Rating: 
Summary: A study in writing technique.
Review: I found it gripping all the way through, story telling for its
own sake, a study in how to grab and hold the readers attention.It was also an interesting look into life in the Phillipines, at
least as viewed by Mr. Garland.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant...
Review: I wasn't sure what to expect after reading Alex Garland's incredible debut, The Beach. I was hoping for similar excitement and fast-paced adventure. Well, I definitely got that in spades! The Tesseract is so much more realistic and dramatic, and I was feverishly turning pages to find out how this tesseract would unravel. Told in four parts, The Tesseract begins with Sean, a sailor on the shipping waters of Manila, waiting in a seedy, run-down motel for the gangster, Don Pepe, and his motley crew. Then the story switches gears entirely and begins the tale of Rosa, a woman who remembers her first love, Lito, through flashbacks. This part of the story is told gently and almost romantically. The next story follows two Filipino street kids, Vincente and Totoy, as they wander the streets of Manila in search of hand-outs and a little excitement. Finally, the fourth part, a gritty and fantastic conclusion, has all three stories violently entwined. I'm positive this novel was no easy feat to write; however, Alex Garland has done it flawlessly. The stories within this novel are powerful and dramatic, some violent, one wistful and romantic, and all are stunning and solid. A perfect novel to pick apart and invoke energetic discussions. Some things might go over novice readers' heads (when one of the characters, Alfredo, waxes philosophic), but for the most part it is easily understood. A highly recommended novel about how your destiny can be shaped by strangers, and how forces beyond your control can come crashing into your life in a moment's notice. Brilliant.
Rating: 
Summary: It's No "Beach," But It'll Do Just Fine
Review: While I personally prefer Garlands first novel "The Beach," "The Tesseract" is certainly an excellent book as well. It may be challanging at some points for younger or less mature readers (condescention intended), but read it again and try to get it. I would know about "not-mature-enough" factor, by the way. I read this first two years ago, and didn't pass Sean, and again a year after that, where I couldn't get further than 15 pages into Rosa. Now, having just finished it, I can honestly say that the payoff is extream. It does come off as kind of a tease starting with Sean, but putting him in at first was the best way to catch attention. Would you read this book at all if it began with Rosa? Most likely not.
Rating:
Summary: an unexpected yet thoroughly engaging story...
Review: The Tesseract starts off so much like The Beach (Alex Garland's first novel). The setting is a slimey hotel in the tropics (Manila), and we have a man caught up in some rather nasty (criminal) business. However just as the tension really builds the author does a major context switch and the reader is then told the lives of various tangential Filipino characters. In the end Alex Garland pulls everyone together for a rather shocking (read: violent) finale. Weird? Yes. But surprisingly well done. For me The Tesseract is a better book than The Beach, an incredibly successful first novel by Garland. Firstly the author really captures the sense of despair of the Filipino people and the seedy, humid, polluted, and impoverished elements of Manila. Rather than being a singular story of urban violence Alex Garland paints a panorama of unfortunate lives. While its "bouncy" structure works very well generally I thought the beginning (mondo violence) and ending (mondo violence) were a bit inconsistent with the rest of the book (human drama, no violence). But unlike The Beach, The Tesseract certainly isn't cool. No sex, no drugs, and no beautiful people. It's just a well-written novel...
Rating:
Summary: Garland's Second Effort...
Review: Garland's second effort as a professional author is actually quite good. His first book being the award-winning The Beach - he did have a tough act to follow. This book reads very much like a "Pulp Fiction format." It is three stories woven into each other, while having flashbacks upon themselves at the same time. You really have to read it to get what I am saying, and you really have to know writing to appreciate how difficult it can be to write the way Garland did. I give him more credit as an author after reading this book. I did not, however, like this story as much as I enjoyed The Beach story. By its very nature, sometimes I got the names confused bouncing from one story to the next (and as an american I also can't relate to the asian names, and remember who is who clearly.) Short of those minor issues I still enjoyed the story. The way Garland describes things, it is like you can actually picture being there -- which is rare for authors to do. Many try and fail, but this is one modern author who does paints a picture for you with his words. Something you can't learn in college... I recommend if you have read The Beach or not, but if you haven't read The Beach get that book also. They are both excellent and very quick reads.
Rating:
Summary: A truly fantastic book about fate
Review: The Tesseract is a brilliant book ... rich and multilayered, subtly playing on the ideas of destiny and fate without directly introducing them. It is divided into three main sections, following first Sean, waiting to meet the gangster Don Pepe in a roach-infested motel; Rosa, a doctor haunted by her past and first love Lito; and Vincente, an intelligent and thoughtful kid cast adrift on the rough streets of Manila. The back of the book says something like 'in three hours, their destinies will violently collide.' - which pretty much sums it up. The Tesseract is a sophisticated book about fate but also anti-fate - it's recurring theme is the possibilities of destiny (along with the other themes of expendability, and random unfairness, of life) without being directly about destiny. It can't have been easy to get this right - but Alex Garland did, to perfection. I would recommend it to anyone. At any level, it's enjoyable. At the very least it's an interesting, thought-provoking read and a gritty look at Manila. Read it a little deeper and all sorts of subtleties, links and themes become apparent - and it's all these apparently inconsequential details that bring the book together. Mr Garland really is an excellent writer who has created a carefully crafted and detailed story about three interlocking lives. I suggest you give it a try.
Rating:
Summary: Getting better, Mr Garland
Review: Okay, I'll state my position on 'The Beach' straight up (well, everyone else seems to) I thought that Garland's previous book was good - not great, but good. I thought that it might have been great to start with, but felt eventually that it was too long and the ending was rushed and confused - I still don't think I'm sure what happened (perhaps I'll find out if I ever watch the film). So I felt Garland was just another prettyboy brand-name dropping, overhyped, right-place-right-time-face-fits-nice-smile writer. But this book is great - not brilliant, but great and there are few enough of these to be thankful for them when they come along. The story shows us perhaps a dozen people in sympathetic characterisation, all of whose lives become dramatically interlinked in the events of one blood-soaked Manilla evening. Everything is a shade of grey, everything portrayed is understandable if not forgivable (except the spoiled, power-hungry Don Pepe) and all is believable - from the out-of-his-depth Englishman abroad, Sean, trying to cut an unspecified deal in a seedy hotel with folk he doesn't trust, to the streetwise bario child Vincente still trying to understand why his well-off father never returned to the traffic lights with his soda-pop five years before. Having been lent 'The Beach' as a "you've simply got to read this" book and finding this one while on holiday, I've still never actually owned an Alex Garland book. If his next one is as much of an improvement upon 'The Tesseract' as that one is upon 'The Beach', however, I certainly think I'll be buying his third novel.
Rating:
Summary: Something Different
Review: Garland will not escape the comparison between the Beach and the Tesseract. All those who have read both books feel some sort of unutterable compulsion to place them side by side and declare one the victor. I will not do so. Instead, I will say that I loved both books. While the Beach was more psychological, descriptive and in many ways more full, the Tesseract is exploding with measured terse prose and riveting characterization. Each character that Garland paints is as complete and complex as the last. They come together naturally without being forced into the same scene, confused and startled, dissapointed and moved. Its as if Garland was a chance observer of the most remarkable events, not a storyteller. This book reminds me of life, the way it would be viewed if someone had the ability to step back and probe it with soft fingers and a keen eye. Garland has this gift, and both the Beach and the Tesseract are more than worth their while. Garland is something different entirely, his insight is not forced, his quirks not heavy handed, he comes across warm and distant, full and ghostlike, the semiomniscient charcter in every scene, never the writer behind some laptop in England. A fantastic all too short read. My only dissapointment with Garland's work is that there is not another volume for me to get my hands on... yet.
Rating:
Summary: Garland's true breakthrough
Review: The majority of nergative reviews were apparently expecting something on the order of "The Beach Part 2." Usually people complain when a favorite artist merely rehashes his earlier work, but Garland chose not to do this, and gets slammed for it. While the Beach was a great book, a study of today's youth culture wrapped around a wonderful story. AG outdid himself with this book, an analogy of the f***ed-up ways life works, and one for fiction itself. A tesseract is someone that no one earth can and or ever will understand- the only way to study it is to reduce it to one or several cubes, something manageable. Life is the same way- you can never understand everything that happens, or why it happens. The only way to understand it is to view it in several reduced parts- which is just what any book or story does. The plot itself is great, weaving in and out of the different characters to show all the different sides of a bloody gun battle in Manila. If you don't think the main storyline is too impressive, think about all the people who are involved but who are not mentioned often or at all- the hotel clerk at the Patay, Alan, and the former captain of the Karamajoun, the police who will be investigating the shootings- those people are all part of the little slice of life that the book presents, are all part of the tesseract, some huge, undefinable thing we can't comprehend. While the book failed to be as descriptive and evocative in its portrayal of Manila as the Beach was (its main shortcoming), it made up for it in many other ways. The first part of the book alone is worth the price for the wonderful writing Garland has produced, some of the best I've ever read.
Rating: 
Summary: BOOO!!
Review: IF YOU LIKE "THE BEACH", DON'T BUY THIS BOOK. IT LEADS NOWHERE. HE BUILDS UP THE CHARACTERS AND TENSION ONLY TO END LEAVING YOU WITH NOTHING. I DON'T KNOW, BUT MABYE I MISSED SOMETHING.
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