America's Boy

Richard Dyer

James Hamilton-Paterson, one of the best novelists now working in our language, has turned his attention to a story no one would believe if he had tried to make it up: the saga of the president and first lady of the Philippines, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, and their rise and fall.

For decades, the Marcoses idealized themselves and their history, and their American protectors went along. Presidents and congressmen spoke of them with unstinting praise, an admiration that was reflected in the American press. When it all went bad - actually, long after it went bad - the Marcoses were ridiculed and demonized, probably even more in America than in the Philippines, where worse was shortly to follow. America's own course, of course, appeared to itself unerring.

Among English-speaking writers, Hamilton-Paterson is perhaps uniquely qualified to tell this tremendous story, which mingles comedy and tragedy, triumph and defeat, agony and irony. For decades, he has spent much of each year in the Philippines, living not in Manila, where journalists do, but in a remote fishing village. He has learned the language, the literature, the history, the culture, the landscape, the sociology, the religion, the politics, and the people of the Philippines, so he is able to place the Marcoses in a context beyond popular journalistic categories. And his educated novelist's imagination allows him access to areas other disciplines cannot reach.

It is significant that the Marcoses do not make important appearances in five of the book's 15 chapters - the third of the book that makes it unique and invaluable. One of those chapters, ''A History Told by Foreigners,'' relates the history of the Philippines, a history that is not safely ''past'' but runs along beneath the surface, ready to boil up at any time. The other four relate incidents in Kansulay, far from Manila: incidents that reveal much about where Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos came from, and about the physical and psychological realities of the Philippines - the realities the Marcoses faced, and the ones they chose to ignore.

Hamilton-Paterson is an indefatigable and observant reporter whose researches led him, bemused and dazzled, into a fantastic six-hour conversation with Imelda Marcos herself. He also visited the building where the corpse of Ferdinand Marcos lies in embalmed state. Nothing escaped his eye and ear: gusts of Mozart's ''Requiem'' greeted him when the door to the mausoleum was unlocked (''No lux perpetua in here: the dim lighting goes off when the door is closed, like that of a fridge, along with Mozart'').

He relates stories the mainstream American press mostly ignored, like Ferdinand Marcos's tacky affair with the American movie starlet Dovie Beams. Lurid details abound, and when familiar revelations appear, Hamilton-Paterson invites us to examine them from a different perspective. Imelda's shoe closets, for example, take on another meaning when we know something of the physical and psychological deprivations of her childhood. Hamilton-Paterson tells a touching story about one of the many curiosities discovered in Malacanang Palace after the Marcoses fled - a small house filled, floor to ceiling, with catering-size jars of Heinz sandwich spread, which in Imelda's childhood had represented an unattainable standard of luxury. ''In its pathos there is a certain `Rosebud' quality about this forgotten house of sandwich spread that is somehow lacking in other extravagances which had come to light ... such as the gallon bottles of Dior and Guerlain scent and the bulletproof bras.''

Hamilton-Paterson is no sentimentalist, of course. He is fully aware of the monstrous horrors of the Marcos regime, part of a sustained history of monstrous horrors that are, to a large extent, the consequences of Spanish, American, and Japanese colonialism - a force more barbarous than any state of nature. If the Marcoses were both deadly and absurd, they were not more so, in Hamilton-Paterson's view, than General Douglas MacArthur; if they increasingly came to live in a fantasy world, so did President Ronald Reagan. Hamilton-Paterson enjoys pondering the imponderable and derailing the simple-minded from their single track. Imelda Marcos's cultural center, for example, has been criticized as ''a grotesque waste of precious resources in a Third World nation where people were dying of hunger and disease. ... [But] when exactly is a nation to be considered rich enough to be able to construct such a building without a blush? Are we really expected to believe that all Europe's and America's great public art buildings were only built once all their hungry had been fed and their sick tended? The clear implication is that the only aspect of a nation worthy worrying about is that of the purely material.''

Hamilton-Paterson loves the Philippines, a love that shines through this book. The reasons he loves the islands, one comes to think, is that they present him with humanity, nature, and human nature in complex and irreducible forms that focus a fitful illumination into the heart of darkness.
— Boston Globe

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Having lived in the Philippines for 18 years, Hamilton-Paterson has acquired a sophisticated understanding of Philippine history and culture. He witnessed the zenith and then the downfall of the Marcos regime. Yet he has observed a persistent nostalgia for the Marcos years among Filipinos. This book, his explanation of these historical crosscurrents, is exceptional for the grace of its writing and for the range and nuance of the author's judgment. Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos emerge not simply as the caricature despots of the popular press but as products of a culture that for centuries had functioned through strong tribal personalities who wielded power and dispensed favors. Imelda's bravura shopping expeditions and Ferdinand's crony capitalism become more understandable, if not justifiable, in this cultural context. As a novelist (Griefwork, etc.), Hamilton-Paterson has a keen eye for the absurd (such as Ferdinand's compulsive falsification of his war record) and for the cynical (such as U.S. complicity in the fraud). He also makes clear that not just Filipino culture but also U.S. Cold War geopolitics were responsible for the Marcoses' long-lived kleptocracy (which is perhaps the best example of Jean Kirkpatrick's famous distinction between authoritarian regimes, which could be supported if they stood firm against communism, and totalitarian regimes). Every page displays Hamilton-Paterson's mastery of his material, and this book will be required reading for anyone interested in the enduring impact of U.S. policy in the Philippines. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

One hundred years ago, in the wake of the Spanish-American War, the United States started down the imperial path. The military conquest of the Philippines and decades of U.S. control have made U.S.-Philippine relations unique in our history. Hamilton-Paterson (Ghosts of Manila), a British novelist and nonfiction writer and a part-time resident of the Philippines, has written a refreshing albeit impressionistic history of the country. Its value lies in Hamilton-Paterson's willingness to investigate events from the Filipino point of view. Americans are quick to see the negatives of Asia's strongmen but less patient when it comes to understanding the complex relationships between non-democratic leaders and their power bases, between traditional values and customs and the impersonal logic of the market and the ballot box. Now that the United States appears headed for new turbulence with China, it may be useful for us to review our ties to the Philippines. This is an entertaining and informative starting point for the politician and the public alike.--John Raymond Walser, U.S. Dept. of State, Washington, DC Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Booknews

Details the rise and fall of Washington-supported Philippine figure heads Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. Though the couple usually did America's bidding, they could not survive the savage media blitz that accompanied their decline. Their story is set in the context of the wider Asian tragedies of the Marcos era, including the Vietnam War, the rise of the Suharto dictatorship, and the Cold War. Pays special attention to the complicated relationship between the couple and ordinary Filipinos. Includes b&w maps and a chronology. The author is a writer of both fiction and history, and has lived half of each year in the Philippines for 20 years. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Kirkus Reviews

The sensational careers of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos are set in the context of Philippine culture and political history. Hamilton-Paterson (Tragic Mountain: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret War for Laos, 1942–1992, 1993, etc.) has, unlike many other commentators, elected to try to understand rather than merely condemn the Marcoses for their egregious behavior during their 21-year reign in the Philippines. He certainly denounces the Philippine First Family for a plethora of crudities and crimes—e.g., Ferdinand fabricated his heroic military record in WWII and won elections so tainted that virtually no one believed the results; Imelda made of shopping an aerobic workout and kept on the palace grounds cases of the sandwich spread she'd craved as a child. But Hamilton-Paterson, a long-time resident of the Philippines and wise observer of the local mores, demonstrates convincingly that for much of their tenure the Marcoses enjoyed public favor; they helped elevate their nation economically and technologically. And with devastating clarity, he shows how the US government, which coddled and encouraged Marcos (in 1966 he addressed—and dazzled—a joint session of Congress), abandoned him only when the Vietnam War was over, only when we no longer had such an acute strategic need for his support, only when the media had turned against him. Throughout this illuminating book, Hamilton-Paterson periodically pauses to focus on a small, remote Philippine forest village (imaginary) he calls Kansulay. These lovely and lyrical sections—all in the present tense—reveal that not far from sprawling, madding Manila the old Philippine ways continue; we see that the Marcoseswere representative of their class, rather than anomalous. A small problem: too often, Hamilton-Paterson, in a curious narrative decision, elects to block the graceful flow of his prose with cofferdams of quotations, some quite lengthy, from writers with little to add. A fascinating portrait of two extraordinary people, of a culture, of a country—a refreshing reminder of the powerful presence of ambiguity in human beings and in human affairs. (3 maps)