No crime in these islands? (Crime fiction in the Philippines)

I don’t know how I missed this when it appeared this summer, but it is emphatically not too late to consider this compelling discussion of crime fiction in the Philippines, or the lack thereof, with subdiscussions here, here, and here.

Among the highlights is this provocative assessment from the Accidents Happen blog:

"So we don't write about it because we think it won't work in the Philippine context; the same way we don't bother to go to a police station when the FX we're riding in is held up by armed men who take our mobile phones, our wallets, our wedding rings. There's a sort of romanticized hopelessness in the way we write about crime, a stoic acceptance that that's the way things are, here in da Pilipins.

"So to sum up a very long ramble: the first reason I think we don't write a lot of crime fiction – to paraphrase [Andrew] Taylor – is that we long ago stopped trying to make sense of our violent society, and quit hoping that evil would not go unpunished."

The prevalence of crime, the pessimistic writer says, inhibits the writing of crime fiction. This makes a thought-provoking contrast with explanations of recent crime-fiction booms in Sweden and Ireland, such as this one, from an essay about Irish crime fiction: “As Ken Bruen, one of our most highly-rated crime writers wrote:`I didn’t want to write about Ireland until we got mean streets. We sure got ’em now.’”

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Technorati tags:
Asian crime fiction
Philippines crime fiction