Return of the Raven
At War’s End By Rony V. Diaz Manila Times Publishing, 2010
It’s not every day that you encounter a well-written novel with barebones whodunit fundamentals, complete with sociopolitical underpinnings of the Filipino class struggle, set in postwar Manila and its outskirts. At War’s End by Rony Diaz is exactly that, rekindling in us the joy of reading for its own sake, and it’s a small surprise that it took a Raven to do that, Diaz being part of the group of writers known as the Ravens now mostly in their 70s who first dominated the literary pages of the magazines in the 1950s. Named after the poem by Edgar Allan Poe, the Ravens have presently maybe a handful left in the land of the living, and Diaz is their prime fictionist.
The novel brings to bear portraits of an old cacique family, the Montts, whose unica soltera Clara sets out investigating the mysterious death of her brother Virgilio after a party with his classmates in the Arquiza Street digs in Ermita, initially ruled a suicide. The Montts are the major players, and the narrative delves back to the history of their landowning down to the purchase from the friars, making their hacienda fertile ground for unrest, or so it seems. There are many subtle tangles to this tale, such that no one is outright a villain or hero, rather drawn in shades of gray the better to revel in a sepia-toned Manila in the midst of rebuilding and settling old debts after the Pacific War.
Trust Diaz never to overwrite and get carried away by potentially nostalgic material, knowing too well that too much of it may be dangerous. The characters however are very clearly drawn and depicted, in step with the caveat at the book’s opening pages that they are based on real people and events, but the work itself is one of imagination. A line stands out, how even the caciques themselves don’t like caciquism, and by this we are given a hint of the subdued, silent self-loathing of the ruling class, and that, apart from money, is what makes them different from you and me, faithful vagabonds serving the caciques. Their names may change but they remain instantly identifiable, a lineage of prodigality if not precociousness with license. Oh, and please pass the scotch.
We get glimpses of Old Manila, specifically the jai alai fronton with its art deco design, the stone houses of Intramuros and Ermita, the slowly revolving rooftop restaurant that gives a panoramic view of the city, the detritus of high society and the ideologues who try to topple them, people places events we might have encountered in the clippings of rain-soaked or yellowing newspapers, like a jingle jangle morning we come following like lost dogs in the wake of unfinished revolution. Well, of course we might have once drove by or walked past the house on Arquiza or on Cabildo, now maybe the site of a mariner’s restaurant or a refurbished videoke bar with waitresses waiting to outlive the night. Or that scene on campus with the physics professor who turns out to be the leader of the local politburo, and whose assassination by bolo is carried out with bloody efficiency, they seem all too familiar. It was a time of Huks and Alagads and inquilinos and the big bank on Escolta, of detectives on UN Avenue formerly Isaac Peral clueless on a crime, and the great expectations that come with having survived a war and the breathless anticipation of finally achieving things long unfulfilled and aborted because of wartime.
In many ways At War’s End is a moral tale, a deadly ironic one, because it all too clearly portrays a world that is constantly at war with itself through the class struggle and inbred iniquities, that even if the second world war has ended the remnants and aftershocks of hostilities take a different form, indeed even mutate into a more menacing variety that threatens to implode, and spill over making the normally disinterested reader feel like a straggler herself.
Because we are for the moment imagining that the reader is of the fairer gender, possibly resembling Monica, daughter of the assassinated physics teacher, in the midst of her research of the history of land reform. It’s not every day that you encounter a character of a novel becoming herself the reader of that novel, and though the author never made it plain as day the quantum effect could just be this: readers become unconscious characters themselves when they are drawn into the novel, participate and even in sleep or dream shout makibaka huwag matakot ikulong si Gloria, etc., at least until Diaz comes up with the next two numbers of this projected trilogy, The Adventures of Candida and Quita y Pone, in which we hope his writing will continue to be anything but quita’y pone.
Again the background of Diaz as newsman has come in handy, with the economy of words and phrases, the unfettered attention to detail and nuance, the pacing almost approximating the under-description of poetry but not quite, this here’s a novel, we have a story to tell.
We almost want to intervene and try to prevent the main character’s sad fate that again seems torn out of a page of history. A bend in the road, a broken windshield, the target pitching forward in the limousine like Dona Aurora, death coming quick but perhaps not exactly painless.
Of the Ravens, we have been most familiar with the work of the late poet and artist Hilario Francia, and that yellow-covered book he edited shortly before his death called Ravens in Love could rank alongside Diaz’s yet unfinished trilogy. Other last living Ravens to carry on the Poe legacy are performance artist and poet Virgie Moreno, critic Elmer Ordonez, poet and journalism professor Rafael Ingles. May they come out with more brilliant works before the reaper comes knocking.
