Irina Kaspe. Run, Alex, run

Mr. Arlend is far from a maniac, although his intention to describe the structure of the world evokes some suspicions. The scope is truly Dantovsky. The author of Tesseract in three available dimensions reconstructs the Universe - with all atoms and planets, accidents and patterns, space and time, hell and paradise. At the same time, there is nothing to be scared, in this venture there is nothing painful. For several decades, the West has been tormented by thoughts about “globalization” and “world-systemicity”. In the sense that relative, unstable, subjective, multiple ideas about reality for some reason I really want to reduce to a relative, unstable, subjective, but holistic picture.

Realizing this task in full, the young English geometer chose the Philippine city on the map, painted it in ominous, fatal tones and played a tragic event on this worthy ancient theater. And in order to give the event multidimensionality, he drawn a novel on three plot planes, three reality unrelated to each other and demonstrated how all of them can coincide in a complex geometric construction of the case. In the course of the narrative, Garland with paranoid punctuality is counted by measurements and planes: 1-1, 2-1, 3-2 and, finally, 4-3, tesseract, a four-dimensional figure in a three-plane scan. Degumanization, it would seem, is complete. In addition, all three plots are exaggeratedly literary (film) and the most old readers (spectator) corns touch: the first story is about blood, the second is about love, the third is about psychoanalysis.

However, Garland, being a master of his craft, supplied the text with numerous traps, the main of which is just a plot of plot. The characters come across it, incorrectly interpreting the course of events, following the script and are not powerful to go beyond its framework. A reader should come into it, flipping through the book fluently, since it is not a gun that is shot on the wall, but a gun, which is behind the belt. Such kunshtuki are well known, although Harlend, I must say, does them masterfully. Another thing is interesting: even after the novel is read with extreme attention and patience, and all geometric delights are studied and deciphered, the plot logic retroactively takes up and has no choice but to talk about banal, unreliable, unnecessary plots and can be traced their ups and downs according to the Tesseract drawing.

In a strange way, you just have to postpone the book, the main one is forgotten - a tense, rapid rhythm of the shoot. The sailor of the Englishman is saving from the Philippine gangsters, a shootout with which he himself started by a misunderstanding; He runs around the city, falls into the sewer, spends cartridges, bursts into the first house that came across. Three stories do not intertwine in a ball, do not flow to each other, but layered, joining the pursuit. Someone catches up with a father who died five years ago. Someone is saving from a black dog from a children's counting. Harland pursues his heroes and the camera trembles in his hands, grabbing new faces - you can’t get anywhere, Tesseract, like the "beach" , is emphasized by cinema.

The clatter of the legs intensifies and becomes more and more coordinated ( "We must fall into the rhythm, as you do not understand!" ). If at the beginning of the novel (1-1) the characters are absolutely impermeable to each other, then closer to the finale (3-2) they have common fears, thoughts, obsessive images; People, events, objects are interchangeable, as in dreams interpreted by the psychoanalyst:

"- So you woke up, and you were┘

- Badly.

- What do you think it could mean?

“I know what you think about it!”

- Well, tell me.

- You think that flowers on the trees are ashes, a running person - my father┘ "

In the last chapter (4-3), the picture breaks up again. The runners are overtaken by death. The pursuers are thrown ashore with a wave: "It's over ... I am alive, I return home." The final thought that comes to mind for those who survived is a mismatch:

"Vincent thought: the running person was not my father, and the boy will not at all be, all this means nothing."

It was another, alien life. And someone else's death. It’s just for some reason that very similar to ... at that moment the plot logic returns.