Stephen Kear has put together, no doubt, his experiences of back-packing in every continent to give us the accurate adventures of Timothy. One expects a coherent novel but this is neither pastiche nor personal monologue. Kear is the person to write such a novel but what we get are vignettes and verbal cuttings from a scrap book. Anecdotes perhaps.The book may have been written over some time because the style and mood shifts restlessly rather than relevantly. The finest moment is in South Africa when the intrepid traveller gets picked up by a local and the dialogue is deeply insightful.But at the expense of plot.I bet he is mad that Garland wrote The Beach when he was sitting on it ten years earlier.