Caterwauling with Irene Sarmiento’s ‘Stray Cats’

By John Anthony S. Estolloso

Cats are endearingly overrated in literature. A constant familiar of witches and their covens. The usual companion of the eccentric writer, the Bond villain, and the underworld boss. The poetry-laced and adrenalin-pumped cavorting figures in an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. This time, Irene Sarmiento’s young adult novel takes the felines further in a mystery thriller laced with magical realism and cultural critique.

Burgeoning into the literary scene in 2023, ‘Stray Cats’ blends classic mystery with hodgepodges of conversant cats, local mythological characters, and phantasmagoric encounters set on scenes symptomatic of the country’s social ills. It’s the usual mystery novel – but with a clarion message, one that is hopefully not lost to its readers.

The reader is introduced to Elisa Paz: middle-class, sheltered, run-of-the-mill eight-grade girl. She makes the acquaintance of Oscar Santos, stray cat with an ostentatious name. To her surprise, she discovers her ability to communicate with the feline, who proceeds to act as the archetypal magical animal companion in her subsequent adventures.

With her middle-class upbringing and sensibilities, Elisa is starkly contrasted with best friend Raquel Madria, daughter of a housemaid. Though classmates in a pricey school, the latter is sustained by scholarships and inflicted by domestic woes, framing in the narrative the social inequalities embedded deep in the system. Her mysterious disappearance pushes Elisa to step out and uncover secrets lurking beyond the gloss of her gated world of elegant houses and frivolous costume parties.

Through the bizarre and the sordid, Elisa’s search for her lost friend weaves the plot in juxtapositions of contexts and characters: the real world and the dreamscape, scenes of affluence and poverty, encounters with mythological creatures and marginalized folk, places of life and death (both in the literal and figurative sense).

In the liminalities between these worlds, she experiences the supernatural interspersed with the religious and the cultural. Her quest takes her to secluded hovels where tarot cards are read, to lurid bars reeking of exploited bodies, to the shadows of balete trees with gnarled roots entwined on edifices. Accompanied by the constant feline, she braves the travails and horrors of each location at the risk of life and limb, even as she tries to come to terms with the world as an eight-grade student in search of a missing friend. With that, the novel goes beyond a coming-of-age story: it is a tale of innocence lost.

At this height of the narrative, author Irene Sarmiento takes a risqué turn. To frame the issue of abduction, child exploitation, and abuse through the eyes and adventures of a child and her magical animal companion may soften the approach to the subjects. Still, it does not diminish the seriousness of these issues nor does it downplay the fact that these abominations still occur in contemporary Filipino society – and the novel can offer but a momentary respite from these at its ending.

As if to cap the appeal to the reader’s sensibilities, Sarmiento breaks the archetype with her clowder of cats bursting from a burning factory to provide an escape for trapped workers. It was redemption most comically staged: a feline deus ex machina that speaks more to whimsy without belittling the cataclysm. They were there to hold back the darkness, the narrative says – the darkness of the dilapidated workplace, the dismal working conditions, and the callous disregard for workers’ rights and welfare.

For one who grew up reading the Sherlock Holmes stories and The Hardy Boys series, Irene Sarmiento’s novel is a shot of nostalgia loud with calls to action – or at least, to wake up to realities we might be insulated from. Rarely is social context given much emphasis in a mystery thriller; beyond the mere thrill of sleuthing and derring-do, Sarmiento interweaves history, culture, religion, social strata, and social ills in the narrative – and the narrative weaving works.

At the end of the novel, we are left with a scarred Oscar Santos and a wiser Elisa Paz, shaken by their harrowing experience yet more conscious of the grim realities of the times. It leaves us asking, what next and what then? We hope Ms. Sarmiento will oblige us with a sequel.

(The author is a language and literature teacher in one of the private schools of the city.)