|
[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
In Filipina F.H. Batacan's first novel, the title SMALLER AND SMALLER CIRCLES refers to a serial killer's growing paranoia and urgency to kill and mutilate the young garbage pickers who subsist near Manila.
Dramatis personae: A serial killer who stuns young male rubbish pickers with a rock, cuts out their hearts, removes their faces, and cuts off their genitals; Father Gus Saenz, forensic anthropologist who favors Jimi Hendrix; Father Jerome Lucero, clinical psychologist and Gus's partner in innocence; Father Isagani Ramirez, a Teflon priest who likes to—help—orphan and street children; Cardinal Rafael Meneses, who believes that the Church can best discipline wayward priests; Francisco Lastimosa, a frail, elderly, and honest man, Director of the National Bureau of Investigation; his Assistant Director Mapa, who craves his superior's position; Benjamin Arcinas, an attorney for the Bureau who likes to grease the rungs of his personal ladder to success; Joanna Bonifacio, journalist determined to be a true witness and the only major female character; missing children, grieving parents, and the infrastructure which tries to fulfill the awful task of seeing to the hungry of the world.
Batacan juggles four plotlines with verbal and intellectual grace and depth. In one, let me call it, the first plotline of innocence, we learn of Gus Saenz' and Jerome Lucero's growing friendship and vocation as young men, seen in flashback, twenty-five years in the past. Second plotline of innocence: Director Lastimosa, frail, determined to change a corrupt government agency for the better, asks Saenz and Lucero to help find the serial killer. A heart attack near the middle of the investigation nearly kills him and derails the priests' progress. Lastimosa rises from his near-deathbed and takes control back from the old guard, Ferdinand Marcos appointees and their friends. Plotlines of evil, then. Saenz and Lucero close in on a serial killer using forensic procedures, deduction, and good ole shoe leather; the serial killer, whose voice we hear at the beginnings of the book's sections, plans his killings and narrates his fear. Finally: the lives of the boys and their parents: they try to survive on garbage.
SMALLER AND SMALLER CIRCLES gives westerners a peek at Philippine society, but its project is in no sense at all a picaresque, giving strangers a kind of titillating glimpse through a veil created by the fiction. Instead, as readers, we are placed there, in the Philippines, surrounded by Philippine society, dress, mores, food, and problems.
The novel, which has earlier appeared in a far shorter form, reaches for big things and gets them. There is no cheap sex, no senseless shootouts, no fountains of blood or car chases; and I applaud Batacan for that. Instead the book is a witness to appalling poverty and to the manipulation of the weak by the strong. By setting the main point-of-view characters as Saenz, Lucero, Lastimosa, and Bonifacio, the novel maintains the sense that there is terrible evil, and, even worse, perhaps, mindless carelessness; but in the minds of some remains a determined need to set things to rights.
§ C. Downs is professor of English at Texas A&M University-Kingsville and a fan of the well-turned whodunit.
Reviewed by Cathy Downs, May 2015
This book has more than one review. Click here to show all.
[ Top ]
QUICK SEARCH:
Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]
|
