In his recently published novel entitled Roles, Carlos Malvar attempts to capture the present realities and sensibilities of Manila’s higher-class, young adult generation through deploying a set of familiar high school characters in the fictionalized yet familiar-sounding exclusive school named “The Montessori of Asia and the Pacific”. Knowing the setting and the title and reading the first chapter of the novel are enough to predict how this work is projected to pursue: every character amounts to and plays a specific role, and every role will be given detachable blocks of substories to give way for character and plot development.
It is interesting to point out though that the title Roles also explores the idea of the plot ironically resonating itself inside an inner plot. In this novel, the characters are united by the challenge to join the auditions of the reality show “You’re It,” but the reality show actually already starts at the very beginning of the novel, the omniscient lenses of the chameleon narrator catching every role that every character plays.
