Andy Beckett
THE TESSERACT by Alex Garland (Penguin)
There are very few verbs at the start of this novel. In a derelict hotel, a man called Sean is waiting to ambush some gangsters; he is in a suburb of modern Manila, growing stickier with the dusk; he is nervous. Entire sentences, even paragraphs, are composed of single words or phrases: “Heat.” “And Blood.” “No other guests.”
The Filipino gangsters take quite a time to arrive. As Sean fiddles with his gun and stares at the cracks in the ceiling, the relentlessly hyped-up pages begin to jar a little. Everything is too stylised – the bare bulbs, the skittering cockroaches, the mute concierge downstairs, with his “sweat- soaked cigarette” – as if art-directed for a particularly ominous advertisement.
All this is exactly as a sceptic about Alex Garland would expect. His previous, first novel, The Beach, despite its swell of sales and acclaim, had a whiff of the calculated yarn about it. It was about backpackers in Thailand, just when travelling there was fashionable; it borrowed from great literary tales like Heart of Darkness and Lord of the Flies; but it was as unsubtle as a traditional thriller.
At first, The Tesseract does not seem afraid of clichs either. Before Sean’s showdown, we learn via a flashback, he “kills time” at an air-conditioned McDonald’s, “armed with a milkshake”. Don Pepe, the head gangster, keeps matchsticks in a silver case, to chew on like a Bond villain. His Mercedes “purred”.
Then the book starts to relax and broaden. Don Pepe is stuck in traffic. Quietly, the opening premise starts to shift around.
Don Pepe is the first to die in the hotel shoot-out. Sean scrambles away into its maze of corridors. Contrary to convention, he finds himself unable to run very fast: his adrenaline refuses to come. And then the novel dives off into another plot altogether.
In the next suburb, a rich mother is waiting for her husband to get back from work. He is in the traffic jam too. For a conjuror of adventures and exotica, Garland picks out this domestic fragility surprisingly well.
Garland is working up a panorama. After the comfortable and the criminal, he does the poor: a pair of street kids, Totoy and Vincente, scamper into both stories as wide-eyed observers. The detail of this starts to resonate in the best Dickensian manner. Manila becomes more than a travel- book backdrop: a great modern stew of a city.
The only problem is, The Tesseract needs an ending. For the last 30 pages, Garland twists and ties all his plot strands into a single knot of coincidence. His excuse is in the title: a tesseract, he slightly ponderously explains, is the three- dimensional shape you get when a “hypercube” – an unknowable four- dimensional entity – is unravelled.
The climax strains. This is fitting. If the promotion of Alex Garland, with his young stubble and low-lit photos, has been like a rock star’s, then The Tesseract is his difficult second album: worked-on, a welcome widening of possibilities, but less coherent and daring than it thinks it is. As one of its more nebulous sentences begins, “Everything weird was the bottom line …” You never learn quite what it all means.