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Harvest Season: A Novel Paperback – February 9, 2013
Purchase options and add-ons
- Print length220 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateFebruary 9, 2013
- Dimensions5 x 0.5 x 8 inches
- ISBN-101481985000
- ISBN-13978-1481985000
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Taylor ultimately achieves something impressive here that all literature should and so little actually does." -- Chicago Center for Literature and Photography
"A glimpse into Chinese society, a morality tale and finally, a page-turning read, racing toward a bloody climax." -- Jakarta Globe
"A racy, chemical fueled parable." --Taipei Times
"Single sentences in limpid simplicity become illustrative of individual character." -- Bangkok Post
"Sumptuously written, with passages of great beauty. Taylor is a talented writer, and reveals to us a China most people have no idea exists." -- Phnom Penh Post
"A cunning and beautifully composed meditation on the demise of individual travel and, to some extent, the publishing industry that surrounds it." -- Bangkok 101
From the Author
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform; 2nd edition (February 9, 2013)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 220 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1481985000
- ISBN-13 : 978-1481985000
- Item Weight : 7.8 ounces
- Dimensions : 5 x 0.5 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #7,224,878 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #279,030 in Action & Adventure Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Chris Taylor is a writer based in Bangkok and Southwest China. He wrote, co-wrote and updated Lonely Planet guides to Seoul, Tokyo, China, Tibet, Cambodia, Malaysia, and Indonesia, among other Asian destinations. He was coordinating author of the China, Japan and Southeast Asia: on a shoestring guides, and has contributed Asia-related material to other guidebook publishers. He has written for The Far Eastern Economic Review, Salon, Time, the South China Morning Post, The Age, and The Sydney Morning Herald, among many other newspapers and magazines. Harvest Season is his first novel.
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Shuangshan is a bucolic corner of Western China, far from the hustle and unfettered state-run capitalism of massive smokestack cities like Beijing, Guangzhou and Wuhan. Situated above a scenic lake and below hills where marijuana grows, Shuangshan attracts a slacker breed of Westerners and Han Chinese alike. The main character, Matt, shares a house with Wang from Northern China; they spend their days drinking and smoking weed. Matt, who seems to be in his forties, has come to Shuangshan in search of some sort of Shangrila he glimpsed fifteen years before. But his concept of what this paradise consists of is rather vague. He wants to find a beautiful secluded spot to smoke weed with the right girl, as far as I can work out.
Somewhere I read author Chris Taylor felt ‘Harvest Season’ had been unfairly labelled “Alex Garland’s ‘The Beach’ but in China.” A bigger influence, Taylor said, was Paul Bowles’s ‘The Sheltering Sky’. I read Bowles’s novel after ‘Harvest Season’ and I can see what Taylor was on about. Both novels involve hedonistic Westerners looking for spiritual answers in places they will be perpetually alien. You might argue the same for ‘The Beach’ – but in that novel, the Westerners aren’t really looking to be involved with the local culture at all. In 'Harvest Season', Matt speaks Chinese and has Chinese friends. He is also interested in the Wu culture and visits the local shaman. This is the most amusing part of the book as they haggle with the shaman over the price of sacrificing a chicken and reading their fortunes.
Bowles was a well-known figure in the post World War II bohemian scene in Tangier, Morocco. I wasn’t around in the forties and fifties and I’ve never been to North Africa, so I don’t know how well Bowles captured that world. In China, I never went to Dali; the closest thing I experienced to it was staying in a hostel in nearby Kunming. However, I spent a lot of time in China in the 2000s and Taylor is on the money with the atmosphere he creates.
While Bowles shows American couple, Port and Kit Moresby's existential angst and nihilism through their, seemingly pointless, journey into the Sahara, Taylor does it through his characters' clumsy conversations in Western-owned dive bars. The names of these places: Hummingbird, The Lizard, Moon Cafe etc. cracked me up. Every city in China used to have these hideouts for hard-drinking foreigners, where people discussed plans to REALLY do something in China – plans, which, for the most part, never eventuated.
The plot revolves around an Australian named Alex opening a youth hostel in Shuangshan that attracts big numbers of crazy Western hippies from their hangouts in Thailand and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Alex also takes over the market for selling drugs to Westerners, something that makes a local Wu businessman unhappy. Furthermore, a newly arrived hippie group, The Family of Light, wants to have a ceremony at the cave of the local shaman – they are turning Shuangshan into just another faux-spiritual tourist trap. Matt, the foreign resident with the longest history in Shuangshan and the best Chinese, has some ability to bridge the gap between the locals and newcomers but he is preoccupied with his crush on Alex's girlfriend, A-hong – not to mention his consumption of drugs and alcohol. For an older guy, he knows how to party. A-hong was one of the weaker characters for me, I guess she was supposed to have something mysterious about her but I couldn't see it. As the book nears its conclusion, the tensions between the long-term foreign residents, new Western faces and local Wu heavies build nicely and then disaster strikes.
Taylor, who wrote for Lonely Planet, gives an idea of how a place transforms from a sleepy backwater with unique charm to some sort of Koh Samui backpacker nightmare. It's not a smooth ride, nor one that can be stopped. In the case of China, if the foreign backpackers don't ruin a place then the Han Chinese will. An example of this being Yangshuo in Guangxi Province. Its needle-like hills grace many postcards but I've heard it has developed into a nightmare of Chinese tour groups following a guide with a yellow flag and LOUDspeaker.
The central character is Matt, a former guidebook writer who's not so much wracked with guilt as slightly sheepish about his small role in spreading the backpacker plague to the places he used to treasure. He's holed up in a town called Shuangshan in south-west China; 20 years ago, he found the ancient walled town on a research trip, fell in love with it and left it out of the guidebook he was working on in a bid to save it. But with or without him, it was always going to be discovered, and the town he's come back to isn't the same, no matter how hard he tries to convince himself otherwise.
Matt spends his days in a fug of booze and drugs (the title refers to the time of year when the locals bring to town the dope that grows wild in the surrounding hills), in the company of a small band of similarly minded dropouts from the decadent and decaying West and the modernising East. They've carved a small niche for themselves in the ancient town, and are a mildly lucrative curiosity to the local traders and a fitfully tolerated anomaly to the local law enforcement. But that delicate equilibrium is thrown into utter disarray by two sets of interlopers: an outsider called Alex who arrives with plans to turn Shuangshan into the next big thing on the south-east Asian party circuit, and a bunch of hippies called The Family who imagine they have every right to take a chunk of this putative paradise without giving anything back.
Chaos, betrayal and murder ensue.
Some Western readers may struggle to accept this portrait of a China in which the authorities are a barely palpable presence, the youth are tuning in, turning on and dropping out, and a drug-fuelled party scene is thriving, but it is well-grounded in fact. Suffice it to say China is a sprawling place, and a lot of it is a long way from the prying eyes of Beijing.
At the narrative heart of Harvest Season is a frustrated and frustrating love triangle (quadrangle actually; hell, make that a pentangle - Shuangshan is that kind of scene), but the book's real concerns are far grander. It's about the hankering for the idyllic, and the countervailing knowledge that to find it is to destroy it (it's a theme the book shares quite consciously with Alex Garland's The Beach).
It's about the intrinsically corrosive effect of mass travel, and the "class" system that allows the self-satisfied drop-outs to imagine themselves as being above both the mass travellers and the go-nowhere locals even as they exist in a state of suspended animation in their empty bars and barely functioning jewellery shops.
It's about the belated and begrudging realisation that outsiders have neither the right nor the ability to snap-freeze a place for their pleasure when to do so is to deny the locals the opportunity to improve their lot.
It's about the pain of waking up from the illusion that anywhere, or anyone, is perfect.
Above all, it's about a generation of Western youth that refuses to buy into the great capitalist-democratic illusion but has no viable alternative other than dropping out - and they can only afford to drop out in places like Shuangshan because of the economic disparity the West's fading prosperity is predicated on.
There are echoes of the opium wars in the book, too, and foreshadowings of the collapse of the West, along with intimations of the decline of the Party.
At a shade over 200 pages, Harvest Season is a short book, but its scope is positively sprawling.
Top reviews from other countries
And how they destroy it like it happened all around the globe, but mostly in exotic countries. Take Koh Phangan, Koh Tao Khao San Road Pai etc in Thailand, Goa or the Coromandel Coast in India, Katmandu in Nepal and... and...and...
THOSE places are obviously yet too overrun by the backpacker crowds - there's something new to discover!!!
And it HAD been disvovered by Matt, a guidebook writer for Rough Planet when he was still running around to find the ultimate Xanadu or Shangri-La for the seekers of mysticism and cheap beer and gratis grass...
And he found it about 30 years ago, but decided to leave the Wu minority to themself and Shuangshan sleep for an other decade or two.
When after the events on Tian An Men Square China had to polish up its image how the world remembered it, the gates opened finally, but very slowly, mostly to foreigners with money to invest or in goods or in travel...
So Matt returned there about a year ago and thinks to have returned to his paradise, the above mentioned Shangri-la, still untouched by the rest of the backpacking crowd. He and a few naturally 'self-selected', as not disturbing the seasons of the life of the Wu.
But speaking of seasons - now it is Harvest Season , now the trend has arrived and it is Alex from Australia who opens up a traveller's lodge on the hills above Shuangshan, called the 'Cormorant Lodge'. And he wants to make it the ultimate travel destination with Full moon parties, fire dancers, the whole fu***ng circus, as he says.
And soon the things get out of the hands of the locals who superwised until now the drug scene, the traveller scene and everything else.
As it is always happening, greed causes a mayor fall-out between Alex and his local investor. Heavy drugs - entering from far away on the 'Outside' replace the simple harvested grass that brought a bit of money to the Wu people.
And the Elders and the police - adapting soon the Chinese Riot Act law to this remote mountainous valley in southwestern China, close to the Tibetan border, apparently in Yunnan - where such places actually exist until now (been there, seen them :) , shut down the show.
But they are unfortunately too late for some good friends of Matt, who really gives himself the blame for the evil things that he obviously had let happen...
This is a most astonishing debut novel by Chris Taylor, who declares:
>>Welcome to Harvest Season, a novel of just 220 pages that I ended up spending a lot of time on. No, the first person narrator is not me, and, yes, a lot of it is made up - though much of the big-picture back story is pretty much how things panned out over the course one winter and early spring in a remote valley in the mountains of southwest China. Yes, it's a difficult novel to categorize, but that's why, I think, it deserves to be read: it wrote itself and refused to be told any other way than the way it wound up.<<
And I myself can only add: Chris, if You have some more to tell, give them to us!