Wrestling With Big Questions While Lives Unravel in Manila

I don’t know that Amtrak derailments or freeway pileups make many people these days think of Brother Juniper, the 18th century red-haired Franciscan monk of Thornton Wilder’s novel “The Bridge of San Luis Rey.” When the Inca bridge of the title collapses, throwing five very different travelers to their perdition, Brother Juniper, feeling that it is “high time for theology to take its place among the exact sciences,” tries to find out who these random travelers were and what divine plan might have brought them to a common end on July 20, 1714. It’s a question that even we hardened departure-lounge atheists ask.

Englishman Alex Garland is another Brother Juniper. His second novel, “The Tesseract,” throws three sets of characters not off a bridge, but into a domino game of encounters leading to a tragedy as bloody and pointless as any Brother Juniper or Quentin Tarantino ever saw.

The setting is suburban Manila, a locale painted so devoid of exoticism and air-conditioning that the most colorful sanctuary is McDonald’s. It is there that Sean, a clueless British merchant seaman, waits for an appointment with the mestizo mafioso, Don Pepe. Outside the restaurant, Totoy, a 13-year-old street kid small enough to pass for 8, stands on a wall, waiting for his friend Vincente. On a good day, they earn a couple of pesos reciting their dreams to Alfredo, a rich psychologist searching for the meaning of his young wife’s suicide. Meanwhile, Rosa, a housewife and mother, daydreams about her first love back in the provinces, even as she tends to her family in the suburbs.

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As night falls, waiting and dreaming turn to action. The violence and filth and poverty of Manila unravel in Rosa’s kitchen, like a tesseract. A tesseract, as Garland defines it for us, is a three-dimensional crucifix with an extra bit on either side of the cross. In the same way that a two-dimensional square unravels into a one-dimensional line, a four-dimensional cube unravels into a tesseract.

If this is all somewhat difficult to comprehend, much less visualize, well, that’s Garland’s metaphor. Divine intention, if there is such a thing, is impossible to understand. Sean and Rosa, Vincente and Alfredo might turn to the guidance of myth, Freud or Hollywood for meaning. But all they can see, in the end, are the human unravelings in their three-dimensional gore.

Garland, at 28, is nearly the same age as Wilder when he wrote “The Bridge” in 1927. Yet to call Garland a Generation X writer is to miss the utter Englishness of his imagination. His first novel, “The Beach,” owed as much to the European comic-book adventures of Tintin and Asterix as it did to “Lord of the Flies,” and had more of a schoolboy wistfulness for Francis Ford Coppola’s southeast Asia than it did for Joseph Conrad’s Congolese darkness.

Both novels have the cartoonish innocence of a “Pulp Fiction,” floating about 15 inches above the surface, inventive and compelling and too detached to cause real harm. But if Garland has yet to develop a Wilder heart, his brain beats with the energy of ideas and the courage to bridge the big questions.