The Tesseract Read online

  Praise for

  The Tesseract

  “Remarkable…Garland is a master at capturing that elastic moment before tragedy rips through the surface of ordinary life. Even in moments of explosion, he catches every contradictory thought of terror and compassion.”

  —The Christian Science Monitor

  “Alex Garland works words the way a spider spins webs. Interweaving disparate story lines, he builds suspenseful narrative tapestries out of seemingly unrelated events. An expertly hewn page-turner…gripping.”

  —Time Out New York

  “As thoroughly assured a performance as The Beach…Mr. Garland not only does a completely convincing job of sketching in these characters’ lives in a series of quick, deftly drawn strokes, but he also fluently cuts back and forth between their stories, building suspense the way a film editor does, even as he is tying his disparate heroes’ tales together with dozens of overlapping motifs. All those small details…come together to give the reader a mosaiclike view of Manila. Mr. Garland is a natural at orchestrating violent set pieces with deadpan panache, but he also proves in this novel that he can create odd, oddly sympathetic people with unexpected inner lives. [The Tesseract] reconfirms his prodigious and diverse talents.”

  —MICHIKO KAKUTANI, The New York Times

  “Inventive and compelling…[Garland’s] brain beats with the energy of ideas and the courage to bridge the big questions.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Complex and intriguing…This subtle fiction has nothing to do with the higher maths and a lot to do with good old-fashioned storytelling about big, old-fashioned themes—the mysteries of love and violence and death, the strange workings of fate. Mr. Garland tells a good, straightforward story, and he writes with great polish and superior control; so much control, in fact, that, like his characters, you don’t really realize what’s going on until it’s too late. The Tesseract marks a significant departure from, and growth since, The Beach. Like a tesseract, it is composed of three dimensions that, in the end, inevitably imply a larger and more significant fourth…each story is delicately observed and ingeniously linked to the others…”

  —New York Observer

  “The tales converge in a climax that will leave you…impressed with the author’s skill…a steam engine of a narrative.”

  —Newsweek

  “A novel that bristles with suspense…Garland’s skill at creating tension keeps the novel driving forward with the force of a thriller…mature, intelligent, and rewarding.”

  —People

  “Garland…possesses an exquisite ability to handle the English language. [He] remains a writer to watch.”

  —USA Today

  “A page-turner…[Garland] spins a terrific yarn; he has an admirable gift for capturing relationships with the whisk of a pen…. The Tesseract is a dashing tour de force of novelistic skill.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “A richly emotional narrative…Garland lends a surprising lyricism to…ordinary Filipino lives. Garland’s spare prose, combined with exotic foreign locations and a dry wit, has drawn favorable comparisons to such writers as Graham Greene and J. G. Ballard.”

  —Harper’s Bazaar

  “A swift psychological thriller…its fallout is the bleak heart of the novel, analogous to weepy snapshots interleaved with Garland’s sharp, beautifully rendered stills of the final shoot-out…. A novel high on skill.”

  —Spin

  “A thriller of elegant and complex austerity…The Tesseract delivers tremendous speed and style, a style that’s utterly pared away yet still allusive and oblique…. Mr. Garland’s dash of experimentalism, his sleek craftsmanship, the confident way he handles the details of Filipino life and his apparent ease, like [Graham] Greene’s, in moving between pop-genre demands and deeper literary concerns: All of these mark him as a highly promising young novelist.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  “One of the most structurally complex noir novels ever written.”

  —Booklist

  “From the first page to the last, Garland’s fine writing [makes] The Tesseract a delightful novel. Sean, Rosa, Cente, and a half-dozen other figures emerge with startling authenticity and life. His young girls and old men, boys and grandmothers are beautifully rendered. The Philippines open up before us, through Garland’s imaginative labors, in a linguistic and historic abundance. Like Graham Greene, Alex Garland takes familiar stories—the murder thriller, the tragic romance, the orphan’s wanderings—and spins them into explosive political fiction. Perhaps the novel’s fourth dimension is Garland’s own insight into the Philippines, an island country about which he writes angrily, intimately, and lovingly.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Is Alex Garland the new Graham Greene? After The Tesseract, the question needs to be asked.”

  —J. G. BALLARD, author of Empire of the Sun

  “The reader will come away impressed by his sense of place and his unique storytelling, which combines a brisk, complex plot with an ability to get into the souls and skins of people.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Intriguing and intricate…Fast-paced, suspenseful, and thought-provoking, this is top-drawer fiction and highly recommended.”

  —Library Journal (starred)

  “Provocatively complex…Garland lures us into a world where logic is turned on its ear and coincidence is simply how life is. In Garland’s world, as with Graham Greene’s, good and evil are rarely that…. A century ago another English writer, Thomas Hardy, created novels where coincidence played a significant role in his characters’ lives to show that man can never escape a preordained fate. Garland goes him one better, suggesting that destiny is preordained not by some universal force but rather by linked events and individual perception of existence. Only when a life is fully unfolded can we see the flaws in our perception; beforehand, the fourth dimension of existence remains a mystery.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Garland has a gift for moving the action along.”

  —Salon.com

  “Like [Graham] Greene, [Garland] creates atmosphere, and specifically an atmosphere of foreign political intrigue and violence that grabs you and keeps you.”

  —Elle

  “Breakneck pacing and lucid, graceful prose…[Garland’s] writing remains refreshingly direct.”

  —Paper

  “Bravura writing.”

  —Boston Herald

  “Excellent…[Garland’s] books deal with alienation, atheism and apathy in a direct, straightforward way…. A fresh, honest voice.”

  —The Sunday Oregonian

  “Garland has given us an existential thriller, a suspense story but with a cosmic twist. In a fictional genre in which so many fail, this is a rare and valuable achievement.”

  —The Sunday Star-Ledger

  “Most young authors get trapped in their own neurotic microworlds, but Garland goes global, scouring the Pacific Rim to produce dark, stark tales of menace and suspense…his fast, clean prose echoes Yanks like Hemingway.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Alex Garland’s literary future looks superb.”

  —Star-Telegram (Ft. Worth, TX)

  “Intricate, absorbing, and suspenseful…The Tesseract confirms [Garland’s] status as a gifted writer and an uncanny observer. It’s a spare work, filled with haunting images and telling vignettes that illuminate the characters’ lives like flashes of lightning…. His picture of Manila and its society is believable and authoritative, without any extraneous details or false notes…. [The Tesseract] engages the reader on multiple levels and sticks in the mind long after it’s been put down.”

  —The Grand Rapids Press (MI)

  “An extr
aordinarily powerful and immensely literary book [which] borders perilously close to the edge of brilliant…. Here we have a profoundly intelligent and beautifully complex tale of human emotion: of the error of coincidence; of the fickleness of fate; of the lottery of survival…. Mesmerizing and mysterious.”

  —The Herald (Glasgow)

  “Garland writes superbly about Manila’s jeepney traffic, streets, and urchins…. Fast-paced action…elegant prose. The Tesseract is a zingy, superbly crafted entertainment.”

  —The Evening Standard (London)

  “A brave, ambitious novel which proves that Garland is an important writer capable of great sensitivity and intelligence.”

  —The Times (London)

  “Bravura storytelling…A tense, jittery but oddly consoling read, The Tesseract proves defiantly that Garland’s far from a one-hit wonder.”

  —Time Out

  “His exotic locations and metaphysical preoccupations have led Garland to be compared with Graham Greene. His cold eye and menaced sense of the sheer strangeness of the world bring him just as close to J. G. Ballard…. The Tesseract is as spooky and compelling as it is thoughtful.”

  —The Observer (London)

  “A brilliantly structured, surprisingly compassionate novel, disguised as an exotic, speedy thriller. Astonishing.”

  —The Mail on Sunday

  “Laden with tension…moments of surprising sweetness.”

  —Times Literary Supplement

  “To nick one of his phrases in this astonishing book, Alex Garland’s writing is as beautiful and rare as his own fingerprint…. Hornby, Ishiguro and Ballard all admire his work. You should too.”

  —The List

  “Perfectly paced and put-together.”

  —Independent on Sunday

  “A vivid and highly entertaining book that promises even greater fireworks for its young author.”

  —The Sunday Times

  “The work of a mature, sophisticated professional.”

  —Daily Mail

  Praise for the International Bestseller

  The Beach

  also a major motion picture

  “Alex Garland, at age twenty-six, seems like a natural-born storyteller. He’s written a furiously intelligent first novel about backpacker culture in Southeast Asia, a book that moves with the kind of speed and grace many older writers can only daydream about. Just as impressively, Garland has written what may be the first novel about the search for genuine experience among members of the so-called X Generation—twentysomethings weaned on video games, MTV, and decades’ worth of pop detritus—that’s not snide or reflexively cynical…. The Beach combines an unlikely group of influences—Heart of Darkness, Vietnam war movies, Lord of the Flies, the Super Mario Brothers video game—into…ambitious, propulsive fiction.”

  —The Washington Post

  “[The Beach is] that real rarity: a subtle and complex novel that reads like a comet.”

  —Salon.com

  “The Beach is impressive in its group portrait of a new generation of young vagabonds. Raised in an era of diminished confidence, they have set out in search of something that feels genuine and fulfilling. What they find turns out to be not utopia but hell.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “You have in your hands one great book…. The Beach will astonish readers…. Builds to a crackling finale, complete with interesting moral questions. But this is no mere thriller. Garland explores the roots of his generation’s ennui in the way he shows that our global popular media has saturated their brains. Not since reading Donna Tartt’s The Secret History has this reader been so taken with a first novel.”

  —USA Today

  “Garland shows a precociously sure hand in this taut, exotic thriller.”

  —People

  “Generation X has its first great novel…. A wonderful adventure and allegory that may be the best novel written by anyone currently younger than thirty.”

  —The Sunday Oregonian

  “The Beach is fresh, fast-paced, compulsive, and clever—a Lord of the Flies for Generation X. It has all the makings of a cult classic.”

  —NICK HORNBY, author of High Fidelity and About a Boy

  “A prediction: Alex Garland’s The Beach will be remembered down the years not as a neo-hippy cult hit but as our first glimpse of a huge literary talent.”

  —KAZUO ISHIGURO, The Sunday Times (London)

  The Tesseract

  Alex Garland

  Riverhead Books, New York

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

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  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196,

  South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 1999 by Alex Garland

  Cover design © 1999 by Marc J. Cohen

  Front cover photographs: Top © Theo Westenberger / Graphistock;

  Bottom right © Kathryn Millan / Graphistock

  Book design by Chris Welch

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Riverhead is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The Riverhead logo is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  First Riverhead hardcover edition: January 1999

  First Riverhead trade paperback edition: January 2000

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the Riverhead hardcover edition as follows:

  Garland, Alex.

  The Tesseract / by Alex Garland.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-65763-8

  I. Title.

  PR6057.A639T47 1999 98-29847 CIP

  823’.914—dc21

  For Theo & Leo

  The larger the searchlight,

  the larger the circumference of the unknown

  DICK TAYLOR

  Table of Content

  Part I

  Black Dog

  The Conquistador

  The Squall

  Son-Less

  A Running Man

  Part II

  Black Dog Is Coming

  Flower Power

  Sandmen

  Locked and Lost

  Perro Mío

  Hollow Be Thy Name

  The Conquistador Closes His Eyes

  Part III

  Black Dog Is Here

  The Reason of Sleep

  Rapid Eye Movement

  Rescuing Girls

  QED

/>   Supersymmetries

  Part IV

  The Tesseract

  Part I

  Black Dog

  1.

  There was no bright color in the room.

  Outside, there was plenty. Through the bars of the window, Sean could see sunlight on drifting litter and flashes of foliage in the narrow gaps between squatter shacks. But inside, nothing. Beige and khaki, faded by age, muted by the hopelessly dim lamps that sat on each side of his bed.

  “Stains,” said Sean under his breath. It was something that the hotel room had in common with the street two stories below. In both places, there wasn’t a single surface without some kind of grubby scar; everything marked by rain or dust, smoke, the overspill from the open sewers, the open fires that burned on the pavement. And blood. There was blood on the bedsheets. The spatter had paled from a few hard scrubs, but it was still rustily recognizable for what it was.

  “Heat.”

  The other thing that his room shared with the city. Oozing out from the sun, heat like molasses. Once it touched you, you were stuck with it.

  It had touched Sean that afternoon as he sat on Manila Bay’s low harbor wall, looking out at the cargo ships and their fat anchor chains. Up to then he’d been protected by the reassuring air-con of an Ermita McDonald’s. He’d gone there for breakfast, around ten A.M., with a copy of AsiaWeek rolled in his fist. At eleven-fifteen he’d stood up to leave and walked toward the exit, where the blue-uniformed McDonald’s security guard had obligingly lowered his stockless shotgun and held the door open. Or obligingly held the door open and lowered his stockless shotgun. Either way, one blast of the scorched air and Sean had spun on his heels and marched back inside.

  But cool as it was in McDonald’s, after a couple of hours Sean could feel the edges of his mind starting to fray. It wasn’t the obsessive wiping and washing and ashtray removing so much as the sprawling children’s party that had commandeered half the seating area. Overweight rich kids with sulky faces and stripy sailor shirts, shouting at their nannies. No more than eight or nine, most of them, and already groomed for a life in politics. Why did this tubby elite choose to celebrate in a hamburger joint, Sean had wondered as he burst a balloon that had been bounced into his face. The sound made a dozen adult heads turn, and had one of the minders reaching under his barong tagalog to the bulge in his waistband. So, time to go.