"If you loved The Beach you'll love Losing Gemma," announces the front cover of this new paperback, quoting Elle magazine. And it's true the two have a lot in common. Both are tales of young people, just out of college, coming to grief while doing drugs and traveling in Asia.
All in all, however, this novel probably has more going for it, though there doesn't seem at first sight to be a role for Leonardo di Caprio in any filmed version, unless it's a cameo of a Western would-be guru called Zak.
Esther and Gemma, best friends since the age of five, set off together for India. Esther is the attractive one, cool, neat and hard-headed, while Gemma is overweight, prone to prickly heat rashes and liable to be found poring over classic novels under the sweat-soaked sheet in their sticky backpackers's bedroom.
You don't have to read far before a crucial piece of background information is revealed. Before they left the UK, Esther began a secret relationship with Gemma's boyfriend. Such conquests come easy to Esther, but this was all set to be the big thing for Gemma. Esther feels guilty, but then reckons that Gemma doesn't know anything about it and with any luck never will.
On their second day in the sub-continent Gemma loses a bag containing her passport and all her money. It is retrieved, however, by an Australian woman called Coral, someone who has been on the road for many a month, and has found her way round most of India's more characteristic problems.
Esther, the more dominant of the two innocents, has decided to head somewhere off the beaten tourist trail, and to this end throws their copy of the Lonely Planet guide in the air, promising to go wherever is described on the page it lands on.
As a result they head off to a remote Muslim shrine in Orissa Province. Mysteriously, Coral shows up soon afterwards at the same unlikely location. Here the plot thickens. After they have fought their way through the jungle to the shrine itself, sheets of flame and a charred body manifest themselves to the formerly skeptical Esther, though not to the increasingly chummy Gemma and Coral.
Has she been smoking too much of the sacred temple weed Coral brought along with her? Esther wonders. And why are Gemma and Coral getting so close? Is it really a joint pursuit of spiritual enlightenment or something markedly less selfless? And is Esther really as incapable of transcending her domineering instincts and her sense of her own worth, as the other two suggest? Meanwhile Coral, exasperatingly to Esther, shrugs her shoulders and insists it's all meant, intended, part of the plan.
Drug-fueled fantasies and paranoias characterize Losing Gemma just as they did The Beach. Who's really in charge? Who's plotting against me? What is the search for transcendence and spiritual transformation really a cover for? Things predictably go from bad to worse. Esther strikes off on her own, though her options are cut short when she has all her belongings stolen (Could the supposedly other-worldly Coral have been responsible?).
The novel could have been enlarged at this point, with more pen-portraits of self-deluding and posturing spiritual seekers encountered by Esther on her solo journey to Goa. To tell more of what actually transpires would spoil what is in many ways not a bad story.
Nevertheless, the conclusion, which takes place close to the Indian Himalayan town of Manali, is strongly plotted.
Reality reasserts itself, the delusions and paranoias of the backpackers's trail, and perhaps of the subcontinent itself, are disposed of.
Whether it's a happy ending or not is for the reader to decide, but it does constitute a genuine and mature resolution of the story's ingredients and effectively ties up all the material in this competent and sometimes skillful, first novel.
This is an attractive and readable book that will appeal more widely than just to the younger generation it's aimed at.
The same can't in all honesty be said about Kurt Cobain's Journals, which has also launched by Penguin with much the same market in mind.
Cobain may have been the leader of what his fans consider one of the greatest bands of all time, but these jottings don't show him to great advantage and certainly not as a wizard with the fine-line uni-ball.
Yet the publishers have seen fit to bring out the private diaries and notebooks in a sumptuous, de luxe edition. The torn and tattered pages have been religiously rendered in a loving facsimile, complete with food stains and crossings-out -- only the burn-holes from falling cannabis seeds are strangely missing.
Nirvana's music has many dedicated and serious followers, but these notebooks, here dignified as "Journals," at best tell an ambiguous story. To those for whom Cobain was a latter-day messiah they will be gold indeed. But how are the rest of us to judge them? There are song lyrics, draft letters to friends, even a recipe -- just the kind of thing more or less any teenager searching for a direction in life might pen.
In a proposed "Letter to the Editor," Cobain writes how much he wants everyone to know that he loves them, how "a very large proportion of this world's art sucks beyond description."
He concludes the letter, ominously and, as it turns out, presciently. "On second thought maybe I just tried to let the world know how much I love myself. Like a hypocrite in a hippie crypt.
"I hate myself and I want to die. Leave me alone. Love Kurt."
This anticipates his eventual suicide in a way that can only add fuel to the efforts of the anti-drug lobby. Both these books illustrate the endlessly paradoxical world of drugs -- genuine insights mixed, in ways that are hard, perhaps impossible, to disentangle, with profound delusions.
The texts tend to rebound off each other in many places, sometimes creatively but more often disturbingly.
Perhaps Penguin know what they're doing after all.
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