THE BLUE AFTERNOON by William Boyd

Finished Sa 12/18/21

This is one of my ancient trade paperbacks that I first completed in two days over the Labor Day weekend, Tu 9/3/96. 

Set in Los Angeles, 1936; and on Luzon (largest island of the Philippines), Manila (capitol city), 1902. 

An elderly man contacts a woman in Los Angeles. He tells her that he is her 'real' father. This occurs in 1936.

Then the story switches to the Philippines in 1902 and tells the story of his love affair and professional tribulations.  

From a review on Goodreads:

" The themes covered here are the occupation of the Philippines by America, the birth of aviation, the improvement of the surgical science at the beginning of the 1900s. And love. Physical attraction, love between couples, love between parents and offspring, and relationships without love. Rather than providing a list of correct historical details you get a feel for the era. It is not the details but rather a sense of what conditions were like. In this book you are confronted with the filth of earlier surgical practices; you are confronted with the atrocities committed during America's occupation; the exhilaration of flying for the first time. What you get is more an emotional understanding than a mental learning of historical facts. I want to feel myself in another person's skin. I am less interested in the historical details. I will soon forget the historical details if I don't feel an emotional empathy for those who lived through those times.

This is a mystery story too. There are murders. I personally think the ending is clear, at least we know how Kay Fischer interprets the events. What is not conclusively known is not that important, and this is an important message of the book."

From the review at Publishers Weekly:

"in 1936, Los Angeles architect Kay Fisher is approached by elderly Salvadore Carriscant, who tells her he's her father and whisks her off on an improbable journey to Lisbon. Despite that unconvincing framing section, a fascinating love story-cum-murder mystery occupies the heart of the narrative, which flashes back to 1902 Manila. There, the young Carriscant, a brilliant surgeon, falls in love with Daphne Sieverance, the wife of an American colonel whose troops are stationed in the Philippines to quell a bloody insurrection. When two American soldiers are murdered by someone who eviscerates their internal organs, Carriscant helps the chief of the constabulary, the improbably named Paton Bobby, to locate the killer, whom Carriscant suspects but cannot accuse. In this middle section of the novel Boyd suspensefully orchestrates some diabolically clever events, including a fatal air crash, a scene reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet and a shocking climax that will send readers reeling."

I enjoyed the book and would read more by William Boyd. I'll check him out on Amazon Books.