In the Philippines, the word ‘Ilustrado’ refers to a class of native intellectuals who were nurtured by but then revolted against their Spanish colonial masters. It’s a fitting title, then, for Miguel Syjuco’s novel, which is both a dissection of his native land’s strengths and failings and an exploration of one man’s attempt to redeem the mistakes of his life.

Ilustrado‘s narrator is an aspiring author, also called Miguel Syjuco, who returns to the Philippines after the death of his mentor, Crispin Salvador, a fellow Filipino writer-in-exile. Embellishing a first-person narrative with invented blog posts, news reports, biography and autobiography, Syjuco paints a picture of an exuberant but deeply corrupt country, proud of its history but unsure of its place in the world.

Syjuco delights in lampooning Filipino politics, but satire is a difficult weapon to control, and here it has the effect of distancing the reader, making it harder for us to imagine the cartoon-ish political intriguing as a backdrop for the other, more personal, narratives. It’s fortunate, then, that they are welded together at a deeper level, as the story of how Miguel (and, ultimately, Crispin) try to heal past hurts becomes metaphorically the story of the Philippines’ attempts to forge a better future.

Some humility, an acceptance of personal mistakes, Syjuco suggests, are vital in this quest. But so too is a sense of rootedness, a heartfelt feeling for (and again, an acceptance of) one’s own nation as a far from perfect but still loveable homeland.

In less capable hands, self-referential, multi-layered narratives can irritate and distract, but Syjuco proves their worth with a finale that transmutes the novel’s many strands into a magical, dreamlike whole. Fusing a cynical sense of humour with an original take on the universal struggle for salvation, he vindicates the idea that individuals and nations alike can, whatever their faults, become once again illustrious.

First published in Time Out

Having had great success with one animal fable, 2003’s Booker Prize-winning, seven million-selling Life of Pi, Yann Martel has gone one better: an animal fable in the shape of a play within a play.

Beatrice and Virgil is the story of Henry, a novelist who believes that more “poetic license” should be taken with the Holocaust. Conveniently enough, he meets a strange taxidermist also named Henry, who has written a play – featuring a donkey, Beatrice, and a howler monkey, Virgil – that tackles precisely that subject.

Martel is principally interested in how we can talk about something like the Holocaust: is it possible for such awfulness to be represented? Is art the right way to bear witness? Hence Virgil and Beatrice’s story initially reads something like Waiting for Godot, always striving to express ideas just beyond expression, but then becomes something much darker as the full horror is revealed.

Martel’s problem is that his human characters seem flat and lifeless compared to the animals in which he excels. And much of the fable’s imagery, and hence the whole book, is clunkingly obvious – and is then carefully explained for the reader anyway.

Even if this simplicity is the point – that directness and honesty are in the end the only valid response to true evil – reading Beatrice and Virgil remains a grating way to pass a few hours. Nor does Martel really demonstrate that a Beckett-style fable of a donkey and a monkey can capture the true brutality of great evil.

Individually, Virgil and Beatrice are deeply affecting creations, pathetic in every sense, but the novel surrounding them is less than the sum of its parts. Martel may need to master more than one way to skin a cat, so to speak.

 First published in Time Out

Why are we so obsessed with making lists? It is this question that Umberto Eco, the philosopher, medievalist and writer best-known for ‘The Name of the Rose’, sets out to answer in his latest piece of non-fiction.

The result is a dazzling, sometimes dizzying, tour through two millennia of tables, lists and categories, supported by dozens of examples from literature and real life, and lavishly illustrated with art that draws on the power of lists (think Breughel’s densely populated townscapes, or Bosch’s chaotic visions of hell).

The examples Eco cites can be comic, as in Rabelais’s setting out of dozens of materials with which to wipe one’s backside (the neck of a goose being the best, apparently); or serious, as when the minutely detailed listing of a nineteenth-century abattoir’s inner workings well conveys their panic, chaos and cruelty.

Eco’s point is that lists do not always impose order on the world, as we might think. Just as often, they perversely emphasise, through their very limitedness, the almost unimaginable vastness of everything outside their field, the huge scope of life. They can also express delight in abundance, exuberance or excess.

But this insight is never properly developed, partly because ‘The Infinity of Lists’ is more a beautifully illustrated essay than a full-length book, and partly because Eco often revels in the richness of his lists rather than dig deeper into them. The overall impression is of a brilliant mind amusing itself, of scintillation rather than penetration – of, ultimately, a great deal of learning being used to produce a very superior coffee table book.

First published in Time Out