There will always be a soft spot in my heart for indie authors—they who choose to take on all the work a publishing house would otherwise take on, just to get their work out into a world of readers who can choose to buy their books or leave them. It takes a special kind of chutzpah to do something like that.
So I braved the traffic between the busy business center of Makati City to get to the book launch of The Merovingian at the Winford Manila Resort and Casino. It was a Monday, and I was in the thick of reading the literary submissions to the magazine—not that I’d have missed the launch.
The book’s co-authors, Renato Clarete Tranquilino and Zahara Depaling, were concluding a meet and greet and brief Q&A with the press when I entered the ballroom where the launch was being held. Gracious waitstaff circulated with canapes and wine, and the Winford’s Jami Ledesma was welcoming, even of this latecomer.
When Tranquilino and Depaling were done with the other members of the media, Ledesma was good enough to introduce us. It wasn’t exactly an interview I conducted. That felt more like a good conversation among writers than an interview.
“The thing with writing a novel,” Tranquilino said, “is that you start off putting one word after another until you realize you’ve written so much. You can get so caught up in the work that you realize you may not have written enough.”
“I was a classmate of the twins,” Depaling said, by way of introduction. She meant my daughters, not my nieces—who are also twins, albeit identical to my daughters’ fraternal status. “I remember you giving a talk at our high school.”
That drew a laugh from me, because I remembered her questions from that long-ago talk I’d given. Then I shifted the conversation back to her, Tranquilino, and The Merovingian, which is a work of science fiction heavily dosed with lore, both from the Philippines and from Europe. “It was a very good experience to write this novel with [Tranquilino],” Depaling said. “It was something that enabled us both to collaborate artistically, to tell a story that we needed to tell.”
The blurb on the back of The Merovingian reads: “A warrior-rebel with a past was among the thousands of Jews who came to the Philippines in 1939 to seek safety from the atrocities of Nazi Germany. But an ancient evil hunted her and her companion and if it weren’t for sympathizers to the rebels’ cause, they might have been caught.
“When that evil reached Philippine shores, she also found something in-country that, when triggered, could destroy the capital city forever. The rebel and her allies must craft a dangerous plan to defeat the enemy for if she succeeds, it would spell not only the destruction of a country, but the start of Armageddon.”
To say the book was creative fiction couched in solid science and history is an understatement. It weaves a very complex tale, one that traces its roots in World War II, further back to the Merovingian Dynasty that rose from the ashes of the fall of Rome, and reaches deep into the roots of the Philippines’ pre-colonial past to the monsters of our lore.
This book brings all of these together, perhaps in an unconscious reminder that Europe is not as far from the Philippines as we may think—we were colonized by the Spanish crown, after all. Our own history also tells us the British and Dutch tried to take hold of our archipelago, as well, Spain’s formidable armada notwithstanding. The natives, however, wouldn’t have it. Heck, the natives eventually booted Spain out, too, only to turn around and fight America, to whom Spain sold us, lock, stock, barrel, Puerto Rico and Cuba.
The story of The Merovingian is strong, and the protagonists are refreshing. It is wonderful to see women, whatever their ancestry, cast as warriors in their own right, and this book does not disappoint in this regard.
If you do come across this book, online or in actual brick and mortar bookstores, be sure to get a copy. Now, if you don’t mind, I need to re-read my autographed copy of the book. Some things just require repeated savoring.