Welcome to another edition of my blog thingy! I've just returned from Malaysia and am resting nice and comfy in my little place in Manila. I'll miss those cheesy wedges, but hopefully there will be better things.
I haven't had time to prepare the pics for my little epilogue to my excursion in Malaysia, so that'll come a bit later. In the meantime, I'd like to talk to you about some other things.
A long time ago, say, fifteen years, my aunt gave me a sci-fi novel called On My Way to Paradise. Back then, my only exposure to novel-length literature were Star Trek novels, and back then, I didn't want to read anything but Star Trek novels, and from what I saw from the book, I found it uninteresting.
So the book stood in the shelf for years. Once I tried to read it, but I was occupied with other things. Then, last week, I decided to bring it along with me on my Malaysian trip to keep me occupied. Since that day fifteen years ago I've been exposed to the greats of sci-fi literature, Frank Herbert and his Dune series, or the sadly overlooked books of A.A. Attanasio, mainly his Radix tetrad.
Now, having finished the book, I can say that this is a good read, and the timing could not have gone better. Better than all those Star Trek novels I used to read.
The novel depicts the life of a morphologic pharmacologist, Angelo Osic, when one day he helps a woman who calls herself Tamara. This one act of mercy takes him on a ride, divided into three parts, from his quiet little house in Panama to space, to a distant planet called Baker, occupied by two warring Japanese factions, the Motoki Corporation and the Yabajin.
For a first novel, it's pretty impressive that the novel's author, Dave Wolverton (who would later go on to write some Star Wars novels) managed to weave a deep, multilayered tale about how society works, and how an honest or at least decent man can be changed to do almost anything (a similar theme exists in some brilliant movies, like the recent works of Park Chan-wook) Sometimes the tone of Angelo's musings seemed to me a bit too moralistic, but could that speak volumes on my own beliefs and moral standards? I ask myself, how much have I compromised to get where I am now?
There are many powerful scenes of savagery that shook me in a way few other literary works do. As Angelo joins the war and is forced to do acts of destruction that intensify as time goes on, he struggles against his compulsion to continue to do evil things. And as the ending comes, it sheds a different light on his motivations, on the way he made decisions in the past, and on how he decides to live the rest of his life.
Though not thouroughly perfect, the images will stay in my head for a long time to come: the burning cities of Motoki, the riots inside the Chaeron, the standoff in Sol Station, and my personal favorite moment of the book, the last part of the first third of the book, when Angelo dreams of his friend Flaco and Tamara playing along the sea.
"Where are you headed?"
"I'm on my way to paradise!"
"Hah! Good Place! I have a cousin who lives there!"
And Angelo spouts wings and takes flight. I hope you have found paradise, Don Angelo. Free at last.
"Pain is a rose of great peace. Silence is the depth of a song. And stillness is the space of our lives, So empty it can hold everything. " - A.A. Attanasio, Radix
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