A trinity of stories -- and a shadowy fourth

Author: By Paul Kafka

Date: SUNDAY, February 7, 1999

Page: H3

Section: Books

The Tesseract
By Alex Garland. Riverhead. 273 pp. $24.95

Alex Garland's second novel opens deceptively. Sean, a merchant seaman, waits in a Manila hotel room for a meeting with Don Pepe, the boss of a smuggling operation. When Don Pepe and three other men rush in from the street and up the stairs, Sean is convinced they are planning to kill him.

He strikes first, then runs for his life through the streets and alleyways of the city. Thus ``The Tesseract'' begins as a shoot-'em-up, and the reader settles in to see if Sean will escape. But Garland has three stories to tell, not one, and soon the thriller appears to have been the author's excuse to tell the other two.

The second is a tragic love story starring Rosa, a girl coming of age on the Philippines' rural Luzon coast. Rosa falls in love with a fisherman's son, who is not the boy her parents would have chosen for her. The third tale is an urban documentary about Cente, a 13-year-old street kid. Cente remembers growing up in a comfortable house on the outskirts of a small town, and coming to Manila as an 8-year-old with his father. His father disappears after telling Cente to wait for him on a street corner, and ``by the time night rolled around, Cente was a street kid.'' Perhaps, as Cente speculates, his father was robbed and killed. In any case, Cente has no idea how to find his old home, and for five years lives a nomadic existence in Manila's soup kitchens, its business district, and squatter towns.

In the end, Garland's thriller, his love story, and his documentary do not come together convincingly, even if the characters from all three meet up in an affluent Manila residential district one night.

But if Garland's plot is heavy-handed, the fault is easily forgiven. From the first page to the last, Garland's fine writing and the interest of two of his tales make ``The Tesseract'' a delightful novel. Sean, Rosa, Cente, and a half-dozen other figures emerge with startling authenticity and life.

There is, for instance, Don Pepe, an aristocrat of Spanish origin, obsessed with all things European. He lectures his bodyguards and driver relentlessly when the four men are stuck in a traffic jam en route to Sean's hotel:

`` `In 1762 the British occupied Manila, returning it to our control in the 1763 Treaty of Paris. I'd imagine that most Spanish are a little ashamed that the British took their land from them, even if it was two hundred years ago.'
`` `I suppose they are, sir. . . .'
`` `They had it for only a year. . . . Next to four hundred years of Spanish rule, eeeeh, it's a mere bagatelle.'
``Jojo and Teroy exchanged a glance. `Bagatelle?' Teroy mouthed, and Jojo gave a fractional shrug. . . .
`` `So,' Don Pepe continued. `There you are. The British once occupied Manila. A little-known fact.'
``Not in this car it isn't, thought Jojo, and released the handbrake, letting the car roll forward another couple of feet.''

Then there is Lito, the boy with whom Rosa falls in love on her long walks to school. He and Rosa are 16 and their feelings for each other are new. But Lito has the deck stacked against him. Not only is he a poor fisherman, he also has a mysterious inherited disease that caused him to be born without a left pectoral muscle, just as his father had a missing thigh muscle. None of this matters to Rosa:

``Rosa watched him for a few moments. He wasn't short, but he certainly wasn't tall either, and he was as black as the other boys who worked in the sea. But Lito was more handsome and less scarred than many of them, and he cut his hair much shorter. . . . Avoiding disco hair was no bad thing. Disco hair, Rosa commented to herself as she set off again towards Infanta, looked pretty ridiculous.''

Garland is perpetually in search of the Philippines. He explores the city, the countryside, the present, the past, always finding poverty and a rigid caste structure. When Rosa's parents discover that she loves Lito, they send her across the Sierra Madre mountains to Manila. Years later, married to another man and mother to two children, Rosa's betrayal of Lito and of herself still haunts her.

Cente's story is also about loyalty and social injustice. Cente has created a family of two with Totoy, another 13-year-old street dweller. Totoy has the body of an 8-year-old, the result of lifelong malnutrition. Totoy's favorite game is to leap onto Cente's back from hiding places overhead. Cente humors his friend by pretending not to see him.

Cente ``was well used to scanning for Totoy on walls, trees, and lampposts, and the quick silhouette on the scaffolding had not been difficult to identify. It had, however, left him with a small dilemma. The first level of scaffold . . . seemed high enough for the ambush to involve a potentially painful velocity. On the other hand, there was Totoy's disappointment to consider, and the whole issue of friendship.''

A tesseract is ``a hypercube unravelled,'' a ``representation of a four-dimensional space in three dimensions.'' Garland indicates that there is a hidden fourth dimension to his novel, one which unifies his three stories. The narrator explains to Cente and to the reader that: ``You exist in three spatial dimensions. In the same way that a . . . two-dimensional boy could not visualize a three-dimensional cube, you cannot visualize a hypercube.

``A hypercube is a thing you are not equipped to understand.
``You can understand only the tesseract.
``This means something.''

But what exactly does Garland's tesseract mean? Is the fourth dimension time itself, which connects the events of the novel's present to the past and future? Is the fourth dimension a theological plain, upon which the violent deaths that punctuate ``The Tesseract'' are an enactment of divine judgment?

Since Garland does not answer these questions, he would perhaps be better off if he stuck with the three dimensions he handles so skillfully. His young girls and old men, boys and grandmothers, are beautifully rendered. The Philippines open up before us, through Garland's imaginative labors, in a linguistic and historic abundance.

Like Graham Greene, Alex Garland takes familiar stories -- the murder thriller, the tragic romance, the orphan's wanderings -- and spins them into explosive political fiction. Perhaps the novel's fourth dimension is Garland's own insight into the Philippines, an island country about which he writes angrily, intimately, and lovingly.