Friday, June 27, 2008

The Tesseract (Alex Garland)

Thank the lord for audiobooks. If it wasn’t for Martyn Reed’s voice reading me Alex Garland’s second book, The Tesseract, I would have died of boredom this past two days tidying my bedroom. As it was, with the convoluted plot being read to me whilst I did my summer cleaning, it was actually a pleasant experience.

I’ve not read Alex Garland’s debut, The Beach, but I’ve seen the film version of it, and, whilst I loved all the shots of Leonardo DiCaprio with his shirt off, I thought the film itself was ploddy and at parts, unintentionally hilarious. That said, it was still fairly thrilling, and thrill is something that The Tesseract offered from the start to finish.

Told in four parts, The Tesseract begins with Sean, a sailor on the shipping waters of Manila, waiting in a run-down motel for the gangster, Don Pepe to pay him a visit. Next, the story shifts to a doctor, Rosa, who is waiting for her husband Sonny to come home, as she reminisces about her first love, Lito. The next story follows two young Filipino hustlers, Vincente and Totoy, as they wander the streets of Manila in search of some easy dosh. And then there’s the finally, so climactic, so wonderfully clever in weaving the three threads together, that it makes Magnolia look like Little Britain.

The ambitious plot device made The Tesseract are hard story to write, but Garland completely succeeds. His modulates tone perfectly; from the nervous panic in Sean’s strand, to the romantic and bittersweet telling of Rosa’s romance of Lito, to the philosophical musings of Alfredo, a psychologist who Vincente and Totoy go to to sell their dreams to. At times, the pseudo-science gets a bit grating, and the flashback-within-flashback strategy left me a bit confused. I liked the novel most when it played things simple; and my favourite plot of the three was by far Rosa's, the tale of her and Lito was handled very beautifully.

Towards the end, Garland ran the serious risk of running himself off at a tangent, but luckily, he kept the story in control. The finale is as interesting as it is satisfying, tying in all three plot strands with one denouement, like the converging Tesseract of the title.

Oh, and the book was read aloud by Martyn Reed, who has a lovely voice; very deep and enigmatic.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

"it makes Magnolia look like Little Britain."

Never put those two in the same sentence again.

Kayleigh said...

What books are you going to read next? I've gone and bought Hamlet and The Woman In Black with birthday money and have a WH Smith token that's just asking to be spent on a Fry book.

Emma said...

Well, I started on The Lady & the Unicorn today on the bus, which I really liked (Chevaliar rox!), I've got two Agatha Christies and two Paul Auster books lined up, plus I do actually need to get the very end of Memories of My Melancholy Whores by GG Marquez (which is only 100 pages). It was really bad, but I just need to finish it completely so I can bitch about it.

I've read one Stephen Fry book, his autobiography I think, and I found it really uplifting and interesting. The bits about his teenage years doing petty theft and "scrounging for the odd blowjob" (or something) was hilarious! I love Stephen Fry!

Anonymous said...

Hey Emma, I saw the film of this today! I didn't realise it was a book you'd read (I didn't remember the title) until about half way through, with the changing perspectives.

The film was crap though.

Anonymous said...

any idea where I can download a free audio book of the beach by Alex garland ?

silent_whistler_uk@yahoo.com

thanks