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Books : Fiction : Contemporary Fiction: 1970 Onwards : Authors A-Z : G : Garland, Alex
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A single evening in Manila hints at shared consciousness and the circular nature of time and experience. More ambitious than his successful debut, The Beach, Alex Garland's second novel follows three seemingly disparate stories that converge just this side of possible. Opening pages are reminiscent of a Raymond Chandler detective story: the dirty hotel room that "didn't know it was a hotel, or had forgotten"; the flinty, deep thinking protagonist; a meeting with rough-cut thugs. But just when we expect the arrival of the stock sultry woman, the cast of characters begins to assume the more recognisable aspects of ordinary life--to eerie effect.Garland shows a talent for finely crafted phrases that emboss an image and encapsulate a moment. One minor character's brief sensory flashback provides more human insight than the pages of descriptive overload in the usual thriller. The Tesseract is an exciting tale that never stoops to the level of popcorn storytelling. --Samantha Starmer
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At present, Sudan suffers from a horrendous civil war: 1.4 million people have died here, while many more have been displaced. The Weekenders is a collection of fiction and non-fiction that takes an impressive array of British writers into the heart of Sudan's conflict, shedding light on this frequently ignored tragedy (profits from the book are going to help the relief effort).Here is a mysterious tale from Alex Garland, WF Deedes' debut piece of fiction, and--the centrepiece of the collection--a disturbing novella by Irvine Welsh in which Welsh's trademark skewering of the vileness of human urges is counterbalanced by his fluid prose and the story's troubling setting. Paradoxically, however, the shortest piece of fiction--Andrew O'Hagan's Fish River--is also the most impressive, as O'Hagan succeeds with brilliance and grace in conveying the thought patterns of a Sudanese child whose mother has been raped and enslaved.
But although the setting is grim, the horror underscoring the collection is leavened by perhaps the funniest thing that Tony Hawks has written, as he recounts his doomed attempts to compose music in a war-ravaged town, and--more seriously--the moral dilemmas which arise when rich Europeans descend upon war-torn Africa. These problems are fleshed out more fully by Victoria Glendinning in the final piece, as she considers the ethics of NGOs and big business working in Sudan.
This is an illuminating and thought-provoking book which raises disturbing questions for us all. In an alarmingly prescient fiction on the American bombing of Khartoum in 1998 in their first search for Osama bin Laden, Giles Foden describes the response of the CIA operative in the region:
"Everything was screwed up. Sometimes it blew [his] head what a tangled world it was that he existed in."
--Toby Green
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