Happiness is a sold gun

GUN DEALERS’ DAUGHTER

By Gina Apostol

Anvil Books, 264 pages

Available at National Bookstore

I was a spoiled brat, a split soul,” writes the character Soledad Soliman in typically distancing fashion in Gina Apostol’s latest novel,

Gun Dealers’ Daughter

. We know Sol’s from Manila’s upper crust from the first few pages, where she meets up with her Uncle Gianni at Nice airport. Light bulbs flash. But not for Sol. She is a cosmopolitan, jet-setting tweener, but a marginal figure in the age of Marcos, taken in hand by a cosmopolitan uncle who, it becomes clear, is one of the many arms dealers of the book’s title.

Apostol has a way with alliteration, a way of wrapping words around her tongue. You could call it her style. Like Jeanette Winterson, she gets away with this peculiarly personal signature. The Manila-born writer’s gift of tongues was enough to rouse the approval of early postmodernist John Barth, no stranger to tongue twisting, who blurbed her earlier novel, The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata.

Gun Dealers’ Daughter is not a breezy novel; it takes some measure of patience to parse out the author’s game. Sol is experiencing a crisis of identity. We learn of two suicide attempts, and of her dislocation from Manila, and of her rarely-seen parents. We learn, in the sharp detail of flashbacks, about her rarefied Manila lifestyle, or at least that of her parents, friends of Marcos back in the day. “Ladies in Manila do not walk,” Sol remarks. Rather they glide from car to car, air-conditioned enclosure to air-conditioned enclosure, but surely this is not all there is to say about them.

Apostol loves the details of the ‘70s, that most vivid of decades. In its kitsch alone, it stands shoulders above other decades. She tells us about the kooky portrait artist who comes to paint her and her mother in a forced pose. Sol finds the results unrecognizable, while her mother is characteristically enraptured by the “wonderful likeness!”

Sol’s friends are rich kids who play at being revolutionaries, while the 15-year-old girl (in flashback) dwells among the cocktail party set of Manila society. These parties give Apostol opportunity to set down the philosophical lingua franca of the day. During a debate about Philippine national identity (still pretty much the only debate there is in Manila society) Uncle Gianni comments: “I think the Philippines was, unfortunately, founded on love. Yes, Magellan came upon these islands, and strangely, very sadly, as you know, fell in love. He had been here before.” It was Magellan’s fate, after visiting so many “disgusting and inhuman places,” to set upon a kind of paradise that resembled something from his memory — whether an invented or truly remembered memory. (It is worth noting that the Philippines is one of the few places in the world — in fiction and in life — where people rhapsodize about the country as though it were a real, living, breathing sensual character.)

On the other hand, Soledad has her rich student friends Soli, Jed and Edwin to make her split from self increasingly pronounced. While they paint graffiti around campus (and, when caught, are excused by the campus police) and plot more serious disruptions, only Sol seems to realize they’re just bratty kids, rebelling against their parents’ entitlement, rather than the social structure at large. “We live outside of the country’s rules. We can do whatever we want,” Sol rages at one point. “We can commit crimes. We can play at revolution. We can even kill people, for all we know. And in the end, we will always get away. We’re cockroaches. It’s we who are the problem, Jed.”

In the twilight of the Marcos era, there are steady players and there are ready pawns. Apostol has an acronym for this second type of person: “U.F.s” (Useful Fools).

Then you have Colonel Grier, a kind of Commander Kurtz figure who glibly refers to the Filipino fight for independence in 1899 as “The Insurrection” and collects coins and medallions from around the world, not unlike the gold-plundering Spanish who settled in the Philippines before Americans did. As one of the military men sent to help train CAFGU militias (and supplying them with US-bought arms) during the waning Marcos years, Grier becomes a symbol of Soli, Jed and Edwin’s struggle, and it’s not surprising that Soledad plays a part in the Colonel’s ultimate fate. And, of course, the innocent suffer — the thing that ultimately drives Sol around the bend.

Apostol has said she put aside the unfinished first draft of Gun Dealers’ Daughter as early as 1999, while studying at Philips Exeter in the States; she couldn’t quite find the right voice of Sol, or locate sympathy for her. Gun Dealers’ Daughter has all the crazy messiness of a Warren Zevon song, one teeming with socialites, guns, goons, commies and bags of money. The Philippines continues to offer up a bounty of fictional, surreal possibility, and Apostol has tapped into some of it in a flawed, sprawling novel that sits somewhere along the spectrum of social commentary between Butch Dalisay’s Soledad’s Sister and Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado.