Set in a small town in Southern China, this gripping first person narrative is a cunning and beautifully composed meditation on the demise of independent travel and, to some extent, the publishing industry that surrounds it. Think Alex Garland’s The Beach, ten years on, and for real. While Garland aimed for high adventure and Hollywood characterisation, Taylor, a former Lonely Planet author and former Bangkok resident, is more interested in what really happened to the long-term travel scene and its attendant culture. Harvest Season – the title refers to the marijuana which grows wild in Yunnan Province, happily sampled by a small group of Western drop-outs living in relatively harmonious co-existence with the locals, until the town is flooded by scores of hippies searching for a Shangri-La like utopia – is a dark book, and a narrative so universal that it could have been set anywhere on the pancake trench in Southeast Asia. The characters are seen through the reflecting eyes of the book’s dysfunctional main protagonist, a former travel writer who has returned to his favorite destination to see it being destroyed by those arriving in his footsteps. The story, one of greed, ignorance, cultural insensitivity and youthful hubris, eventually and invariably leads to a gruesome showdown between opposing forces, and is equally applicable to the deluded aspirations of a generation of drop-outs and the literature they traveled with.

Harvest Season
Chris Taylor | Earnshaw Books | 210pp B595