White Lady, Black Christ

I???m sad I have to say this, but: this was disappointing. I picked this one up out of curiosity: it was billed as Smaller and Smaller Circles meets Himala, with the summary on the publisher???s website implying that it was more along the lines of a thriller than F.H. Batacan???s novel, which was very much a mystery novel.
But whatever this was, it definitely wasn???t a thriller. It???s not that I was expecting pulse-pounding, balls-to-the-wall action, since not all thrillers are built like that and frankly, I need to be in a very specific mood for that sort of thing to be any kind of fun. But I was at least expecting an intriguing plot: something with a cool mystery to untangle at the heart of it. The fact that this book centers around the Black Nazarene and Quiapo implied that the author would be mining the extremely rich vein of Philippine folk Catholicism, with the angle of tackling the many fringe practices and cults that are the byproduct of syncretization between Spanish Catholicism and precolonial beliefs. Sadly, none of that comes to fruition in this book. First off, the pacing in this book is completely out of whack.  While there???s nothing wrong with going off on occasional tangents to show what???s happening with other characters, there was just way too much of that happening here to make for a tightly-told story.
This pacing is a reflection of the plot, which was just as out of whack as the pacing. I can see what the author was trying to do, but they just didn???t pull it together tightly enough for it to be any kind of fun read. There was a moment, about two-thirds of the way into the book, where there is a big explosion in a cave, and then the next scene cuts to the characters back in their safe spaces, celebrating Christmas. I know these quieter moments are vital and they contribute greatly to character development and plot movement because you can???t always have the action going full speed, but that was VERY badly placed.
The way flashbacks were handled was also poorly done. I think the author was shooting to make each chapter a complete entity unto itself, so he writes each chapter as if telling a short story about the character who???s the current focus of that chapter, but it just doesn???t work when you???re trying to do tension and intrigue in a scene. There were so many of these moments where something tense was happening, only for it to be broken because of a flashback. Of course, this meant the pacing and plot were further hobbled, unable to get any kind of real momentum.
Not that I???m talking of flashbacks, I think I need to talk about characters. For one, I think there were way too many POV characters in this novel - and this is coming from someone who reads fantasy on the reg, where sometimes you need a list of characters at the start of the novel just to keep track of who???s who. The problem is that it felt like the author was trying to make EVERYONE a main character, but none of them had ???main character energy???, so to speak, save fr one or two, but they tended to get lost in the crowd of other characters who, quite frankly, just weren???t interesting enough to hold my attention. Additionally, the characterization also felt weirdly flat in places. I understand that in most cases, thrillers are about plot and not so much character development, but these characters felt like cardboard cutouts trying to sound more profound than they actually are. I think this might be because they???re all trying to be the main character and it???s just not working out. The way dialogue was formatted also didn???t help, because there was something about the way it was handled that meant I sometimes didn???t know who was talking in any given scene. On top of the fact that most of the characters aren???t really THAT fleshed out, it???s easy to get lost and wonder ???Who the hell is saying this now????
What I suspect the main problem here is, is that this book was written with the themes in mind first, and everything else built around those themes. Which, when you look at the themes presented in this book, is kind of admirable: the intersections between the wealthy, the powerful, the Church, and corruption in the Philippines; how Catholicism in the Philippines has valorized poverty and suffering instead of trying to uplift those who are poor and suffering; justice as commodity to be bought and sold by the corrupt and powerful, instead of a right guaranteed to all; the deep-seated wounds of colonialism and where that intersects with white privilege and cultural appropriation. These are all amazing ideas. But the book doesn???t let these emerge organically from the story through the characters and the plot; instead, it feels like the characters and the plot were made in service to the themes. Which then explains all the other problems this book has, in my opinion: the characters are reduced to puppets, and the plot reduced to a series of mere lines to be put into their mouths, with things happening TO them instead of BECAUSE OF them.
And again, this is all very disappointing, because I can SEE how this could have been an awesome read, but the execution just wasn???t up to snuff. Maybe in the future someone will try this sort of thing again - honestly Philippine folk Catholicism is a VERY rich vein for story material and really should be mined more - and I hope it does the job better than this book. Which, frankly, isn???t going to be that hard.