Wired in Manila

Filipinos are a warm, gentle, caring, giving people. Which is a good thing since so many of them carry concealed weapons. - Avi, to business partner Randy Waterhouse, in Cryptonomicon

Is it a great celestial coincidence – or just a weird touch of irony – that cyber-novelist Neal Stephenson sets a big chunk of his 1,100-page novel Crypto-nomicon in one of Manila’s oldest sections – Intramu-ros?

A little of both. Like any good writer, Stephenson is wired to pick up on the juxtapositions of old and new, ancient and high-tech, mystical and cyberspace. Writers have been commenting on the rich, contradictory strangeness of Philippine life for years (myself included). Of course it’s weird that almost all Filipinos carry around cell phones but still have to jump on foot-pedaled trikes to get from point A to point B. Of course it’s amazing how malls have replaced parks in the hothouse environment of Manila – so that Pinoys will always choose the Great Indoors over the Great Outdoors.

This is all part of living with, sailing on and adapting to the strange waves and breezes of life in Manila. Stephenson captures this – or at least one of his main characters, American code writer Randy Waterhouse, understands it as he wanders around the perimeters of Intramuros, Quiapo and Roxas Boulevard with his GPS receiver, locating the densest pockets of humanity so that he and his business partner, Avi, can corner the market on… information.

Or something like that. Actually, I’m still reading the damn thing, but it’s always interesting when the Philippines makes more than a passing appearance in fiction. We’ve had foreigners like James Hamilton-Paterson’s Ghosts of Manila and Alex Garland’s The Tesseract putting the spotlight on all that is weird and perversely human on these local shores. Stephenson – who is fiercely prolific, writing even longer sequels to Cryptonomicon as well as dense epics like Snow Blind and Quicksilver – must have spent enough time here to really soak up things, because he notices all the little bits about Manila – not just the container trucks lining Roxas Blvd. after 9 p.m. every night, making passage for other vehicles impossible, but the smallest vagaries of Pinoy existence, like how Filipinos tend to "notice footwear."

Not only that, but he sets another big chunk of his story right before, during and after the Japanese occupation, where US Marine Bobby Shaftoe is just starting to successfully woo a respectable young Pinay named Glory from Intramuros – when the Japanese torpedoes begin pounding Manila Bay.

Cryptonomicon hurtles back and forth between the high-wired present and the past, where the grandfather of Randy – Lawrence Waterhouse, a mathematician called upon by the US to join an Allied cryptography team called Detachment 2702 – tries to make sense of the destructive force of war, while aiming his analytical skills at cracking Nazi secret codes. Yes, this thick-as-a-brick paperback also works well as a spy thriller, though Stephenson seems more concerned with the lies people tell to survive than in crafting a straightforward page-turner.

There’s Lawrence Waterhouse, trying to make sense of the Axis codes, while his grandson Randy wanders Manila Bay, using the latest technological gadgetry to figure out how to make Manila the center of the world’s information matrix. How does Randy and his fast-talking partner Avi intend to achieve this? Through "Pinoy-grams."

"Pinoy-grams?"

"Here’s how it works. You are an Overseas Contract Worker. Before you leave home for Saudi or Singapore or Seattle or wherever, you buy or rent a gizmo from us. It’s about the size of a paperback book and encases a thimble-sized video camera, a tiny screen, and a lot of memory chips. You take this gizmo with you. Whenever you feel like communicating with the folks back home, you turn it on, aim the camera and record a little video greeting card. It’s highly compressed. Then you plug the gizmo into a phone line and let it work its magic."

But we soon learn that the information company, Epiphyte Inc., with its radar dish transmitting waves back and forth from the walls of Intramuros out to the China Sea, is after something vastly more complex than OCW dollars.

Avi and Randy enlist Amy Shaftoe (yes, the granddaughter of Bobby) a half-Pinay who runs a salvage operation with a knack for locating buried treasure, and the story veers into Yamashita gold territory.

Cryptonomicon will appeal to hackers and computer geeks, for sure, with its quicksilver problem-solving and mathematical in-jokes. But it has a propulsive, high-flying exuberance that will also appeal to fans of magic realism and, naturally, the spy thriller genre. It took an American – who was visiting here from New York, and who rarely wore shoes during his entire vacation here – to point out Stephenson’s mammoth bookstop to me. Little did I know the book was set in our own backyard.

In truth, to the discerning eye, the Philippines will always be rich in stories even stranger than the one Stephenson strives to tell. You can’t invent characters like Commander Robot or Bionic Boy; they’re just too good for fiction. Yet they’re up for grabs here, as easy to pick as an overripe mango. Surprising that so few Western writers and novelists have completely succeeded in transferring that weirdness to the page. And of course, Hollywood never, ever gets the Philippines right (though Apocalypse Now and its companion documentary, Hearts of Darkness, are more revealing about both Hollywood and the Philippines than most fiction could be).

Weird stories are a dime a dozen here. But Stephenson picks up on something else in Cryptonomicon: the buzz. The human buzz, generated by an archipelago of active, chattering voices, looking to be heard. And the buzz is building.

"The Philippines is going to be hot shit informationally speaking," Avi says. "The government has its flaws, but basically it’s a democracy modeled after Western institutions. Unlike most Asians, they do ASCII. Most of them speak English. Longstanding ties to the United States. These guys are going to be big players, sooner or later, in the information economy."

Needless to say, the Philippines is already a huge player in the Believe It Or Not economy. Who’s to say it won’t someday turn all that energy into something that will really rock the world again?

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Cryptonomicon is available at Powerbooks.