Melissa Modolo "The Beach"

There's a really good book written by Alex Garland called The Beach. There's actually been a movie made about it but I have only read the book. The book is about a man who is backpacking and bumming around in Thailand and he hears of this island with something important on it. He spends a large part of the book trying to reach the island and when he does, he finds a community of people living apart from the rest of society on one side of the island and a weed farm on the other side of the island. The society he finds is basically a utopian society where everyone works their job and all food and shelter is shared by everyone. There are many subplots within the plot that are irrelevent to this class and so I won't go into them, but anyway, by the end of the story there is chaos on the island. People within the society have formed social groups and opinions about one another. Assumptions are made regarding the actions of the others within the group. At the end of the book, everyone is on edge and the weed farmers come over to their side of the island dragging the dead bodies of some new curious people who had ventured over to the wrong side. A fight breaks out and the main character barely escapes the island with his two friends. The point of me summarizing this book is to discuss the fact that liminal states cannot be made permanent. The society on this island formed to escape all social structure and to create utopia. The result of this, however, was that new social structures eventually formed anyway and everyone who survived the island was eventually forced to return to reality. What made their society so special was the liminality they were in, but as soon as the liminal mindset became a permanant one, the liminality was lost and the community fell apart. It is strange to me that liminality is such a fragile state to be in. Part of the definition of liminality is that it is temporary but since in many cases, a liminal state is an enjoyable one, it is somewhat ironic to me. People need the structure and the unpleasant parts of society so that they can be compared to those brief liminal periods of time.