The Ilustrados, from whom Miguel Syjuco derives the title of his novel — the enlightened ones — were Europeanised Filipinos who came home, from 1860 onwards, to prepare for revolution. Many, if not most, of the narrative mechanisms of this first novel don't work but it is difficult to quarrel with the judges who awarded it the Man Asian Literary Prize. At one point, Syjuco describes the white sky over Manila Bay as a blank page waiting for its first mark — but anyone who reads Ilustrado is likely to feel that the skyline has been richly inscribed and illuminated.
The plot starts with the death by drowning in New York of a famous writer called Crispin Salvador, a gadfly in exile who can rarely resist provoking the powers that be in his home country. There is a noir tinge to this opening and a scattering of clues. Salvador leaves behind a list of names but no trace of the manuscript that was supposed to establish his reputation for all time and settle any outstanding scores.
The novel's narrator is a younger Filipino writer, a student of Salvador's, who decides to follow the clues back to the Philippines and write the biography of his mentor.
Neither of these characters comes to life. Salvador is a prolific producer in a number of genres, from the essay, the poem and the guidebook to the disco musical, and extensive extracts are included from his works. His thriller and his books for children are equally feeble.
Salvador's life includes some rather false notes. For instance, the family's Japanese gardener, who turns out to have been a spy all along, intervenes to save the family he has come to value.
There is a reference elsewhere to "the melodramatic tradition that links every genre" of film in the Philippines and even an academic book called And Then the Locusts Came: The Socio-Political Relevance of Melodrama in Philippine Literature in English. The tone here is two-faced: half defensive, half defiant.
Salvador's chief usefulness is as a mouthpiece for oblique manifestos along these lines, descriptions of what Syjuco wants to avoid: "What is Filipino writing? Living on the margins, a bygone era, loss, exile, poor-me angst, postcolonial identity theft. Tagalog words intermittently scattered around for local colour, exotically italicised. Run-on sentences and facsimiles of magical realism, hiding behind the disclaimer that we Pinoys were doing it years before the South Americans ..."
Syjuco has taken the odd decision to name the younger writer after himself and give names to the character's five siblings which share at least an initial letter with his own. Intermittently, he treats "Miguel Syjuco" parodistically.
The elements — pseudo-autobiography, broad comedy and standard genre-movie motivation — don't begin to mesh. The noir conventions, too, soon run out of steam in the Philippines.
The pleasures of Ilustrado are not in the rather creaky evocations of the past, nor in a rhetoric that grows increasingly sententious as the book progresses, but in its sophisticated evocation of modern Manila. The book displays in a kaleidoscope a culture that has already been through the mincer called history. Animism, Catholicism and fundamentalisms both Christian and Islamic overlap and between the president, the senator, the dancer and the reverend, it is a toss-up as to who will be in jail and who will be giving a press conference to unveil a surprising alliance.
