Without Seeing the Dawn

THIS first novel by a young Filipino writer tells a simple story of a young man’s marriage in a remote country village on one of the Philippine Islands — Panay, to be specific — and of his efforts to make a home and living for his wife and sons. But because Stevan Javellana is a real novelist, this plain tale of a man and the life and death of the community he lived in becomes the story of all the Philippines under the heel of Japanese occupation. It is an extraordinarily vivid book, worked from the fabric of Philippine life — quiet, laughable, exalting, bitter, and horrifying; but it is written almost gently, with an undertone of lightness, like the sound of Filipino voices heard in the fields towards the end of day. Its roots are deep in the earth from which, in spite of the embroideries of science, all life springs, and its simplicity makes it universal. It belongs, perhaps, in the category of the great Scandinavian novels of the growth of the soil, but because it deals with Filipinos it. also has a gift of sunshine and laughter and broad humor despite the horror with which the ending unfolds.

When Carding Suerte married his Lucing, there was still peace in the Philippines. His father was one of those rare and lucky people who owned a handkerchief of land in his own right; but as it would not grow rice enough to support more than one, he and Carding worked the land of an absent proprietor. This land was so rich that they lived well by village standards and were regarded as fortunate. For a year there was happiness in the new marriage.

Then the landlord’s son came to stay in Carding’s house, attempted to seduce his wife, and was badly beaten. In revenge the land the Suertes had worked so long it had come to seem almost like their own was taken from them. The old father could live alone off his own freehold’s produce, but Carding had to look elsewhere. An experiment with city life was a failure. Carding returned to his home village with nothing to show for his labor. It was then war came.

With ot hers Carding was taken away by the Army to fight on Luzon and on Bataan and to make the Death March with the Americans. When he finally returned to the village, the Japanese controlled the land. He wanted only to rest and to fight no more. How he came to join the guerrillas and fight, his own war against the Japanese, and how they retaliated with the insensate and capricious cruelty that marked their occupation, is the ending of the book.

Carding’s story is a grim and bitter tale that fits in many quarters of the globe. It has seldom been told so well or with greater feeling for the dignity of simple men in the unholy mess that “civilized mankind is making of this earth.

WALTER D. EDMONDS