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Beach author dries up
By Andre Paine, Evening Standard Last updated at 00:00am on 13.02.03
The success of The Beach made Alex Garland a millionaire. But now he is struggling for words
Alex Garland was the great young hope of British literature thanks to his best-selling debut novel The Beach.
Published when he was only 26, the dark adventure story became required reading and was turned into the Hollywood blockbuster starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
But five years after writing the follow-up novel, the millionaire author is suffering a prolonged bout of writer's block. Instead of penning another best-seller, he admits to an obsession for video games - while friends believe that his success may have left him burned out.
In a rare interview, Garland, 32, told the Evening Standard: "I am not working at the moment. If I am going to write another novel, then I need a good idea and I just have not got one. I am stuck.
"The last thing I managed to produce was an eight-page comic strip, so I was thinking of maybe expanding that. Generally I do not have any plans to do any writing at all. At the moment I am playing on my X-box an awful lot."
Garland was a literary sensation thanks to The Beach, about a young British traveller who gets caught up in a murderous community of backpackers in Thailand. The book was first published in 1996 to critical acclaim, but it was the resulting word-of-mouth and 2000 Hollywood film, directed by Danny Boyle, that made The Beach a global bestseller. Since then, Garland's literary output has been slim and he has stayed out of the limelight. Last week he showed up at the Dorchester Hotel for the Empire Film Awards, but he avoided the media and left early.
His follow-up, The Tesseract, was published in 1998, but fans and critics gave it a lukewarm reception and it was not seen as the sequel to The Beach.
Last year Garland, who lives with his girlfriend in Hampstead, wrote the screenplay for Boyle's British horror film 28 Days Later, and he has written occasional short pieces of fiction.
However, for the past five years the son of newspaper cartoonist Nicholas Garland has kept everyone waiting for a new novel. He admits the wait is likely to continue for a few years yet. "If I was going to write anything again it really would depend on the idea, and it might not even suit a novel. It might work better as a screenplay," he said.
"I like to take a lot of time off. I am just a very slow worker. But I don't feel a huge pressure to write a new novel."
Boyle said that studio executives insisted on major changes to the story for the final script of The Beach, and he believes this may have affected Garland's creativity. "We should tell the whole story of that film one day and what happened to it in Hollywood," he said. "If I had my way, I would recut the film and re-release my version."
He added: "I would like to work with Alex again very much, but he is still waiting for his muse to appear. He lives a writer's life really and sometimes that means moping around, worried about what he will write next."
Garland admits success affected his writing. Penguin Viking signed him for a two-book deal but it is believed a work in progress was scrapped in 2001. A spokesperson said: "There is nothing new coming up from Alex Garland."
Ellen Schoenfeld, assistant to Garland's agent Andrew Nurnberg, said: "We still represent him."
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