Customer Reviews

Most accurate book on backpacking across India available!
'Lonely Planet', eat your heart out! If there is one book to sum up travelling the Indian sub-continent, it is this. Coupled with a compelling story of one mans struggle with the woman in his life, this novel exceeds all the 'travel novel' limits, previously set by 'The Beach'. Having travelled the same region as Dave did in the book, I find his descriptions and feelings uncannily accurate. He ridicules the attitude of the self-congratulatory 18-year-old who have taken a year out (to 'find' themselves), and the 'getting at one with his karma' hippy-traveller with true humour. It is refreshing to read a book that is lighthearted but compelling reading. This man had done his research! If you are ever considering travelling East, then this is the book to read.

Light and dark and in short, brilliant
My girlfriend gave me this book as a humorous alternative to the dark stuff that I normally read, so I was expecting some in-your-face, smart-aleck pulp that a reviewer somewhere thought was trying to be funny. I started reading it at 11 o'clock at night, and I have to say that by the time I finished it, four hours later in the wee small hours, I was pleasantly shocked to discover that it was actually very funny in a cynical sense, and overall a deeper and more insightful read than I had first expected.

Some have called the storyline pointless and the characters 2-dimensional, but that is the point of the story: it satirises the latest PC fad. Anyone who says it is pure pulp cannot have read the part where Dave encounters a Reuters journalist, a passage where the author's intent for the novel is laid bare. With Liz and Dave, Sutcliffe accurately depicts the two main types of traveller swarming into the lesser regions of the world: the self-obsessed type who make out like everything is 'karmic' and 'spiritual' without the first clue of what that means, and the type who travel and 'experience poverty' just because everyone else is doing it and they can put it on their CV. It is very fitting that, whilst following Dave around India, we learn next to nothing about the country, and likewise, with Liz on a spiritual quest, we get about as spiritual as who she's sleeping with. Add to this some very accurate portrayals of travelling (such as how when you return home, everything seems strange), and some weird and wonderful (and morally corrupt) supporting characters, not to mention all manner of bizarre situations, and it's a riot.

Don't believe the nay-sayers. You can read this novel as pulp if you want, because the humour and free-flowing storyline make it truly difficult to put down, but between the lines it is a dark and bitter diatribe to the culture of the traveller. Only the ending with its 'nosy-parker' humour lets the story down. But it shows that none of the travellers learned anything from travelling, despite their claims to the contrary. So it succeeds in its point. So buy it, now.

Close to the bone
This is the first book to make me laugh out loud in a long time - mainly because it was so close to the bone, parts of it were painful. I am constantly amused by my friends and acquaintances who think that spending a couple of months on a sanitised, whistle-stop tour through a country means that they can truly get to know and understand it. Sutcliffe has picked up on this patronising attitude, and gently mocks it in a very, very funny way. The characters are very realistic (I defy anyone in the 18-30 age bracket to say they don't recognise the characters in this book), as are the situations and, indeed, the observations Sutcliffe has on the tangled web of relationships that form the basis of the plot.
'Are you experienced' is short, but definitely un-put-downable, and most of the people I have recommended this book to have read it in a single sitting.