It’s like Crash without the racism.

by robynrobotron

My family has been sick, so I’ve gotten behind in my Cannonball Reading.  When you’re young, being sick gives you more time to read, but when you have others to take care of, that time is lost.  The Tesseract by Alex Garland has to do with loss as well (not the smoothest of segues, but that’s the best my cold addled brain could come up with).

The book is presented in three parts which eventually all collide.  The first tells us of an Englishman in Malaysia who is waiting to meet a gangster that he is supposed to be working with.  However, the state of the hotel room he’s in gives him the idea that he’s not there for a friendly meeting, hence it ends with a misunderstanding of Tarantinoesque proportions.  It also includes my favorite line in the book: “A cockroach zipped across the carpet like a miniature skateboard”.  It’s a nice mental picture for this former skater girl.

The middle section is devoted to lost love.  We meet a woman with a family of her own and are treated to flashbacks of her as an island girl falling in love with a fisherman.  She comes with the standard overbearing mother who sends her off to the mainland to prevent her from ending up stuck on the island forever.  This was my favorite section, partly due to me being a huge sap and partly to do with this section being the most developed.

The last bit concerns a couple of street kids and a psychologist who is studying their dreams.  It’s pretty interesting, however we don’t get very long to get to know them before they meet up with the other two plots.  Which is the crux of my issue with this book.  The characterizations are well done, but Garland has a habit of dropping bits of information and then not going anywhere with it.  As a result, the ending is anti-climactic and you’re left wondering about all that stuff.  Maybe that was intentional on his part, but I didn’t find it satisfying.