WEARY of study, I returned to my hotel room, ready for my nap. Then my eye chanced upon a book, lying unopened since friends had pressed it upon me, urging me to read. Idly, I picked it up. At 150 pages it didn’t seem much of a challenge. It said on the back cover that the book had received literary awards. So I opened it. And then I was hooked.
Smaller and Smaller Circles, by Filipino author FH Batacan, is about two Jesuit priests-cum-detectives, who investigate a series of murders of undersized, undernourished teenage boys in a slum suburb of Quezon, the Philippines’ largest city.
The story opens with the discovery of the dead body of a boy dumped in the Payatas area of the city. The body has been mutilated and eviscerated. The two priests, Father Gus and Father Jerome, set about their investigation as the number of the victims rises, eventually to six.
All the victims are killed and mutilated in the same way. I shift my weight on the chair and continue to read, almost forgetting my ritual afternoon cup of coffee.
In a rapid and vivid style reminiscent of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the author describes how the two priests try to decipher the psychology of the serial killer. As they gather more clues, they draw nearer to their quarry. Finally they zero in on a dentist named Alex Carlos, who works for a mobile clinic providing dental services in the area. What is his background, and why is he killing these boys?
I looked up. Already it was late. Tiredness forgotten, I settled myself more comfortably and continued to read.
Alex Carlos, the priests found, was one of the smallest boys at his school, where he had been molested by their PE teacher. Alex was his “favourite”.
Unable to talk to his parents and friends about his humiliation and trauma, Alex grows up psychologically impaired and angry. First he takes fatal revenge on the teacher. But he is not yet satisfied. Now he feels compelled to wreak revenge on his fellow victims, whom he suspects of having promoted him to be the molester’s pet.
It doesn’t end there. Alex is a cunning and precise killer. He leaves the corpse with signs that imply there was a sexual conflict. In doing so he relives his own youthful ordeal.
Then comes the end, capping a thrilling narrative with a dazzling exposition of analytical detective work in writing so vivid I could almost smell the garbage heaps of the slums and hear the sobbing of the bereaved.
The story left me excited, relaxed, stimulated and satisfied all at once. My thoughts continued to race. My quest for the purpose of reading extended into a general perception. I asked myself – why do we read literature, what do we gain from reading?
Reading books is a form of entertainment, but not entertainment alone. Literature is worth pursuing as long as it is created through “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”, as William Wordsworth defined it. When writers perceive order and meaning in what they see, they receive inspiration and write down their perceptions, their “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”, to convey it to other people. This may be accomplished through the protean form of the detective story, or a volume of verse, so long as the writing captures the mind of the reader.
As author Robert DiYanni explains: “We read stories for pleasure; they entertain us. And we read them for profit; they enlighten us. Stories draw us into their imaginative worlds and engage us with the power of their invention. They provide us with more than the immediate interest of narrative – of something happening – and more than the pleasures of imagination: they enlarge our understanding of ourselves and deepen our appreciation of life”.
However reading does not always involve us in critical thinking. We can immerse ourselves in an imaginative world without putting in much intellectual effort. Sometimes we read just to kill time or fend off idleness. But if we really want to use reading as a tool to “enlarge our understanding of ourselves and deepen our appreciation of life”, we need to read in a more objective way, so as to see if reading clarifies our ideas about the world.
Reading needs a lot of practice if we really want to grasp its purpose. As beginners we can be drawn to the ideas of the writer and be influenced by his or her thinking. But as we progress we will be able to see “some flaws in the workmanship or in the coherence of the design in itself”, as Milligan puts it, and will be able to understand a particular history, culture, society or individual lives independent of the writer’s own thoughts.
That, I think, is the very state of intellect that we have to try to develop through practice.
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