The Beach

The Beach is a fine title for a summer read and being in the middle of summer in the most important part of the world, the south, it would be churlish of me not to read a book devoted to Surfers Paradise.

I actually dug this out of one of the neighbourhood libraries during a walk and for some unknown reason began it immediately. Something about it being a cult book according to the front cover blurb. I know it was a film that I never watched. I have actually enjoyed the book.

GR has 91,345 ratings 4,090 reviews and I have not read one of them nor really read much about this beach book or film that I can recall. So, here's my take.

And that take is that the first-person narrator, Richard, is an unreliable one. My take further is that he is a junkie in a Bangkok hotel room who has occasional earworm and a hell of a lot of junk filled dreams about a guy called Daffy Duck and a trip to an island to hang out on a beach with a bunch of hippy surfer dudes who are all very individualistic except when they're not. (Just like the rest of the western world, in my opinion.) They have a kind of commune that has each individual going to work and once the work is done, they can do what they like be that play computer games, go smoke pot, throw frisbees and play beach footy. But there is no sex. A bunch of 18-year-olds to mid-30's, I presume, make up the people of beach and I would have thought that they would have been rutting like randy rabbits, but no, Richard has no libido, so therefore no one else does. The junkie hallucinations of Richard include, among others, firebombing airfix models, pretending he is in Vietnam and playing hide and seek with armed guards of a marijuana plantation. He has plenty of these dream sequences but as with all junkies it ends all ends in tears and the final hallucination has this insane kind of murderous mayhem that him and his backpacker pals have to escape from via a raft.

As he is coming down from his junk hallucinations his backpacker pals take him back home to England and as he says in the last line, he has the scars. These scars are that backpacking and junk is not all Surfers Paradise and that some in paradise are sufferers, and that may be the moral of the book.

I saw a mouse!
(Where?)
There on the stair!
(Where on the stair?)
Right there!
A little mouse with clogs on
Well I declare!
Going clip-clippety-clop on the stair
Oh yeah!