THE TESSERACT

Alex Garland’s second novel explores the intricate workings behind every moment

67/100

Original Release: 1998

Author: Alex Garland

Favourite Quote:

“Light can never be seen at rest. Move as fast as you like. Start running, and keep accelerating until you’re racing across the solar system at two hundred and ninety nine kilometres a second. Then look at light. Far from having caught up, you’ll discover that it is still hurrying away from you at the same frantic speed it was before.”

“A hypercube is a thing you are not equipped to understand. You can only understand the tesseract. This means something. For you and for me, Cente, this is the way it is. We can see the thing unraveled, but not the thing itself.”

Every moment you experience is packed with an infinite amount of detail that you will never be able to see all of. What has happened in each individual’s, and object’s, life which has placed them in that exact position in that exact time to become a part of that moment? We can never truly grasp this, at least not all of it.

And as a result we can never truly understand each moment. Why people acted the way they did, why things were the way they were. We only understand the limited perspective we are given.

Alex Garland’s second novel The Tesseract attempts to give us all of this information so that we can truly understand one singular moment. The novel is structured based on characters. We are given at least a chapter with each major character. And are shown what long term and short term events have forced each character to be in this specific moment together.

Garland uses the non-linear structure that has become much more popular these days to be able to explore ideas of fate and also to provide a twist ending. Alternatively, Garland uses it to be able to tell three stories that are entirely different in genre and tone and also to explore how this idea of humans not being able to see the full picture can affect how we act.

Set in the Philippines we begin The Tesseract seeing through the eyes of Sean who is waiting for esteemed gangster Don Pepe in a hotel room. As we go inside his thoughts it appears that Sean is losing his mind and is convinced that he is about to be killed by the gangsters he is meant to meet up with.

This first section is quite riveting and suspenseful. Garland writes Sean’s descent into paranoia convincingly, and he captures the atmosphere of a gangster movie quite well.

But then we switch to the perspective of the gangsters coming to meet him. And this is where the first story begins to weaken. We are given some nice anecdotes about Don Pepe and the other gangsters. But it is quite a shift from Sean’s paranoiac ramblings and it isn’t quite as interesting. The final confrontation between these two stories is thrilling and is not given a conclusion meaning it is in the back of our minds for the rest of the novel.

The second section is through the eyes of Rosa, a mother with two children, who is waiting for her husband to come home and putting her children to bed as she hears a gunshot in the neighborhood. We are given an extensive history of her childhood, relationship with her parents and first love. As well as minor details about her husband and two children.

Even in an attempt to give you as much information as possible about a moment, Garland still fails to provide more than just the tesseract. We can never see the hypercube.

The backstory for Rosa is again a tonal shift. But this works better because we have moved to a totally different story and it is quite satisfying to get a totally different kind of story in this second section. It is moving, nostalgic and explores ideas of lower class and upper class.

The third section is a personal favourite. It seems to be the most like what Garland has written before, meaning that it is the most confident section of the novel. We follow two street kids, Vincente and Totoy, and their night in which they puncture a man’s tyre and chase gangsters down the street.

It also explores why the two kids came to live on the streets as well as their relationship with an older guy named Alfredo who pays them to tell him about their dreams. There is also a beautiful chapter in the middle of it about the different people that would want to kill a cat.

There are obvious links between each story. Some are obvious such as the street kids being the ones that punctured Rosa’s husband’s tyre. But they are also connected through themes such as tragedies. All the main characters experienced some sort of tragedy in the past which has brought them to where they are.

It explores the randomness of the world, and how we can’t control whether terrible things happen to us. And truly how at any moment everything can change. Especially because of the main theme of the book, which is that we can never see the full picture, only what appears in our limited vision.

The main flaw of the novel is that because we have to learn about so many characters we never really get a deep exploration of any of them. (Rosa is probably the most complex character we are introduced to.) And this meant in some cases I wanted to stay with characters much longer than we got. Or it meant some of the characters’ motives were unclear.

This is an ongoing problem with Garland’s writing. He can rush characters at times and have them do things that are unconvincing. An example of this is when Rosa’s first crush Lito pours acid on her son. Garland just hasn’t put in the groundwork with Lito to convince us that this is an action he would take.

But also this flaw contributes to the whole theme of the novel. Even in an attempt to give you as much information as possible about a moment, Garland still fails to provide more than just the tesseract. We can never see the hypercube.

The ending is underwhelming. There was a lot of potential to have crushing tension running throughout the scene, but instead nothing really happens. No major characters that we care about die, and it turns out to seem a bit rushed.

There are definitely some beautiful moments. There is a part where we get a brief few sentences from each major character’s point of view in that final scene. But ultimately you question what the point of it was. It seems as if Garland began with the characters and worked to the scene, whereas he should’ve had the scene in mind and then crafted the characters.

Overall it is an easy read. Once again Garland writes short chapters that are captivating and easy to follow so that even if you aren’t totally spellbound by the story it doesn’t take too much effort to get through it.

Alex Garland’s The Tesseract brings up interesting ideas of fate, tragedy and the divide between rich and poor. And also manages to merge many different genres and characters into one book with each, most of the time, seamlessly flowing on into the next. But mainly it is a book exploring how humans are not able to ever fully understand the intricate details behind a moment.