THE SAMSONS

The final volume in Filipino author José’s Rosales Saga (after Dusk, 1998, and Don Vicente, 1999) consists of two short novels bringing the action up to the period of the Marcos dictatorship. The Pretenders opens with the suicide of Tony Samson, then circles back to consider its causes. Leaving his impoverished native village of Rosales to study in America, Tony met the daughter of a wealthy Filipino industrialist, the kind of man despised by his proud father, and came home to marry her. His ensuing corruption and despair are chronicled with José’s customary passion (and lack of subtlety): “The young people like Antonio Samson . . . they were destroyed because they were bribed. And . . . the country and the beneficent change they could have brought were lost.” The protagonist of Mass is Tony’s illegitimate son, Pepe, who redeems his father’s sins by returning to Rosales to struggle for liberation. “I leave behind those who see the sword but refuse to use it,” he tells a local priest, and this modern-day Samson departs with his hair uncut. Didactic and hectoring, as José’s work often is, but also a powerful portrait of the human cost of colonialism.