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I have put these two cult books together because I think they tell basically the same story. A young man goes to a strange island and through a mixture of action and inaction causes (or thinks he causes) its miniature civilisation to disintegrate into barbarism. The outside reflects the inside; there may be madness, there may not. In other ways, however, the two books are very different. Both have ruling mythologies, but they could hardly be further apart: The Magus seems, at times, almost nothing beyond a checklist of world religions and cultures; The Beach pares its outside references down to two sources - films of the Vietnam war and computer games. Fowles lays on the symbolism with an earth-mover; Garland tries to dodge it altogether. They are both unmistakably young men's books: confident, ambitious, thrilling, unaware of quite how cranky they are being. In Fowles' case, this latter seems hard to believe. The Magus is one of the most eccentric books ever written by an Englishman. But the conceit wouldn't succeed as it does without an underlying conviction on the author's part that 'Yes, I've tied it all together!' If Fowles doesn't believe he's found Casaubon's Key to All Mythologies (never recovered in Middlemarch), then he's not far off thinking he's left behind the best description so far of the Door the Key would open. Garland's book is cranky in the obsessiveness with which things are excluded. When people read The Beach in twenty years time, as I think they will, what is likely to strike them most is the bright dreamy feeling of emptiness. (In its opening moments, the film caught something of this: the shot of the Buddha and the bus-stop.) Hemingway said that the things a writer crosses out can still be read in what remains. In writing The Beach Garland has crossed out (or, more accurately, put under erasure) The Magus.
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