Literary Notes: Manila has found literary favour, as befits a nation whose founding martyr, José Rizal, was a novelist. Rizal's Noli Me Tangere or Touch Me Not (1887) established modern Philippine literature and is a key work in the evolution of the modern national consciousness. His El Filibusterismo or Subversion (1891) is even more explicit in its dissection of Spanish colonialism in the Philippines. His successors, however, remain mostly unknown to an outside audience.
British writers have contributed some of the best recent interpretations of Manila. James Hamilton-Paterson has published Ghosts of Manila (1994), a tale of horrible goings-on in the twilight of the Marcos era, thinly fictionalised from real events. James Fenton showed up in Manila for the last act of the Marcos soap opera - his memoir, The Snap Revolution (1986), captures the occasion, albeit from an arguably patronising and leftist perspective. Corazon Aquino and the Brushfire Revolution (1995), by Robert Reid and Eileen Guerrero, interprets the events differently but also with a jaded eye. William Boyd used Manila in 1902, as the backdrop for his The Blue Afternoon (1997), while Timothy Mo's Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard (1995) makes a great play of Manila's once notorious electricity outages, weaving them with more than a whiff of scatology. A Short History of the Philippines (1969), by Teodoro Agoncillo, is probably the best work to cover its brief.