Feel the burn: why holidays from hell make for blistering fiction
Every summer, we long for a much-needed break from daily life, dreaming of self-reinvention in some distant paradise. But really, holidays can be absolute hell. Instead of relaxation we encounter heaving crowds, lumpy beds, the caprices of our loved ones and the grim truth that we can escape neither their worst failings nor our own, however far we travel.
Small wonder, then, that the disaster holiday has become a booming subgenre in fiction. For most of us, the levels of luxury promised by hit TV series The White Lotus are pure fantasy, yet we’re all vulnerable to the expensive promises we’ve been sold. Two of the smartest offerings in fiction this summer come from Claire Powell’s All In and Chloë Ashby’s Family Friends. In the former, a struggling couple whose marriage is on the rocks go on an all-inclusive Spanish weekend break, paid for by a rich brother. Poignant and extremely funny, the frictions that ensue are all too believable.
So, too, is the implosion of Ashby’s group of friends who have a decades-long custom of holidaying together in the south of France. This year, however, their marriages are threatened by one husband’s deceit, the lingering attraction between old friends and the arrival of a vivacious teenage stepdaughter. Poised and gripping, it uses a sweltering Mediterranean setting to amp up tensions to dramatic effect.
In Sabine Durrant’s superb thriller Dead Heat, meanwhile, a failed journalist, his more successful media friend and a former school contemporary, now a Gatsbyesque billionaire, find their Greek adventure transformed not only into a shameful reminder of racism in their shared past, but something outright murderous. Being thrown together to brave blazing summer heat only intensifies existing tensions as Durrant expertly brings the drama to a head.
Many characters seeking escape find that a change of scene only makes problems worse. Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk, adapted as a film last year by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, chronicles a family unravelling in a Spanish fishing village. Rose pays thousands to a clinic to cure her mysterious paralysis while Sofia distracts herself with local beauty, Ingrid, as unresolved conflicts between mother and daughter start to boil over.
A fateful holiday also inspires the scathing, semi-autobiographical play in Jo Hamya’s novel The Hypocrite. Sophia is taken out of school to act as her novelist father’s amanuensis, though he spends much of his time in Sicily seducing local women instead of bonding with his daughter. Years later, he is appalled to see that Sophia has adapted his parenting failures for the stage, though the novel cleverly hints at aspects of her own behaviour on that holiday which Sophia may have conveniently chosen to forget.
The fancier the surroundings, the worse a fictional holiday is likely to be. In William Rayfet Hunter’s Sunstruck, an invitation to his university friend Lily’s parents’ chateau is the catalyst for unwelcome epiphanies about the class and race differences between the narrator and Lily’s family, even as he becomes involved with her wayward brother. Lucy Foley’s The Midnight Feast also plays with this trope to great effect, when the opening weekend of a high-end wellness retreat in the West Country is disrupted by revelations from a guest’s disastrous stay many years before.
Our attempts to get away from it all can often lead us right back to what we left home to avoid. In Deepa Anappara’s ambitious, multilayered The Last of Earth, Victorian adventurer Katherine hopes her journey into the forbidden kingdom of Tibet will help her overcome difficult feelings about her heritage. Unfortunately, disguising herself as a male pilgrim to cross dangerous unknown terrain only serves to underline Katherine’s alienation as she attempts to become the first European woman to reach Lhasa.
In an unfamiliar setting, relaxed and away from our usual points of reference, we are more vulnerable to danger. Patricia Highsmith’s classic The Talented Mr Ripley posits the holiday abroad as a perfect space for murder and identity theft. In Sean Gilbert’s I’ll Be the Monster, a murderous husband and wife encounter an old university acquaintance while on a trip to Istanbul to revive their marriage. This unsettling novel disorients us by asking who is really the predator, and who is the prey.
The self-discovery that travel can bring is not always benign. Thirty years ago, Alex Garland’s cult bestseller The Beach lured in the reader with the promise of a mysterious idyll on a remote Thai island. However, the narrator’s true awakening is to how easily manipulated he and most of the other would-be lotus eaters really are. Painful self-awareness don’t come to a stop with parenthood, either. In Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter, Leda allows a new acquaintance, downwardly mobile young mother Nina, to use her beach cottage for an illicit rendezvous. Even as Leda hypocritically judges Nina for struggling in the way that she once did, she is forced to come to terms with her own temporary abandonment of her daughters.
At once longed-for and disruptive, any break from place or routine can be double-edged. In my own debut novel, The Decadence, a group of former university friends break lockdown to holiday in a remote Devon country house during the pandemic. Too quarrelsome and intoxicated to notice that the house is in fact haunted, they do not realise they must band together against the danger until it is almost too late.
Despite all these fearsome warnings, venturing far from home can still bring vital insights. In EM Forster’s A Room With a View, Lucy Honeychurch scandalises her chaperone with the realisation that she must break off her engagement after being impulsively kissed by George Emerson in a field above Florence. David Nicholls’ bestselling You Are Here brings together lonely divorcees Marnie and Michael for a rainy hike across the Lake District, with love growing unexpectedly as they emerge from their self-protective shells.
We don’t always get exactly what we want from our holidays, but the adventure is in breaking away from the familiar. Even our most unpleasant travel experiences can be revelatory, and the best can transform us into new versions of ourselves, especially once they are safely behind us.
Reporting from The Guardian contributed to this story.
