text: magic show

Magic Show: Alex Garland's The Tesseract

Now that The Beach is about to be shown in Manila and will surely capture quite a number of the Generation (te)X(t), perhaps it is an opportune time to reintroduce that other much-hyped Alex Garland excursion, The Tesseract. "Reintroduce" is the proper term because words have already been spread around about the genius of Garland who, at 26, has been compared to William Golding and Graham Greene. Sudden collective adulation is always suspicious to me, but if you have writers from J. G. Ballard to Ruel De Vera (of the Inquirer) commending your work, surely things can't go wrong. So allow me first to pay my own homage: Alex Garland is a cunning writer and The Tesseract is a cunning book. And then this: that is exactly why the book is a problem.

A Tesseract?

A tesseract is a four-dimensional construct of a cube. The Geometry Center offers an approach of fleshing out this mathematical concept:

Start with a point. Make a copy of the point, and move it some distance away. Connect these points. You have a segment. Make a copy of the segment, and move it away from the first segment in a new orthogonal direction. Connect corresponding points. You have an ordinary square. Make a copy of the square, and move it in a new orthogonal direction. Connect corresponding points. You now have a cube. Make a copy and move it in the fourth orthogonal direction. Connect corresponding points. The result is a tesseract.

The process follows how the story evolved. There is a single point at the start: Sean, a young Englishman killing time in a run-down Ermita hotel/motel to meet a local crime boss, Don Pepe, who controls the cargo boats plying the Southern Seas. Garland is brilliant in the way he turns the room itself to press on the paranoia of this young merchant. One can imagine a camera panning frenetically around the room: the stains on the ceiling and the walls, lizards and roaches, the plate on the door covering rotten wood. But this is only the start. Garland took this point and made a segment with Don Pepe, a sugar baron with a merciless disposition and a spurious disdain for his Filipino lineage. In this segment are various points consisting of his hitmen— among others, an ambivalent neophyte who does not know how to use a gun and a stereotypical sipsip, aiming for his past, and his crimes. This part contains some of the more effective devices; the tale of the red mist hovering above a sugarcane cutter's head echoes of magic realism.

The other points of the tesseract are eventually charted: Rosa, a doctor who can not shake off the memory of her first man in a distant village, and Vicente, a precocious street thug abandoned by his father in the city. But three points do not a tesseract complete, so Garland draws up a host of other characters. We meet Teroy, Jojo, Sonny, Corazon, Lito, Panding, Raphael, and, finally, Alfredo, who is a buyer of dreams. There is fascination in the way Garland introduces each character and the way he whisks them off the stage the moment the reader's interest is hooked. The reader is always left craving for more.

A Magic Show

This is why, in a lot of ways, The Tesseract is a magic show. Utilizing multi-layered flashbacks and multi-faceted angles, Garland not only was able to reveal insights about the characters, but revels in the exercise of shifting his characters from foreground to background and back again. Just like the geometrical figure, the story can be seen from any point (in fact, can be read from any point) and the reader can still have the whole picture, although whole is not the precise word. The trick of introducing new characters and stories in various places and various times only to converge at an explosive event in the end has been done before, but somehow Garland made it fresh and distinct.

So what's the problem?

Garland has traveled a lot to southeast Asia since he visited India when he was 17. He claims that among the countries abroad, he has stayed in the Philippines the longest, and among the cities he has visited he likes Manila the most. In an interview with Spike magazine, Garland said that his long stay in the Philippines afforded him deep insights about the country that he practically did not have to do any background research for the book. Maybe he should have. In the same interview, Garland said that he never deemed culture to be crucial to the storyline, that what he was after was the idea of people being suddenly caught in situations that not only challenge, but paralyze their understanding. It is a universal picture, alright, and one can just as easily situate all the events that happened in the book in Sao Paulo or Hong Kong or Chicago and one will still be able to convey any supposition across.

I always have trouble with foreigners who spend a year or two (or a summer) in another country and write a book as if they know its people inside out. This is sensitive ground to tread on, as a lot of such writers have produced literary gems that allowed us to intrude into the consciousness of people and cultures totally alien from ours. This is how multiculturalism grows. But Garland, with all his magical skills, is no Greene or Paul Bowles. His is a start in a dangerous direction of multicultural understanding, which in itself is a fickle area. Several quotations in the blurb praise Garland's tight narrative and his excellent choice of an exotic location. I hate this word. Where does one draw a line between exotic locations and understanding of the exotic? How does a place end up being positioned as exotic? From whose point of view is it?

The theme may be universal, but having chosen Manila, Garland owes his readers a lot beyond surface perception. Having chosen his narrative style, he is bound to provide more than just fast-paced descriptions of the city's crimes and grime. Although peppered with expressions that capture the nuances of Pinoy expressions, Garland failed to account for some issues that may dazzle a Western reader, but only baffle a common Pinoy. Why did Rosa discount her former lover's acid attack on her child? Why would a wife of a rich and seemingly successful man commit suicide? Why would a father take his child to the city and abandon him? Is there any Pinoy, really, who refers to his mother-in-law—just like many in the West—by her first name? How does Vicente deal with the streets? Without any answer to these and hundreds of other questions, Garland only succeeded in retelling stereotypical plots and characters. One can argue that Garland leaves all of these to the reader's imagination, but one can argue that he just ran out of his own.

Maybe Garland should have just stuck himself with a foreigner's perspective, the way he employed it in The Beach. Again, just like the geometrical figure, too many surfaces are spun in front of the reader to ground it to any solid understanding. Alfredo muttered by the end of the book, "A hypercube is a thing you are not equipped to understand...this is the way it is. We can see something unraveled, but not the thing itself." I can imagine college students in cafés in Paris or trains to Amsterdam in intense meditation over these lines. I can imagine backpackers in Mexico or Bangkok in heated deliberation over these existentialist passages. But hey, it's all a magic show, really. Because after all the tricks Garland churned page after page, after all the explosions and excitement, there's nothing there worth sinking one's teeth in. You are left wanting for more but you know all you will have is more of the same. Then again, maybe Garland never meant anything more with those lines than excuse himself from his own show.

(This piece appears with an slightly different content at www.getasia.com.ph)