On not ticking the boxes
Comparisons with The Beach were inevitable, and I suppose at first I encouraged them. But, I think at this point, it needs to be pointed out that Harvest Season is a very different book than Alex Garland’s debut of 15 years ago. For a start, one of the reasons Harvest was widely rejected by the agency system in London and New York was because it wasn’t enough like Garland’s book – "The only precedent for this is The Beach," wrote one London-based agent, "and so you have to tick all the boxes." I refused, reasoning there was no point in writing a simulacrum of a surprise bestseller set in the backpacker milieu that has yet to inspire another of its kind.
I’d be lying if I said that I hadn’t at times hoped that Harvest might have shared at least at least a little of the success enjoyed by The Beach, an idea that now seems fanciful. Perhaps the London agent was right, after all. But I have no regrets about not ticking the boxes; indeed, I had no choice. Harvest Season mostly wrote itself inspired by events that I witnessed close at hand in Yunnan province, China, and it was always doomed/destined – whichever you please – to be a more "knowing" novel than The Beach. And that, for me, was the point.
That point I’ve written about elsewhere (here is a truncated version courtesy of a 2004 Time special travel edition). It's that The Beach is about the nostalgia – "You should have seen it twenty years ago" – that haunts the contemporary traveler, and the anxiety – "Get there before it’s too late" – that inspires adventure. In Garland’s novel they amount to a premonition that all attempts to secure a slice of paradise are doomed. There’s much banter on the evils of guidebooks, but the brooding threat throughout is other travelers. Obviously, the Beach’s days are numbered from the moment the central character, Richard, arrives with his map. And if the community had been smart they would have voted to either disperse or start charging for the bungalows there and then. The guidebook writer would have turned up in due course – probably around the time the second or third commercial guesthouse opened, and a regular ferry service was up and running and the dope farmers realized they had a ready market on their doorstep.
The one thing the Beach community is unanimous about is that the guided masses are not cool – they may as well never have left home. But the inhabitants of the Beach are not travelers either. They are utopians, a community under siege: from other travelers, from guidebook writers and from the locals – especially the locals. They are a reminder that the modern travel experience is a communal phenomenon, less a personal journey of discovery than about being with the right kind of people in the right kind of places – and what is that but a form of elitism? In other words, perhaps, in their extreme forms, there is less difference between travel and tourism than we generally admit. At its worst, the travel ethos of The Beach is a paranoiac quest for exclusivity, a journey into the wasteland – the wagons drawn up in a circle on the prairie – while the exclusivity of tourism is simply its day rates: if you can afford them, welcome to paradise, sanitized, home to the right kind of people, the unruly local world kept at bay by the security guards and the fences.
The crucial divergence between Harvest Season and The Beach, in other words, is that the characters in Harvest mingle with locals, they know that their tiny slice of paradise is under siege and they are aware that they themselves are as much agents of its destruction as anything else that threatens it. In Harvest, I wanted to write something that reflected the reality of the long-term travelers’ scene, with its refugees from the phony freedom of the West who both welcome its coming collapse and hasten its local arrival through their rootless complaisance. So far this has struck a chord with Harvest’s small readership – and that will have to do for the meantime. The box-tickers denied the book a place in the mainstream and the niche, China-focused publisher that took Harvest on was afraid to announce its agenda too brazenly for fear of attracting the attention of the Chinese authorities. (For a glimpse of what might have been, Ben Owen-Browne’s cover design is above left.)