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Book Reviews Title The
Tesseract Fiction-Net
Rating Buy It
From Amazon.co.uk - BUY
NOW! Cover
Story The sun is
setting over Manilla. In an abandoned hotel on the
wrong side of town, Sean prepares for the arrival
of Don Pepe, the mestizo gangster who runs the
shipping lanes of the South China Seas. As he kills
time, Sean discovers that his bed sheets are
stained with blood, the phone lines to his room are
dead, and somebody has screwed a steel plate over
the spyhole in his door... Elsewhere in the
city, Rosa, a doctor, waits for her husband to come
home. As she puts her children to bed she remembers
the coastal village in which she was raised, and
the boy who would meet her on the way to school.
Meanwhile, thirteen-year-old Vincente begs from the
stream of air-conditioned cars on Roxas Boulevard,
keeping an eye out for the strange man who lives in
the city's most expensive apartment block, and who
pays money for street kids'
dreams…… Tonight, these
disparate lives will collide in a shattering
finale. We
Say I saw Alex
Garland at an event that was part of the Birmingham
Readers and Writers Festival not long after "The
Tesseract" had been published. My impression of him
was of an articulate man with intensity and a
determination to make the very best of his craft.
Though also seemingly modest about his work, he has
every right to feel justly proud of this novel and
confessed that he felt and indeed, hoped that it
was an improvement on his first novel "The
Beach". Shamefully, the
latter is probably more famous now for its
re-invention as a Leonardo DiCaprio led film.
However, the book that many of us remember was a
great thriller and a compulsive page-turner but
slightly flawed. What Garland has produced in The
Tesseract is something more complex and
unexpected. Manila is brought
to life in the best way that a city can be in a
novel. I have never been there, but Garland gave me
a sense of the heat, the smells and the different
paces and facets of life that exist in this one
place. The three main parts of the book involve
totally different stories and totally different
characters and you wonder how they could possibly
meet; but then this book is about the complexity of
connections and how nothing can ever be as simple
as it may appear at first glance. All of the
characters have their own stories to tell, Sean,
Rosa, Don Pepe, his henchmen, the street kids and
Alfredo who buys their dreams. It's a highly
complicated structure for a narrative, like the
tesseract itself (a hypercube unravelled) and it
shows great courage on the part of Alex Garland
that he even began to tackle it. Garland is
frighteningly talented and a true craftsman of
words and the fact that The Tesseract holds
together and concludes with such confidence and
vigour is proof of the fact. Review by: Rachel
Taylor |
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