Tangled Saviours

Research output: Book/ReportBook

Abstract

Tangled Saviours is a zany, fast-paced, self-aware story of race, gender, culture, prejudice and redemption. Extraordinary characters connect across time and space through fate, heredity and sympathetic magic. In 1986, abusive and substance-addicted action movie star Kirk Decker realises his survival is inextricably tangled with the fate of a matriarchal barangay (tribal community) in the 16th century Philippines. His heart failure, DTs and mental distress are reflected through time and space in ailments suffered by the barangay’s citizens. Both parties are on the brink of destruction when a visiting shaman intervenes to conduct an epic ritual in which the barangay dwellers simulate Kirk’s violence and degeneracy. Kirk’s quest for redemption is a matter of historical justice, for the novel later reveals that his relatives in other periods – the 1570s, the 1940s and the 1960s – have oppressed other Filipino women descended from that same tribe.

It's 1986, and low-budget action-movie star Kirk Decker is on the verge of a breakdown. He is a drug-fuelled bully and abuser of women whose films often elicit death threats. After dodging an assassination attempt – but suffering a heart attack anyway – Kirk is warned by a doctor that he must change his lifestyle or die.

Kirk travels to Manila to make a film set in the Philippine American War (1899-1902). He and Frampton Keppel, the anxious chain-smoking director, are invited to a dinner hosted by Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos along with the film's major funder, the disgraced British Viscount Farquar, who has reinvented himself as a Manila gangster-businessman.

During the filming Kirk has a series of disturbing visions: a demon links his story to the novel’s parallel timelines. In 1570 AD, on Luzon island in what is now the Philippines, Dayang, the queen of a matriarchal barangay (tribe) is frantic about her subjects suffering from mysterious diseases. She consults Mang, a travelling shaman, who intuits that a demon has possessed the barangay so that its own maladies are being borne by the community. Mang orchestrates a pandot (mass ritual) involving all the barangay dwellers to help the demon redeem itself and therefore save the barangay.

When the film is cancelled mid-shoot, a devastated Kirk binges on drugs in his trailer. The story then rapidly transitions between his wanton behaviour and the barnagay’s ritual that resembles it i.e. Mang dabs the noses of the ill old men with an intoxicating poultice to simulate Kirk's cocaine-snorting. The shaman marshals the barangay dwellers to perform ever more intense rituals, chanting and beating drums. As lightning strikes the barangay in 1570, in 1986 Kirk’s body shudders as a nurse applies a defibrillator to his heart.

The novel reveals that Kirk’s and the barangay’s salvation through the pandot is a wider matter of historical justice, for Kirk’s various relatives in other times and places have mistreated other Filipino women related to Dayang. While working as a security card for General MacArthur in Manila in 1941, Kirk's Nazi-supporting German-American father Houston impregnates and then attempts to murder Carmelita, a Filipina sex worker and amateur sorceress who is a distant descendant of Dayang’s.
Original languageEnglish
PublisherRoundfire Books
Publication statusAccepted for publication - 2024

Keywords

  • fiction and social reality
  • literature
  • postcolonialism
  • historical fiction
  • Asian studies
  • Philippines

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