The wilding

TINY yellow flowers carpeting the road. Glossy purple and green balls of caimito that drip sweet juice down one’s chin and leave one’s gums and lips caked afterwards in an odd telltale stiffness.

No one needs to tell me summer is here.

The traditional two months of release from school means that, even after I have long outgrown childhood, March still brings on a great restlessness, which the first rain in May only dampens.

I can see this same restiveness in nature. Leaves leaving trees in a great exodus, scattered into all directions by a wayward wind. Even the riotous grass withers and withdraws beneath the earth to a place I cannot behold.

This going away makes me wonder why I am still here.

This leave-taking is what reading becomes for me.

Reading looks such a placid, quiet preoccupation. Except for the flipping of a page, a reader is an enraptured creature, appearing to sleep with eyes wide open. The lips may just so slightly move, mumbling an incantation unheard or just breathing, keeping the reader barely connected with this world.

Inside, the reader is a savage, thumbing her nose at boring life and its petty fetters, escaping through the window of a scholar’s office to run wild and free, from roof to roof in the mythical Jordan College in the Oxford created by Philip Pullman and illustrated by Clement Oubrerie in the graphic novel adaptation of the controversial “children’s” classic, “The Golden Compass”.

This is the first novel in Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Pullman’s mistrust for organized religion bars these books from getting within shouting distance of schools’ required reading lists.
His thesis—a troublemaker will save the world—will not endear the trilogy to parents who regard books as pacifiers for unruly imaginations and tools to churn out exemplars and leaders.

But if you can relate to the child Lyra Belacqua shouting “Long live savages!” after running away from a lesson on experimental theology, if you have ever yearned to hid behind bookcases to spy and eavesdrop, you will find yourself at home in a tale where beasts, witches, and daemons in animal form are less deceptive than scientists, theologians, and religious authorities.

Offering not just deviations but disruptions, fantasy and science fiction compose my idea of perfect narratives. Lyra’s daemon Pantalaimon says my favorite lines in the graphic novel:

“Are you mad? Why are you always imagining things?”

Uttered by a talking animal in a make-believe university of great learning, the lines are found in two small panels on page 3. As a counterpoint for all the insanity organizing our world, has the imaginary been couched in terms more casual, insidious, and heartbreaking?


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s March 18, 2018 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Free will

A SEQUEL and a prequel are different but not altogether. A sequel follows a story; a prequel precedes. Both continue a story.

The husband and I went to search for the third volume of Joanne Kathleen Rowling’s Hogwarts series. A goddaughter had all seven volumes but the third one. How could the child have skipped reading the third, finished the series, and endured waiting for the third?

Ever practical, the husband suggested she borrowed a copy.

The more popular movies may dictate how books are read now. I read “The Lord of the Ring” trilogy, which John Ronald Reuel Tolkien wrote in 1954, before I discovered “The Hobbit,” written in 1937.

Yet, the struggle of good versus evil in Middle Earth continues long before Frodo picks up the ring “left” by his uncle, Bilbo. in “The Hobbit,” a young Bilbo finds The One Ring in the cave (or the ring finds him).

Supplying the “back story” of a major character, a prequel milks a top-grossing movie for its worth. In reading, is there a proper order?

I went down this rabbit hole again while debating whether to get Volume One of “The Book of Dust” for a young goddaughter. “La Belle Sauvage” (2017) returns Philip Pullman to the world of Lyra Belacqua in His Dark Materials trilogy (1996-2001).

The first of the series, “The Golden Compass,” was made into a movie, which, despite featuring Nicole Kidman, Eva Green, and Daniel Craig, is inferior to the book.

In “La Belle Sauvage,” Lyra is an infant sought by the mother who initially abandoned her, the father who cannot keep her, the despotic Magisterium, a shadowy organization calling itself Oakley Street, and a relentless predator.

The object of all this unwanted attention does nothing but wet her nappies. “La Belle Sauvage” belongs to an 11-year-old innkeeper’s son, Malcolm Polstead.

Pullman has a gift for recreating the rich, complex life of young people. In the fantasy world of Oxford, where scholars co-exist with witches and gyptians, and humans are twinned with animal daemons, the real enchantment is found in Malcolm’s ordinary life.

When Hannah invites Malcolm to choose “one novel” and “something else” from her bookshelves, the professor remembered an old lady in her village who initiated her to the “delight of choosing for herself, of being allowed to range anywhere on the shelves.”

While the race to control Dust—representing knowledge and the deathless debate if fetters can be imposed on knowledge—connects the planned trilogy of “The Book of Dust,” Malcolm’s choices settle the question for me: “He chose his books and tucked them away tightly in his knapsack to keep them dry… and he went out into the damp, dark evening.”


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s January 14, 2018 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata"