You Go, Girl

By Michelle Goldberg, Salon. Posted July 8, 2002.

Among low-budget backpackers in Asia, there is no more favored topic of conversation than the pretentiousness, vulgarity and cultural insensitivity of other low-budget backpackers in Asia. It's a contempt born of travelers' guilt at their role in spreading the very Western culture they're all fleeing and their embarrassment at how absurd the earnest quest for Third World experience looks when pursed en masse.

Such ambivalence is the dominant theme of the subculture's growing canon of books, all of which feature caustic appraisals of the hordes of dreadlocked, baggy-trousered, ganja-scented drifters who crowd places like Thailand's Kho San Road, Goa's Anjuna beach and Laos' Vang Vieng, where they sit in cafes devouring banana pancakes, chai and the novels that mock them.

Except for "The Beach," Alex Garland's nightmare of neo-hippie atavism, backpacker fiction has never really caught on among Americans, in part because a year spent traveling through the Third World isn't a rite of passage here in the way it is in Europe, Israel and Australia. On the backpacker circuit, though, the volumes are ubiquitous. Books like William Sutcliffe's neurotic India comedy "Are You Experienced?" and Simon Lewis' slick 1999 novel "Go" can be found in bookshops from Katmandu to Koh Phangan -- any Asian spot frequented by white people.

Until recently, though, these books have been strictly a boy thing. There are thousands of young women traveling solo or in pairs through Asia, navigating the ordinary perils of life on the road -- loneliness, aimlessness, amoebic dysentery -- as well as the clutches of predatory men, but their stories hadn't been told.

It was only a matter of time. This year, there have been two extremely entertaining English novels about young women roaming the world, both of which satirize the backpacker scene while offering fresh perspectives on the dilemma of adventure-seekers in a world where most of the thrills seem secondhand. "Losing Gemma," by Katy Gardner, and "Backpack," by Emily Barr (already a bestseller in Britain), reinvent oft-told tales of frustrated vagabonds by making them stories about the endless female quest for self-improvement.

The two books are strangely similar. Both feature deliberately obnoxious, attractive Englishwomen in their 20s whose delusions of worldliness evanesce once they arrive in Asia. Both books revolve, in part, around the violent deaths of other female backpackers, deaths that clearly underline the anxieties likely to plague even brave women. In each, a beach holiday taken on touristy Thai islands signifies a fall away from intrepid ideals and into holidaymaker banality. And of course, both women end up humbled but wiser, liberated from oppressive vanity.

(Spoiler alert: Stop reading here if you don't want to learn the details of the plots.) The biggest difference between the books lies in the execution of their murder plots. In "Losing Gemma," the death of the title character is at the center of the book, while in "Backpack" a serial killer stalking blond English travelers across Asia is an unfortunate, hollow distraction from what is otherwise an absorbing, darkly funny tale of self-discovery in expertly rendered exotic locales.

The animating mystery in "Losing Gemma" is a gripping, psychologically resonant one. Beautiful Esther regards her lifelong best friend Gemma as a dumpy sidekick and treats her with affectionate condescension. When they go to India together, Esther feels entitled to make all their plans and drags Gemma to an obscure village they'd been warned against. On the way, they meet Coral, a nomadic, flaky waif who drives Esther crazy by embodying much of what she aspires to. As Gemma allies herself with Coral, and Esther finds herself shut out, Gardner wonderfully illuminates the currents of envy and power that disfigure friendships. By the time Esther begins to suspect Coral's involvement in some kind of cult, Gemma wants nothing to do with her old friend. When Gemma eventually disappears and is declared dead, Esther is destroyed by guilt.

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