Apostrophe S

Some definitions of a tesseract describe it as a hypercube unraveled, and others as the hypercube itself. I chose the version used here only because I happen to prefer it.

— afterward, “The Tesseract”

“The Tesseract” is the kind of book that if you’re not paying attention, you’ll find you’ve read 40 pages without realizing it. I hate the term “page turner,” but this book certainly qualifies. I think it has something to do with author Alex Garland’s writing style.

I’d been wanting to pick this book up for a while, since reading Garland’s “The Beach,” one of my favorite books of the last 10 years or so.

The plot is deceptively simple. A mob boss and his two henchmen visit an English smuggler in a sleazy Manila hotel. The English smuggler gets spooked when they arrive, and a gun battle follows, which spills into the streets and concludes — rather violently — in a nearby residential neighborhood. Garland offers us four distinct perspectives from four characters present at the final showdown. Each character is unable to understand the reasons or causes for the event that they find themselves involved in. Just like a 3-demensional person can’t visualize a 4-demensional hypercube, each of the characters can’t visualize all of the paths that lead up to the final scene. They can only see their piece of the unfolded projection. The reader of “The Tesseract,” however, can see the event unraveled, with each path branching out from the finale like the cubes branch out from the center of the 3-dimensional projection of the hypercube, also known as the tesseract.

OK, now that you’re confused, head on over to the Wikipedia article on the hypercube and see if you can make any sense out of it.

There’s not much to examine with this story. It’s just a hell of a good yarn. Check it out.

Next book, “Fahrenheit 451″ by Ray Bradbury.

[This article is part of the 26 Books project that I'm doing this year.]