Years after everybody else – or so it seems – I’ve finally read The Beach. Really enjoyed it. Got a little impatient with it in the middle, but couldn’t put it down towards the end.
And yes, it did have s-c-r-e-e-n-p-l-a-y written all over it. I love observing the adaptation process (and I’m starting to adapt a novel into a screenplay), so I’m planning on watching the movie as soon as possible, even though if I trust the reviews, it sounds like I’ll be disappointed.
Reading up on what the british author has been up to since he wrote The Beach, I found this article . This passage made me cringe:
« Publishers, predictably, have been more reluctant to let the bestseller go. Garland recalls how, after he wrote his second novel, The Tesseract, a far more complex and demanding narrative set in Manila, he was sat down by an editor in America who said: « Look, Alex, your strength is young people, backpackers in search of Utopia. Get back to that. And this time, can you make the young people Americans? »
