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seasoned with some Graham Greene.”)
It is certainly a more mature and reflexive study than
the fast and furious The Beach although personally I
find myself in with one foot in both camps; I was not
totally convinced by the characters in The Tesseract.
The use of film references and American slang works
perfectly in The Beach, when all the central characters
are European, but somehow I can’t quite imagine the
rural and local characters in The Tesseract coming out
with lines like: “You’ll be brained by a coconut.”
Set in the Philippines, the story interweaves three
narratives. Sean, an Englishman, is on the run from
two Filipino mafia henchmen. As they pursue him, he
stumbles into the kitchen of Rosa, a Filipino village girl
now living with her husband and children in Manila.
Cente, a 13-year-old street child, witnesses the encounter.
“Basically what you have in the book is a group
of people who can’t make sense of everything that’s
around them. And I think I use that as an anti-religious
argument,” Garland explains. “It’s sort of theistic. It’s
not even fate. The point is, sometimes things just happen
to people and it’s not for any cosmic or religious
reasons. Sometimes things just happen that way.”
As the above quote indicates, Garland has a knack
for seeing and expressing things in a very understandable
was, and this is no doubt part of his appeal to a
generation turned off by so called ‘classic’ yet impenetrable
authors. “I know exactly what you mean,”
BUY Alex Garland books online from and
Garland says. “I think if you asked the average literary
editor whether they thought my work was equitable
with Salman Rushdie’s, they would say no. Well, that’s
not something that bothers me very much and I doubt
very much that it bothers Salman Rushdie.” Garland’s
approach to the actual nuts and bolts of writing is similarly
nontraditional.
“For The Tesseract, I didn’t do any research,” he
confesses. “I’ve spent more time in The Philippines
than anywhere else so there was a certain kind of background
detail that I didn’t really have to research. But
in terms of putting yourself into the heads of different
characters, I’m not really fazed by this culture thing.
As long as people have enough money to live and
they are not starving to death, then basically people’s
preoccupations tend to be the same wherever you go.
They are worried about their jobs; they are worried
about whether their wife or husband is happy, or how
their kids are doing. I think I approached The Tesseract
thinking the culture is quite cosmetic.”
This may seem like a strange attitude for a man who
has made so much out of basing his work in exotic locations,
yet there is a sense that Garland uses South East
Asia as only as a backdrop. What he is really interested
in is the human story, the development and exploration
of different mental states. The way in which human beings
make sense of the world.
Having said this, there is no doubt that at least part of
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