Books like The Tesseract

The Tesseract by Alex Garland is a novel that lets the reader wonder at his own insignificance. It is a theme that's already been implanted there, in the modern reader’s sophisticated brain, by Voltaire, and made new again by this generation’s collective and personal psyche, which is quite enormous/ambitious in scope. It’s no travesty to say that the society of 2011 is somewhat the intended dream of our future from way before the millennium--that is, we are living the 2011 version according to 1999, the very oracular year. There is an omnipresent ghost that hovers above it all, called Globalization, and this specter is felt everywhere: from the smallest villages of Thailand to the most industrialized cosmopolitan cities of the U.S. This current feeling had been hinted at way before it even got here. Alex Garland is a remarkable writer. He says that there is in life, in his novel, “something… you are not equipped to understand.” The Tesseract is "[that] thing unraveled, but not the thing itself.” (249) This conclusion is reached only after having read the three distinct vignettes which finally come together in the impressive fourth act. Cohesiveness is found once all stories are put together, like a jigsaw puzzle. The three stories are completely different from one another in tone and style, though the writer’s voice is identifiable & easy to read (but it strays from the comprehensible by oftentimes entering the realm of the poetic). This writer has very little to hide: he is definitely more about exposing secrets than hiding them (as opposed to countless other great modern British novels, including Ishiguru’s Never Let Me Go, Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty or anything Julian Barnes). The Tesseract is a terrific Masterpiece.