on the line: alex garland

Jan Daley finds the hunky author of The Beach in the US top 100 showbiz folk, has a cartoonist for a Dad and won't be going near a beach this summer You have recently been named as one of the top 100 people in the world by the US showbiz magazine, Entertainment Weekly. How does that make you feel?

"It's quite flattering actually. The real flattering stuff is when I get a good review for one of my books. That makes me feel straightfowardly good. It is the least complicated response I have."

You have become very famous and you are still in your twenties. Are you enjoying it?

"No, it's not something I take very seriously. It's a certain type of fame but it is not real fame. My face is perceived to be familiar, but actually, it's not. I hardly ever get recognised in the street. I think writers have a clear ceiling of what sort of fame they can achieve unless they go down the Salman Rushdie route and appear on Have I Got News For You. It's not something I am going to do and I have no plans to move to Hollywood just yet."

Your dad is Nicholas Garland the political cartoonist. Do you think a lot of your creativity came from him?

"Yeah, I grew up among comic strips and I learnt to draw by copying him. I used to draw a lot of comic strips which have a narrative and a dialogue. In those terms, it did not seem like such a big jump to writing novels."

Your family supported you when you were writing The Beach didn't they?

"I was living with my mum at the time. They were a bit worried because I had actually written a book before The Beach and writing is a lottery. There's just a huge random element in there and I think my parents understood that better than I did."

It must have felt great when a publisher bought the rights.

"Yes, The Beach got rejected by quite a few publishers. Publishers get it wrong and they also get it right. Whatever else you you can say about The Beach, and some people say it's a lousy book, it ended up making the publishers money."

What are working on now?

''I have just finished the first draft of The Tesseract screenplay for the BBC. I've seen a figure for my fee quoted in a national newspaper and it is wildly inaccurate. I don't know where these figures get created. I've had two books that I could sell the film rights. I didn't sell either of them to the studio system. What I think is The Beach could have got sold to a big studio but it was much more open to getting screwed up by the Hollywood system."

You chose Danny Boyle of Trainspotting fame to make the movie of The Beach but he still had to make concessions to Hollywood.

"I don't agree that he made any concessions."

Di Caprio?

"Why is he a concession? He is an incredibly good actor and it doesn't make any difference that he is American. While I was writing the book, the nationalities were irrelevant to the extent that I used to confuse people's nationalities. I didn't care whether X or Y was French, Belgian, American. The French couple may seem very French, but I think they could be Spanish. Bugs is South African. Say he was Israeli, so what?"

Seeing as you wrote it, I can't argue with you.

"I see what you are talking about and the person who is most like his nationality is Richard. He refers to things in an English way. The thing that would have bothered me I if they had made all the characters American. That would be problematic but if they had a spread of nationalities, it's fine. I'm instinctively against nationalism. I get very irritated when people start talking about how great their country is."

Have you seen The Matrix yet?

"It was alright. I enjoyed it but I was really looking forward to it and when you are looking forward to something that much, the film is always a disappointment. But there were bits when it was just great. I loved the helicopter crashing into a building and the glass rippling out. I thought that was just brilliant."

The Matrix is a Generation X film. You have been described as a spokesperson for Generation X.

"I don't buy that at all. And I'll tell you another thing, that was decided for me. The whole Generation X thing is incredibly dependent on irony. I think the problem with irony is that it stops you feeling very passionate about things. Irony has its place as long as it's not the dominant thing around and Generation X is something I associate very much with irony."

What are you doing tonight?

"Tonight I'm going out to dinner with my ex-girlfriend Laura as long as she doesn't blow me out. We went out together for three years and we're still really good friends."

What else do you do to relax apart from seeing your ex- girlfriends?

"I play pool with my friends or we all sit around and play video games. Yeah, video games feature in The Beach. Richard is obsessed with them. It's a good way of unwinding. If I have been working hard, if I look at videos, I start thinking about how it is written or how they have put the scenes together, looking for holes in the narrative, also if I start reading a book. So video games are quite a good way to switch off work. They are a good break."

You know a lot of people say the video games turn your brain to mush.

"I've been playing video games since I discovered Space Invaders aged eight. There was a method, you had to shoot the sides so they took longer to get from one side of the screen to another. A spaceship would give you 500 points. I think that for me, video games are quite a social thing. They help me to switch off, but I also play them with my younger brother and friends of mine who are into them."

Do you go on beach holidays or are you beached out?

"I'm beached out."

Are you going on holiday this summer?

"I'm going to Manila to see some friends but that is turning into a work trip because afterwards, I have to go to Australia and New Zealand to publicise the book."

Your next book is set in Europe isn't it?

"There isn't a next one. I haven't started writing it. I had eight pages and then I ditched them."

You do that quite a lot.

"Yeah, that the way I work. Screw it up and start again."

I heard that you are anti-drugs.

"No, its sort of a myth. I'm anti the drugs trade. The only thing that bothers me about it is that I don't like the trade and what goes on around it and I'm sick to death of people talking about their drug experiences. At a certain point, there's a limit to how many stories of a funny trip you can sit through.''

They'll be asking you to make public health announcements, telling kids to just say no to drugs.

"That's one of the most insane suggestions I have ever heard in my life."

Copyright 1999
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