Traveling Lite

The standard postgraduate journey for 19th century young English ladies and gentlemen was the Grand Tour of Europe, a lengthy buffet of the best art, architecture and—for the men—wenches that the Continent had to offer. Today's overmedicated, under-careered university graduates have come up with their own rite of passage: backpacking through Asia. It might be more of a slouch than a Grand Tour, but at least it's edgy.

Or it was. Once guaranteed to send parents into spirals of anxiety and friends into paroxysms of envy, the Asia trek now elicits a shrugging, "Send us an e-mail when you make it to Kathmandu." Trouble is, no one seems to have told Tansy Harris, the self-absorbed heroine of Emily Barr's debut novel Backpack (Plume; 310 pages). Tansy is a glamorous young Englishwoman with glamorous friends and a glamorous media job who has no more direction in life than the location of the next line of coke. When her monstrous alcoholic mother dies, Tansy survives an overdose and decides to escape London for what she sees as stylish and beautiful Asia with her awful boyfriend Tom. When Tom backs out, an enraged Tansy goes alone. Not to find herself, but for the social cachet she anticipates when she returns home "skinny and brown."

Skinny and brown might be an amusing goal if Tansy ever morphed into Ab Fab's Edina. She doesn't. Instead her shock upon discovering that parts of Vietnam are squalid makes for condescendingly dark comedy. And it would take a more skillful parody to convince readers that Tansy hopes Asia will wean her off drugs.

Tansy learns the rules of the new Asia soon enough: do not accept drugs from men on strange motorcycles unless they're offering cocaine; do hook up as soon as possible with whatever group is desperate enough to accept you. And she starts down the backpacking trail with equal measures of complaint and courage. Her journey is prosaic in the extreme, filled with hearty Aussie backpackers, haughty French, outwardly friendly but inscrutable native guides, beachside bars in Cambodia, beachside bars in Thailand, etc. Although Tansy enjoys it, the strongest sensation the reader is likely to get from her trip is the been there, done that ennui pervading the backpacking scene.

Barr may be aware of this failing, because she loads Backpack with enough neurotic angst to fill a season's worth of Ally McBeal, then grafts on a murder-mystery subplot centering around a backpacker serial killer stalking Tansy look-alikes. The murderer can be spotted within a few paragraphs of the title page, but provides a diversion from a suddenly at-one-with-Asia Tansy looking down upon the "tourists" in Bangkok or musing with unconscious irony upon "deluded Westerners" at the base of Mount Everest. Barr even includes Tansy's rambling e-mails home; most people don't want to read those from their friends.

Barr has managed to throw Bridget Jones onto The Beach. But The Beach gave some insight into the backpacking scene, while Backpack rarely ventures from the tourist quarter.