There’s nothing like getting an enthusiastic recommendation from somebody who loves a particular book. So when Rach stopped by the blog to tell me that I had to read Illustrado by Miguel Syjuco, describing it as ‘a wonderful (funny) exploration of the country, its history, politics and people’, I made a point of looking it up.

Rach wasn’t alone in her appreciation of the novel. It won the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2008 and was one of the New York Times’s 100 Notable Books of 2010. Clearly a lot of people around the world rated it.

The novel follows Miguel Syjuco (yes, you read that right) as he attempts to get to the bottom of the death of his mentor, famous New York-based Filipino writer Crispin Salvador. Told through extracts from Salvador’s work and his protegé’s biography of him, interviews with the writer, meetings with his relatives, blog posts and comments in web chat rooms, a series of jokes about Filipinos in the West, and a first- and third-person narrative that charts Syjuco’s return to the Philippines in search of clues, the book traces and tangles the threads of Salvador and Syjuco’s histories. And, as the search for answers and identity becomes ever more fraught, it finds an echo in the public life of the nation, where a sleaze scandal, a rebellion and an impending typhoon look set to the shake the country to its core.

This is a novel about the search for authenticity – and one that plays this search out on every level. While Syjuco begins the novel ‘unconvinced’ by the accounts he has read and sets himself the task of sifting through the stories to get to the truth of Salvador’s life and death, readers must contend with the multitude of conflicting voices and sources in the book, as well as the protagonist’s self-confessed tendency to embroider the truth by, for example, fabricating a conversation with his neighbour on the plane home. In addition, the trustworthiness of love comes under scrutiny through the prism of Syjuco’s failed relationship with girlfriend Madison – a pairing based on embracing a series of ill-researched, international good causes and a vague Western guilt quite alien to their Filipino roots.

The result is an impressive and complex array of investigations into truth that can often spill over into the world outside the book. In fact, Salvador, whose work comes complete with footnotes in the novel, is such a convincing creation that for a while some readers even believed he existed in real life.

However, it is when it comes to writing that the questions about authenticity become most intense. Throughout the novel, a debate rages about what it means to be a Filipino author: there is the indignant Manila-based writer who maintains that writing in English is ‘heinous’ (more than a slight irony in this book which won the Grand Prize for the Novel in English at the 2008 Palanca Awards), while Salvador himself is on record advocating for dispensing with country boundaries altogether and aiming to be ‘an international writer’ because ‘your real home country will be that common ground your work plows between you and your reader’.

Yet nationality and cultural authenticity aren’t the only hot potatoes when it comes to writing in the novel. As the title of Salvador’s lost exposé, The Bridges Ablaze, suggests, the simple act of putting words on the page can itself be a violent, destructive thing. Throughout the book, storytelling causes rifts and feuds as people feel betrayed by the truths they are forced to confront. This touches on everything from the ridiculous insistence of Grapes and Granma that all their relatives’ work – no matter how remote from their lives – is about them, through to revelations that divide the nation. To write, then, requires fearlessness and even ruthlessness, as Syjuco finds himself reading, and perhaps also writing, in a dream:

‘Whatever they may say, your story is truly your own. You have a responsibility to it, the way a father has to a child. Damn your detractors, your hurt-faced family. They can’t take it away from you.’

The greatest irony is, of course, that the book’s interrogation of storytelling takes place through the medium of some truly outstanding writing. Funny, dexterous and seemingly effortless, Syjuco’s prose (the author… or are protagonist and author one and the same?) is a joy. Reading it is like skimming over deep waters in a speed boat with an expert pilot at the helm. If there are one or two too many daredevil manoeuvres here and there, the thrill of the overall experience more than makes up for it. Top notch.

Ilustrado by Miguel Syjuco (Picador, 2010)