pilgrimage, plague and paradise in The Beach

leonardo di caprio is doing a medieval dream vision again

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I’ve read The Beach by Alex Garland twice. Both times I started it in a hostel bar, when I’d promised myself I’d do relevant grad school reading for my medieval studies degrees. Then I have a few weird conversations with a German cokehead and decide I need to read about travel instead. But the instinct to find medievalism in everything I read won’t be quiet, and I discover I’m not doing escapist 90s-Leonardo-Di-Caprio reading after all. Without expecting it, I’m reading a densely multilayered medievalist narrative of dreams within dreams, pilgrimages turning sour and turning into plague pits, and above all, desperation to get back into the garden of Eden.

The grad school professor who taught my paper on Imagined Landscapes would have called it a narrative of the locus amoenus, the sweet and pleasant place we feel must exist if we can fight for it, search for it, yearn for it hard enough. A lot of dream vision poems from the European Middle Ages take us to symbolic landscapes where we orbit around the sweet place we can never quite own, or never quite create, or never quite keep. The Beach’s Richard is a flawed pilgrim groping towards a cultural memory of a more meaningful place, and with it, the idea that he could live a more meaningful life if he found the right key to the right walled garden.

That’s right, baby. It was medievalism all along.

I’m aware I’m reading against the grain again. I don’t think Alex Garland was explicitly tapping into medievalism when he wrote The Beach age twenty six. But The Beach is a book that explicitly and carefully gestures at the past, how it loops and recreates itself. When I’ve done medievalist readings of non-medievalist books before, The Secret History and Call Me By Your Name were both books that looked for the classical past and found the Middle Ages turn up uninvited as the era that arrived after the end of the classical age (read them, they’re good). The Beach isn’t completely different but the past it tries to conjure is more recent. Richard’s obsession with the Vietnam War is present on almost every page of the book.

A lot of the literary criticism on The Beach looks at how it chews the twentieth century and spits it back up — either Joseph Conrad and Heart of Darkness or, in one cool journal article, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. Richard is obsessed with recycling the past. The novel’s opening words are:

Vietnam, me love you long time. All day, all night, me love you long time.

‘Delta One-Niner, this is Alpha patrol. We are on the north-east face of hill Seven-Zero-Five and taking fire, I repeat, taking fire. Immediate air assistance required on the fucking double. Can you confirm?’

Radio static. (UK kindle ebook edition, p.2).

He’s quoting Full Metal Jacket, already re-dreaming the past on the first page (and engaging in some dehumanising orientalism while he’s at it). But he doesn’t know or care much about the distant past.

So he relives the Vietnam War on purpose but he relives the Middle Ages by mistake.