Review—Dovelion: A Fairy Tale for our Times
by Eileen R. Tabios

Glenn Aparicio Parry

Once upon a time, standing in front of a grey building, pushing the button to Apartment 3J,” this immensely important novel begins/was written/and maybe never ends. A richly complicated and timeless glimpse into the fairy tale we call modernity, Dovelion (Duh-vee-li-on) defies easy description. It begins like a somewhat kinky love story, with two passionate lovers, one woman and and one gender fluid person, one the more submissive mentee and the other the more dominant mentor, brought together in such a unique and convoluted manner that it takes the entire book to reveal the depth of their interconnectedness. But Dovelion is not a love story, at least not only. Neither is it only a story of personal redemption, a political drama, suspense story, poetry, prose, fact or fiction—although it is all of that and more. Reality, to paraphrase Walt Whitman, ‘contains multitudes.’ Reality is large enough to contain poetry, prose, fact, fiction, magic, imagination, passion, revenge, justice, and more. Ultimately, reality is large enough to contain even fairy tales. And that only begins to give the reader an inkling of what Dovelion is all about.

To understand Dovelion, you almost need a soundtrack, for the one thing that is constant about Dovelion is its rhythm. Herbie Hancock’s Chameleon Man would do nicely. It begins with a repeating beat: Badomp ba domp domp domp, badomp ba domp ba domp and just when you are hypnotized by the repeating phrasing, it gradually, surreptitiously, changes and expands with a myriad of cascading variations on the theme. Suddenly, you realize you are in completely new territory, even after you return to the original beat. The author employs the same device in Dovelion. Over and over again, we hear “Once upon a time, standing in front of a grey building…” and “Once upon a time, an emerald island laid upon a blue, sapphire ocean…”and “Once upon a time, I thought poetry was a fairy tale…” and then slowly are shifted out of that reality. By the end, the grey building is no longer grey and the poetry is no longer a fairy tale, but a gripping reality, a suspenseful political thriller, a murder mystery, a search for one’s roots, and a visit from one’s ancestors. The novel unfolds like a kaleidoscope of fractals; it is deeply rooted, like a large tree; it has rings inside its bark, but its energy also expands outward, radiating and reaching out to connect with other trees and with the whole cosmos. The overall effect is one of exploration into a richly textured, interconnected, multidimensional universe. The layers are revealed one by one, until in the end, we glimpse the whole.

The breath of the philosophical themes in Dovelion are too varied and expansive to cover in a brief review—but the main point the author always returns to is how everything is interconnected and interrelated across time and space. Tabios calls this Kapwa time. There is no past, no present, no future as we normally think of them in Kapwa time. The past, present, and future exist simultaneously; any event that has occurred continues to exist somewhere in spacetime. Kapwa time includes everything, including what in the normal world we would call contradictions. “Once upon a time, I wake up and I am old that day.” But I am the same me that was young. Once upon a time, I am in a love affair, and even after my lover dies, they are still there. The only difficulty with Kapwa time is that pain never disappears. Everything is as fresh as the moment it occurred. The upside is that there is always enough time. Even when her lover dies, the time between them was sufficient.

I hesitate to say too much of the plot other than the bare bones, lest it be misconstrued. Elena, the main protagonist, is the daughter of someone ordered to be killed by the father of they, Ernst, her gender fluid lover who was the son of a CIA agent. Elena’s father was killed by a dictator in Pacifica, a made-up country close to the Philippines in more ways than one; her mother was a rising political star supported by the CIA who died giving birth to our protagonist, or so we are told. The facts and the truth become malleable in this story, just like the time. How the son of a dictator’s supporter and the orphan daughter of the father murdered by the same dictator could meet, let alone become lovers, is explainable only by the fact that in Kapwa time, everything is related and everything is part of each other. Nonetheless, there is great tension in the plot due to the odd juxtaposition of the participants. There is an overarching sense of fate pervading the story, not unlike the great Greek myths or tragedies.

Dovelion reads like an ancient myth, and like the great myths, the energy of the past continues to live in the present.As the plot unfolds, and more and more details are revealed, Gibran’s words ring in my ears. “Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.”¹ The inverse relationship between joy and sorrow is evident throughout the story. It is through reaching deep into her wounds that she finds her salvation. It is in the confronting of pain, not the running away from it, that she learns the truth of her life. When her lover dies, the building is no longer grey. “There is no longer any need to miss you,” she realizes. “We are all one.”

To be an orphan is to live in an alternative universe, but that too is interconnected with the normative universe. Her struggle to find out the truth about her mother, whether her father ever loved her, is all revealed in due course. The protagonist, like the author, is a poet. Clearly, the author’s purpose in writing this was not to write poetry, but to find a better life.

In the end, she learns she was not who she thought she was. And that is her saving grace.

She discovers that her heritage and poetry are for a purpose. She discovers her words are healing, that her poetry can change the world. Most importantly, she discovers herself. “It is never too late to have a happy childhood,” wrote Tom Robbins at the end of Still Life of a Woodpecker.² The same could be said about Dovelion. In Kapwa time, it is possible to live happily ever after. It may require being in a liminal, metaphoric space, but it is possible to exist ever after in the bosom of one’s ancestors. In truth, those ancestors have been with us all along, supporting and inspiring us. The veil between life and death is thinner than we realize. They are as interconnected as the roots and branches of a tree.

In the end, Dovelion is a book about love, for it is love that interconnects us together, that makes us all one with each other across time, with our friends, lovers, enemies, ancestors, and the yet to be born. In this sense, Dovelion is a love story after all. “You should bring the past into the future, through love,” says Elena. And indeed, she does. This fluidity of reality is what makes Dovelion a true fairy tale for our times. And that is quite the accomplishment.

Endnotes

1. Gibran, Kahlil. The Prophet. New York. (1973), p. 29.

2. Robbins, Tom. Still Life with Woodpecker. New York. Bantam, (1990), p. 277.