By F.H. Batacan, a Filipina author, this book has a curious publication history. The version I read was published in 2015. It is an expanded version of the novella of the same name previously released in 2002, which itself started life in 1996 as a manuscript that won a prestigious prize three years later...

The book is often touted as the first Philippine crime novel. But Batacan herself qualifies this somewhat. If anything, it's "the first Filipino novel that's more typical of the Western idea of a mystery-thriller, even though it’s more of a 'why-done-it?' than a 'who-done-it?'" (It's interesting to read in this same interview, though, that she had an early exposure to New Zealand crime writer Ngaio Marsh, since her mother was a fan...)


Elmer Borlongan Exhibition, Manila, 2018

Smaller and Smaller Circles, set in Metro Manila in 1997, follows an investigation into a series of brutal murders. All the victims are young, male adolescents; all are found horribly mutilated; and all are known to frequent the huge Payatas dumpsite, in Quezon City, in order to scavenge a living for themselves and their families.

Assisting the understaffed and underfunded National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) are two Jesuit priests. Forensic anthropologist Father Gus Saenz collaborates with police investigations from time to time, and previously worked with human rights organizations trying to locate desaparecidos or "salvage victims" from the Marcos dictatorship. His right-hand man is psychology lecturer Father Jerome Lucero, one of his former students, and now a friend. It's a nice partnership, and their minor squabbles and incisive commentaries provide both light relief and broad-brush social background.

Not all in the NBI welcome the help of these specialist priests. Saenz has made himself somewhat unpopular in the past by questioning the bureau's work methods, investigative practices, and findings. It's also hard to deny, he feels, that the agency "suffers trust and integrity issues, going all the way back to the dark days of the dictatorship". More generally, Saenz senses that the records kept by the Philippine National Police are grossly inadequate, leaving little scope for spotting similarities and determining patterns. He also detects a tendency to neglect poor victims of crime, in order to focus on celebrities, politicians, and bankers... The "Miss Teen Philippines scandal", for example, is considered way more important than some dead dump-kids.

Nevertheless, in cooperation with the good apples in the various forces, Saenz and Lucero get going. Having spotted that there's a monthly pattern, it becomes a matter of urgency to locate the killer before the next victim is downed.

Running along in the background of the principal story is the business of Father Isagani Ramirez. He has repeatedly been accused of child molestation, and there seems to be plenty of evidence to back the charges. Rather than bring him to book, or hand the matter over to the police, however, the Church authorities constantly move him on. Over the course of his career, he has made powerful friends, and it's now hard to persuade his victims to testify, because they know nothing will happen.

There's a link here with our main story. The murderer is identified relatively early in the story (after which the tension derives not so much from the puzzle as from the cat-and-mouse game of attempted capture and attempted evasion). But the killer's back-story is that he, too, was abused as a young boy. By a teacher this time. His parents knew what was going on, but never really tried to intervene. His mother, asked whether she and her husband understood how seriously their son was being hurt, replies: "We were afraid. Nobody talked about such things back then." The element that makes things worse for this victim/perpetrator is that not only is he being violated, but his whole circle knows this is happening. He longs for anonymity, the power of erasure. This is what leads him to carry out his serial killings and his symbolic mutilations.

Quite how psychologically plausible this all is I don't know. It makes a gripping enough story.



Raising the novel a notch above the average, however, is the vibrant Philippines background. It's not just the typhoons, and the traffic jams, and the fact that good work depends on grant money that can all too easily be stopped at source by influential enemies. It's not just the casual political commentary: "No use complaining," says Saenz wearily, "about the world's freest press -- we fought for it, we got it, now we have to live with the nonsense that it spews out." Or the delineation of the sharp economic contrast that sets the upper middle class apart from the dump community: "Saenz's family lives in a small, gated community in Makati. The parents own valuable urban real estate, while the children have expanded the family's assets to include a small chain of computer stores and a start-up firm that makes financial and retail software for retail corporations." This is all effective. But the immediacy derives particularly from the kind of description that instantly rings a bell with anyone who has experienced both the trials and the beauties of a developing country in the tropics. Examples:

-- "[Saenz sits in] a small office with dingy cream walls and fluorescent lighting. The chairs have rusty metal legs, and their fatigue-green upholstery is cracked and flaking off in places, exposing the yellow rubber foam underneath it to dust and grime. There are two desks in the room, their cheap wood veneer peeling back in the humidity like shavings of cheese. Saenz has been in countless rooms like this this before, all of them ravaged by decades of bureaucratic neglect and systemic inefficiency."

-- "Green is the only color that rain intensifies; the grass and the trees look as though they have been retouched with a giant brush by some great, invisible hand."

Batacan aims to push to the foreground the kind of destitute people who are all too often ignored and shoved to the background -- unless they can provide photo opportunities for agencies seeking good publicity, that is. Saenz is familiar with the hand-to-mouth existence the Payatas families lead. "But to hear about it firsthand, told with such apathy and resignation, is a different thing altogether... Even though he's done this many times before -- tried to understand the complex interactions between power, poverty and crime in this country -- in the end, none of it makes any sense."

In the end, the serial killer is cornered. And eventually, even Ramirez is brought down -- although his fall is due to his financial corruption not his paedophilia. As the NBI director says: "You tell a few rich people that a priest is abusing children? They may care, but they're unlikely to do anything about it. But you tell them that same priest is stealing their money? Sit back and watch how fast they move."



It would be difficult for an outsider to write this kind of novel, I think, without being accused of stereotyping. "Ah yes, same old, same old, the Philippines equals slums, corruption, poverty." You can imagine how it would go... But because of its authenticity -- Filipino readers attest that Batacan's scenes come across as familiar, and "everything felt real", and it's "as Filipino as it could get" -- and because of the fiery passion for justice that thumps through its veins, it works. As Kristabelle Munson points out, Batacan comes out swinging against the Church, poverty, the country’s infrastructure problems, cronyism, and misogyny -- which testifies to no small amount of courage.

It is an angry book, as Batacan freely admits. In the afterword she writes: "The first time I wrote this book -- in 1996, when I was in my mid-twenties -- I was angry: angry about my job, about the state of my country, about the callousness, complacency, and corruption that had dragged it there. The second time I wrote this book -- in 2013, in my forties, having moved back home with my infant son -- I found myself even angrier: about the state of my country, which seemed even worse than it was in 1996, and about the callousness, complacency, and corruption that kept it there."

And in 2015, that anger has not gone away. As she says: "I think if you want to write crime fiction in the Philippines you have to be constantly angry. You have to find a way of tapping into your anger about the extent of suffering and injustice you encounter every day... Every time I came back here on a visit I found something new to be angry about. It’s a wonderful country but the suffering and the injustice you see every day is staggering... I think that’s where crime fiction maybe has an edge over other genres of writing, because it enables you to talk about ugliness, to speak of what’s wrong, while at the same time providing an entertaining read for those who may not necessarily want to be confronted with that ugliness except as a fictional element. You get to plant the idea of a better way of doing things."



And Payatas itself? Researchers Ito and Igano provide a bit of background. The dumpsite was established in 1976. After the closure, in 1995, of its Tondo equivalent, Smokey Mountain, a number of displaced waste-pickers went to Payatas, which became home to some 4,000 families. Close to 300 people were killed in a dump landslide in 2000. The site was temporarily closed, then reopened. It was definitively closed in 2017, but in 2019, when this research was carried out, many families were still living there. And not everyone was happy: "While the environment has now become cleaner and safer after the closure, former waste-pickers have also suffered from lost or reduced income."

The site itself is to become a park... In an article earlier this year, we're told: "The Quezon City government has opened a new bicycle park and trails at the Payatas Controlled Disposal Facility (PCDF) as part of its bid to provide more green and open spaces for residents... The city government said that aside from the bike park, the PCDF will also have a bamboo park, a dog park, an open-air museum and a plant nursery, among others."

Meanwhile, many former waste-pickers have migrated to the dumpsite in Montalban, Rizal Province, which is now Payatas II, or Smokey Mountain III...

You can't help wondering whether it would really be so impossible to envisage a solution that both tidied up the Payatas area AND provided its former denizens with some sort of alternative living... Dog-walking maybe, or bicycle-maintenance, or bamboo-watering, or museum-dusting...

I leave Batacan's novel with a renewed appreciation for its title. The background to the story, after all, reads like a microcosm of the planet: You're either rich or poor; powerful or powerless; gated or scavenging; able to enjoy bike parks or eternally moving on... Every decision leans to the former group rather than the latter. But inexorably, our common fate is closing in.