The Betrayed by Reine Arcache Melvin (Europa Editions)

The story flowing from the pages of The Betrayed has the thickened, sweet darkness of freshly drawn blood. Reine Arache Melvin has created three main characters who could easily take center stage in a Greek tragedy. They inhabit a place that everyone has heard of, during an unnamed time that many will think they can identify. But the portraits of the two sisters, Lali and Pilar, along with Arturo,  the man they both long for, reveal only enough of what takes place around them to create skillful traps. One quick snap and all that seems to be understood becomes a lie.

The death of their father brings Lali, Pilar, and their mother back from a U.S. exile to their home in Manila. “The General” has been ousted but politics are so convoluted that even the new female leader must honor his godson, Lali’s husband Arturo. As new alliances are forged, Lali and Arturo’s marriage weakens. Arturo fell in love with a seductress. Now she’s soon to become a mother, a truth that shakes them.

Confused and floundering, they both take refuge in old habits. Arturo becomes attracted to his wife’s younger sister and pregnant Lali gives Pilar permission to comfort him. Lali, horrified by her changing body that no longer rivets the male gaze, comes across a foreign man in a shopping mall and decides he’ll become her prey. She fascinates him, but not for the reasons she expects.

Then both sisters are ensnared in the brewing revolution that lurks beneath the surface of the Philippines. Their story swiftly encompasses a burning village, a public decapitation, a dinner party with a man who would cheerfully see everyone at the table dead at his feet.

“I was wrong about Lali. People surprise you,” Lali once heard her father tell someone over the phone. She and everyone around her continues to surprise, going against easy assessments, right up to the conclusion of their stories. 

So does the novel’s setting. Arcache Melvin, in tactile detail, shows Machiavellian cruelty, casual corruption, and wealth that makes all wishes come true. Her trio are aristocrats, born into privilege and comfort that’s denied to the majority of Filipinos. Yet even with the insulation provided by their birth and breeding, both Lali and Pilar understand more about the people who surround them than does the foreigner Lali picked up in the mall, an investigative photographer who has steeped himself in places the sisters have yet to see, or the foreign missionaries who have made their homes in the middle of a revolution.  

“You don’t go deeper, “ Lali tells her photographer, “It’s all one-sided.” Yet within the kaleidoscope of violence and shifting loyalties of the Philippines, going deeper is like being hacked with a machete. The pain is excruciating and unfathomable.

Aracache Melvin takes her readers deeper. With skillful twists of her kaleidoscope, she shows one side, then another, with vertiginous speed and clarity. The Betrayed splits open a crack into a hidden world, quickly showing its brutality, its tenderness, its ghosts, and its darkest corners--and still by the end, readers will find themselves for answers to the enigmas they’ve been shown. “In the end, life gave more than it took away,” but for whom?~Janet Brown