SMALLER AND SMALLER CIRCLES by FH BATACAN

GEMA CHARMAINE GONZALES Reviews

Smaller and Smaller Circles By FH Batacan

(Soho Crime, 2015)

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I’ve come to understand something about myself as a reader after reading four crime fiction novels last month: I don’t really like whodunnits. The who bores me. Give me the why and the where. Give me the architecture of violence, the rot beneath the floorboards.

Batacan delivers exactly that. In this book we follow a forensic anthropologist (who’s also a priest) investigating child murders in Payatas and the real crime scene is the entire system. Corruption as cultural inheritance, poverty as policy, a justice system stitched together with bribes and blind faith, criminology so underfunded it might as well not exist.

The where is everything here. What does crime fiction become when set in a country where the state itself is an accomplice? Where the church shelters predators and the police can be purchased? Where the cultural veneration of community and faith renders serial murder conceptually impossible, because to acknowledge it would be to admit the community itself is broken?

It’s visceral. And much more brutal than I anticipated. Batacan weaves in psychology, institutional rot, the failures of everyone who should have cared. It’s sad and uncomfortable and I haven’t stopped thinking about it.

This is often regarded as the first crime fiction novel in the Philippines. Highly recommended for fans of literary fiction, diverse lit and thrillers. 

  

*****

Gema Charmaine Gonzales is a Filipina PhD graduate based in Paris working in independent publishing and content creation. She shares book reviews on her bookstagram @adelicatereader focused on contemporary, feminist, and world literature.