There was something I liked about this book in spite of the many things I disliked about it. One strong point was the depiction and description of what you might call Phillipine national identity. Perhaps because Phillipinos speak such good English, enjoy a lot of Western culture (music, basketball etc.) and because there’s such a heavy US military presence in the country I had always ignorantly assumed the two countries had an amicable history. The scenes from the Phillipine-American War (1899-1902) are either very well researched or very skillfully created or both. One of the book’s major characters, Magasulin, captures its forgotten quality well. Vietnam dominates the Western consciousness of American imperialism in Asia. The Philippines is where the other major character, Chiara’s, father shot the war scenes for his cult Vietnam war movie. This role for the country really resonated with other aspects of the book for me; the Philippines as a silent servant, helping to recreate another country’s history, perceived through the lens of an American, while forgetting its own. I was reminded of Magasulin travelling to America to study and work, like so many other Phillipinos in diaspora, and of her uncles reverence for Muhammed Ali and Elvis. I also really enjoyed the characters and the pacing of the narrative.
On the other hand, I struggled to work out exactly what was going on because of the books ‘inventive’ narrative structure. As far as I could tell, Magasulin and Chiara meet in the modern day, Duterte governed Philippines to scout locations for Chiara’s film with Magasulin playing the role of translator and guide. As well as this timeline, we also have flashbacks to Chiara’s childhood, to her father making his cult film in the Philippines, and to her parents meeting before she is born. Furthermore, the action includes the script for Chiara’s film, either translated into prose or described as it might have happened or possibly even as it might have been filmed - it wasn’t entirely clear. However, the book also makes it clear that Magasulin edits the script and writes her own version of Chiara’s story and this is included too. Chiara’s script revolves around a white American woman turning up to photograph a remote military outpost in the Philippines during the war. The soldiers are massacred by the locals and then go on a campaign of destruction and death as revenge. The photographer woman turns out to be Chiara’s grandmother. In Magasulin’s edit, the plot revolves around the cult film that Chiara’s Dad made in the Philippines using a remote location to mimic the rice paddies of Vietnam. This story was far less vivid and clear to me. The plot entails Chiara’s Dad filming with his wife and child, him having an affair with a local teacher and then commiting suicide. There is also another story about a novel writer called Stephane Real but I really couldn’t tell you what was going on there or how it relates to the other stories! If it all sounds overly complicated and confusing then I have done a good job in describing the atmosphere of the book. I’ve only been able to reconstruct this much using the lists of characters at the front of the book which are split into two parts - 1. A mystery and 2. Duel Scripts. On finishing the book, I didn’t have a clear idea of what had happened and what was going on and a week or so after reading it I feel this even more strongly. The prose follows this division too. However, each chapter has a number but the chapters are not in order. I found this to be pretentious and really unhelpful. I wondered what readers are supposed to do with this? Are they expected to write out the chapter titles in numerical order and see if things make more sense like this? I thought about doing this before deciding it wasn’t worth it. One of the chapters has two numbers indicating that it relates to two separate narratives but I couldn’t even properly locate it in one of the narratives there was so much going on. It’s as if the author wants the plot to be complex and polyvalent but has gone WAY overboard and ended up with a plot so complicated that it would actually require quite a lot of work on the part of the reader to work out what is going on. This is not a positive feature from my perspective. There is a definite sense in which the good parts of this book are overwhelmed by the pretentious and overly complex parts.
Chiara’s script detailing the American occupation, the revolutionaries attack and the subsequent massacre was by far the best and most coherent part of the book for me. This was closely followed by the modern day scenes involving Chiara and Magasulin. The other parts seem half finished and thinly rendered to me with highly superficial characters, incomprehensible chunks of narrative suspended in nothingness and incomplete plot twists. I feel like I would have enjoyed the book more if it had just been a story about the war or a story about the two women but instead it tries to be dazzlingly complex and ends up detracting from the overall impression. I would say a similar thing about the prose. Some of it is good, taught and evocative. Other bits are ludicrously overblown and pretentious, for example:
‘She watches Joe Frazier go at Ali again, one more time, in one more rope-a-dope. No moment is too small not to have contrasting attention. The existential condition of sharing the universe everyday with strangers hits her as Magasulin watches Ali in Joe Frazier’s soon-to-be blinded vision and Frazier is glimpsed from the frame of Ali’s not-yet-Parkinsoned arms.’ p111
Yuck! The whole thing is so overloaded with imagery and ugly, overly descriptive language but at the same time is so unclear about what the author is trying to say or demonstrate. Equally, this section tries far too hard to jam big, impressive ideas into what should be a descriptive detail about a scene:
‘The priest spits in solidarity with the captain’s gurgling, as if his thoughtful saliva were settling a theological quibble beginning in the captain’s throat and his meditative spit were thus giving the pair summative consequences in the awkward moment before the lady’ p161
Again, it’s just so overwrought and overburdened it really reduces the quality of the prose and the efficacy of what is attempting to be conveyed. There are plenty of good details, scenes, characters and dialogue in the book but far too often a good idea is ruined by attempting to put three or four more on top of it at the same time - just like the book and its multiple plotlines. The same problems occur in some of the dialogue where the characters talk more like they are part of the prose. For example, a lieutenant reports to his superior:
‘Scheetherly is all right, sir. The doctor, too, says he is not loony, sir. It is only a state of being on the islands. So says the medico. The harvest of the war in the shape of thousands of sick and wounded and insane wrecked in body and mind.’ p245
Moving seamlessly from matter of fact, militaristic reporting to philosophical reflection of the kind you might expect to find in high falutin literature in the space of barely a few sentences. There was also a general tendency towards sesquipedalianism and a truly extraordinary outbreak of the use of the word ‘vespertine’ in the final third of the book. I barely recall seeing the word in the early stages but by the end it feels like the author is required to use it every ten pages!
Overall, I found the book too pretentious and confusing to really enjoy as a whole but I did enjoy certain parts of it and feel like it could probably be a book I liked if it was heavily edited and drastically restructured. The author chooses themes well and interlinks them skillfully as well as being capable of good prose when she’s not trying to give every line six different levels of significance and cram in a couple of arcane words and facts to show just how clever she is for good measure!
No comments:
Post a Comment