One into three will go
Rory Dunlop
THE TESSERACT by Alex Garland Viking, £15.99, £19.99, pp. 288 Alex Garland's first novel, The Beach, was an enormous success; it won a prize for travel fiction, it has been made into a film with Leonardo di Caprio and (best of all) it is, if you believe feature writers, an essen- tial accoutrement for any would-be 'ladette' (Nineties woman). The Tesseract is his eagerly anticipated second novel. It is set in contemporary Manila and made up of three interconnecting short stories.
The first story is a mini-thriller: Sean, a character about whom we learn no more than his name, waits to meet a local gang- ster in a dingy hotel room. There may not be too much to this story but it is certainly dramatic. Although Garland's prose style may waver from pithy to trashy, it has, nonetheless, a fluidity which complements well the simple plot.
If the first story is all action and no char- acterisation, then the second is quite the opposite. An Indonesian woman reminisces about her childhood and first love as she waits for her husband to return home. Gar- land only gives himself time to sketch her character through flashbacks before sud- denly (if unsurprisingly) bringing the two stories together.
So, by now, we have a certain degree of tension and at least one character. The third story breaks away completely from the other two. It concerns an imaginative street-child and his relationship with a phi- lanthropic psychologist who pays money to hear and analyse his dreams. In the implausible persona of Alfredo, the psy- chologist, Garland allows himself several chapters to ramble on about life, death, fate and astrophysics.
Unfortunately his style is not so well suit- ed to tackling problems of metaphysics. Imagine a trailer for a Hollywood block- buster about chaos theory and you have something like the effect. Take, for exam- ple, the passage which explains the title: A cube unravels to a cross. Three dimensions unravel into two. A hypercube unravels to a tesseract. Four dimensions unravel to three. You exist in three spatial dimensions. In the same way that ... a two-dimensional boy could not visualise a three-dimensional cube,
you cannot visualise a hypercube. A hyper- cube is a thing you are not equipped to under- stand. You can only understand the tesseract.
The point, I think, is that we understand the hypercube only when it is unravelled into a tesseract in just the same way that we only understand the novel when it is unravelled into the three stories. However this subtle (but not very subtly put) point is somewhat spoiled by the next sentence: `This means something.'
Indeed several less illuminating facts about atoms, stars and the speed of light are tossed out in a speculative attempt to `mean something'. In the search for a 'new dimension' Garland all but gives up on the novel he had only half created. At the end of one passage Alfredo concludes, 'Some things are too complicated to be easily expressed'. Quite so and I suggest that Alex Garland, who has a gift for easy expression, should not strive so hard to be complicated.
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