. Instead, there was just a little bit of those things and it was much more a story of people enjoying life on a secret island beach that mankind hadn't yet spoiled. It was very well done and has my interest piqued to finally watch the movie.

incredible! i put off reading this as i’ve seen the film and loved it but felt reluctant to read a familiar story. but it was sooooo engaging. i stayed up for the last three hours to finish it because it was just so enjoyable. really funny but also super dark and what a great story. you really feel as though the narrator is telling a true story and the characters and plot are so realistic but somehow so surreal. this is the most exciting book i’ve read in ages

This was a pretty good book! Very impressive for a debut novel. It is such an idealist's story, of having the perfect paradise and wanting to keep it untainted. I loved the suspense & twists & turns. The ending knocked my socks off! I will definitely read it again. I watched the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio but it did the book absolutely no justice whatsoever.

пані та панове, це не зовсім відгук на книжку про тайський пляж, це сумбурний стос складнопідрядної рефлексії, спричиненої творчістю Алекса Ґарленда. буде неймдропінг та легкі спойлери до інших робіт цього пана, а також цілковите нехтування правилами побудови читабельного тексту. я вас попередив.

ну що ж, любі друзі, виявляється, Алекс Ґарленд все своє творче життя фанатіє від Джозефа Конрада. “Пляж” заведено порівнювати з “Володарем мух”, бо це ж дуже зручно: типу, острів, типу, формування таборів, типу, ворожнеча та кровопролиття, всі ці штуки, але я не можу дивитись на нього інакше, ніж як на відносно сучасну інтерпретацію “Серця пітьми”. бо чим ще може бути історія Річарда, twenty-something бекпекера, що прямує на секретний пляж (де балом заправляє одна там харизматична лідерка) й потроху плавиться кукухою в процесі. що це, як не стрибок віри в безодню та відносно вдала спроба опору темряві, що ховається всередині кожної людини? та тут навіть наративний прийом схожий: роман побудований як спогади тіпа, що пережив травматичні події. чому все життя (слідкуйте за руками, тут я продовжую думку з першого речення другого абзацу)? бо в останньому його фільмі станом на квітень 2024 року, “Повстання штатів”, один із лейтмотивів мало чим відрізняється від конрадівської класики: влада розбещує, треба мати неабияку силу волі, аби протистояти спокусі її узурпувати. і це я зараз не про типу-трампа, а про кріпового вояку в червоних окулярах (Джессі Племонс, я тебе боюсь обожнюю). якщо так подумати, то Ґарленд чіпав Конрада і в “Разрабах”, бо його Форест — вилитий Куртц: напівбог, що конструює навколо себе вигаданий світ, ще й має відповідний demeanor: сумну щенячу пику та тихесенький голос. було це й в “Анігіляції”: буквально, подорож в невідоме, де зіткнуться дві різні культури: людська та інопланетна, і ніхто не повернеться додому таким, як був (та знаю я про Лема та Стругацьких, одне одному не заважає). попаяні вояки, що організували свій хиткий мікровсесвіт посеред хаосу, та навіть не помічають, що несуться просто в пекло, були в нього ще в “28 днів потому”. ну, а якщо тема геть інша, то він хоча б свою героїню Марлоу назве (тільки в оригіналі зайву e десь знайшов). так, це я зараз про “Чоловічий рід”. кароч, нитки “Серця пітьми” та “Апокаліпсису сьогодні” як найвідомішої його інтерпретації стирчать майже звідусюди. бляха, може, тому мені так подобаються його роботи? але це питання не до вас, я задам його своєму психотерапевту (якому психотерапевту?). отже, вправу з притягування різних там сичів та пугачів за вуха завершено, можна видихнути.

на особистому рівні цей текст — ще й ностальгійний флешбек, хоч мені й довелося побачити Ко Панган зовсім іншим: Ґарленд пише, що вже станом на 1996 рік острів був зіпсований туристами. от пихатий чорт, гг. нічого не знаю, у 2019 все було норм, але я й не планував вештатись канабісовими плантаціями та шукати загублені пляжі в хащах, про подібні речі краще в книжечці почитати. і той, кіно гірше. ваш, к. о. (але Pure Shores все одно послухаю)

5 stars. Mesmerising - I wish I’d read this sooner. Dark, intellectual, tense and witty. Amazing writing which felt really to the point and not too descriptive, yet I could picture everything in such detail. Perfect chapter lengths too. I was so gripped by this, I couldn’t put it down and was sad when it ended.

I have never watched the film but after reading this book I'm itching too!

I could have read this book in one sitting given the chance. I was so drawn into it that when I put the book down I was always disappointed to find myself in my living room rather than on the beach. I can see why this book was a big hit.

Well written, great storyline!