Public Service: Blighted Reviewed By Antonio C. Abaya

‘Blighted’ is the title of a first novel by someone who I never suspected was a budding novelist, feisty lawyer and former Solicitor General Frank Chavez. It was launched yesterday at the former Nielsen Tower building on Makati Avenue, before Makati’s glitterati crowd, among whom may count the living inspiration of some of the villains in his novel.

‘Blighted’ is a searing social commentary on the state of the nation as it lurches from one moral crisis to another, tragically without any resolution, and set amid the events of the last 30 years, up to and including the death of former President Cory Aquino in August 2009.

The villains are recognizable enough, including a fat and powerful Godfather-figure named Jabba, though the events are fiction. And the three protagonists are meant to represent a cross section of Filipino society in the 21st century: Pabs, a spoiled brat from a fictive South Greenwich gated subdivision; Leandro, a middle-class intellectual polit-sci student at UP Diliman; and Rico, a hard-hat construction worker employed by Pabs’ father’s company, trying to make ends meet.

The three are thrown together in a police jail after they were rounded up following a rowdy street demonstration. They become good friends and meet several times after they are released from jail. This is the story of that three-cornered relationship, and through it, the story of Filipino society in metastatic decay—the title of one of its chapters—asit spirals in a moral vacuum.

Not being a literary person, I am not competent to comment on the novel’s literary merits: characterization, dramatic tension, dialog, atmospherics, narrative style.

I can only mention that it has a Rizalian resonance of Elias and Ibarra discussing the ills of contemporary society, but the setting is not 1887, but the still cancer-ridden Philippines of 2009.

The denouement comes in a murder in which the three are implicated, justly or unjustly. And the trial that follows reveals the endemic corruption that underlies the Philippine justice system and all its warts. As a trial lawyer, Chavez knows the ins and outs, the maneuvers and the backroom deals, that are the hallmarks of the system, from the local police to the Supreme Court.

The three protagonists and their lawyers navigate through this legal minefield, and here Chavez’ novel acquires the patina of a John Grisham legal thriller. The ending seems foreordained by the story of mega-corruption that Chavez weaves.

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