After all, not long ago, the young Londoner was backpacking around Asia, working odd jobs to finance an insatiable travel fixation. He's in demand. His debut novel about trekking through Thailand has been on the best-selling lists since its 1997 release, translated into 25 languages. It hasn't cracked the American market yet. But the Generation X manifesto about backpackers who find an island Utopia, fringed with marijuana fields, is certain to smoke the US charts by year's end.
Garland sloughs off such praise.
I think the praise is a bit ridiculous. You have to realize that literature about backpackers is pretty limited. It's an ambitious work in a totally new direction. And it's set in the Philippines. Which is what irks Garland, whose first novel has been written off my many Asian critics as a one-dimensional look at the region by an uniformed outsider.