When on the island he kills a small shark, its death throes appear to him as “something out of a comic-book fight”. He was the kind of child who built Airfix models, stuffed them full of cotton wool, doused them in lighter fuel, set them on fire and then threw them from the highest window in his house.

He was not the kind of child who just built Airfix model aircraft.

And there are serpents: the drug lords who control the huge marijuana patch on the far part of the island. There are alpha males, chest-beating and jockeying for position. Gradually, of course, Eden is revealed to have the dynamics of the playground. Having first made the mistake of copying the map for two American backpackers he has formed a casual acquaintance with (an act that will later have horrific consequences), Richard and his two new friends – Étienne and his lover Françoise – find the beach and the small community of travellers who have been living there for several years in a small, self-sufficient community that, at first, resembles Eden. The premise was simple and cleanly executed: in Bangkok a young traveller is given a map to a hidden beach by an older traveller, Daffy, who then kills himself. Garland’s narrator Richard arrived at the Britpop feast like the Ancient Mariner, had Coleridge’s cipher been raised on Platoon, The Simpsons and Nintendo. The Beach is a recollection told in the first person (“Thinking about Thailand tends to make me angry, and until I started writing this book, I tried not to do it”) and it is peppered with cataphoric references (“Considering that two of them ended up dead and the other ended up nuts, I feel bad that their names mean so little to me”): tropes of horror fiction that conspire to create a feeling of dread, a warning about what is to come.

(Enragingly to me, at any rate: I was struggling with the outline for my own first novel, whose eventual publication was still nearly a decade in the future.) You have to go to … ” I was moving among the backpacking, one‑upping, (mainly rich) young things that Alex Garland would skewer in his fiction debut a few years later, when he was, enragingly, just 26 years old. They’d be tanned, unshaven and stoned and they’d be saying things like, “No, man, Koh Samui is over. I remember meeting them, at parties in Notting Hill flats, in nightclubs, at raves. I n my mid-20s, in the early 1990s, I moved to west London from Scotland.

The beach read book