[In the following review, Hussein examines the themes of fantasy, food, and popular culture in Dogeaters, calling the novel “an echo of an epic ballad of resistance.”]

At the entrance of the Manila Intercontinental Hotel, a radical senator is shot down. Two bystanders, one a waiter with dreams of show business success, the other a male prostitute and petty criminal, are caught up in a chain of events that will lead to the imprisonment of one and the other's flight to a guerrilla hideout in the mountains. Meanwhile, on the borders of this narrative, the story of Daisy, the senator's daughter, arrested for her seditious activities, interrogated and brutalized, unfolds.

Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters is a song of her native Manila, a walk on its wild side where, in the city's pits of deprivation, the privileged and the powerful rub shoulders, in a search for young flesh. It is also an indictment of the Marcos regime, a fiction about the net of politics cast over the lives of ordinary people, changing victims into rebels.

There are echoes of Han Suyin in Hagedorn's evocations of the timbre of life in South-East Asia; there is more than a touch of Manuel Puig, too, in her fascination with the paraphernalia of popular culture. The radio soap opera, Love Letters, captivates rich and poor alike, the film studios magnify a universal dream world and provide playmates for the corrupt politicians and their cohorts, the tycoons and entrepreneurs, who are the targets of Hagedorn's satire. Her gallery of villains—which includes Imelda Marcos, caricatured as a Philippine Alexis Colby, lying her way to fame—is full of cardboard cut-outs, luridly coloured, larger than life yet smaller than their victims.

Hagedorn captures the rhythms and the flux of her city in a variety of viewpoints and voices; Tagalog phrases are interlaced with Americanisms and she takes pleasure in naming (often suspect) street-foods: dogflesh, pig's black blood. Food imagery recurs in the protagonists' dreams; their dream language is a hybrid of Roman Catholic and animistic elements, full of metaphors of sacrifice and penitence. Dates are deliberately vague; the events seem to be taking place in the 1950s, but could equally well have occurred much later in the Marcos regime.

This nightmare vision of Manila as the gateway to a neo-colonial hell, a microcosm of the underdeveloped world, is reflected in the eyes of Joey, the child of a black American soldier and a whore who abandoned him to drown herself. His path to the guerrilla lair in the mountains is guided by fatalism; along the way, he seeks relief in drugs, homosexual prostitution, and casual theft, but inherent in his wasted life is the possibility of transformation, and this is the resilience that Hagedorn celebrates.

Dogeaters is an echo of an epic ballad of resistance, of the disenfranchized and the disenchanted. Although, towards the end, there is a hint of an encounter between Joey and a rebel daughter of the rich, Hagedorn leaves their story—in the fashion of Scheherazade and soap opera—tantalizingly half-told. The ballad of Joey, Daisy and the mountain guerrillas remains to be sung in another novel.