In the mid-1990s, Alex Garland penned "The Beach," the classic novel of the backpacker pack, searching for the authentic Asian experience away from the plastic consumer world. Now comes Chris Taylor with a darker take on the "independent traveler."  The characters in Mr. Taylor's novel are also veterans of the well-trodden route from Goa to Koh Phangan. Yet unlike its predecessor, "Harvest Season" features no handsome heroes, no consummated love story, no Bob Marley, no redemption.  Mr. Taylor draws on his experience as one of Lonely Planet's most prolific writers. In the 1990s, he crisscrossed Asia in the footsteps of thousands of young travelers who, while exploring, profoundly changed the places they passed through. They brought Western culture and, in some cases, drugs and decadence.  Tourists relax on the beach in Pattaya, Thailand.  By Chris Taylor Earnshaw Books, 210 pages, $19.99  "Harvest Season" is a more thoughtful depiction of the subculture these travelers spawned. The 200-page novel depicts a tranquil mountain hideaway in China's Yunnan province, populated by a hill tribe, a handful of urban Chinese drop-outs and scores of backpackers. Cultural insensitivity, greed, blatant disregard for local law enforcement and buckets of youthful hubris soon destroy the precarious equilibrium between the three groups.  At the center of the narrative is Matt, a travel writer and fascinatingly flawed character. In his early 40s, he is confused about what he should do with his life now that he has packed in his writing career and settled in his own Shangri-la. He has carefully omitted any mention of its location from his books, not wanting it to change like so many other destinations he has covered.  Matt's drug intake is punishing and his relationships with a couple of equally disoriented Chinese hippy girls are clumsy. One encounter is particularly sad, a blunt description of two people attracted to one another, yet lost in translation. Their frightened embrace is too fleeting to have any meaning beyond a sense of loss, one that infuses the entire text.  The former writer's illusions of utopia fall by the wayside when Alex, a young and brash entrepreneurial type, arrives. Tapping into a network of hedonists across the Internet, he promises free parties and mind-altering substances.  Soon hordes of unwashed free-loaders scare the daylights out of the reserved tribespeople. The local business community, which has been quietly selling drugs to the backpackers, turns on them. As a consequence, China's conformity-enforcing authorities threaten to put an end to romantic notions of preserving a Lost Horizon in our consumer-driven, information-saturated 21st century.
In The Wall Street Journal, Tom Vater reviews Harvest Season, another novel about the Western backpacker who seeks an Asian paradise, only to see hedonism ruin it.