Beautiful writing and a clever and
fascinating idea carry the book. (Review by Margaret von Klemperer, courtesy of
The Witness)
The roots of The Season of Glass, Rahla Xenopoulos’s fourth novel, lie in the
Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition which tells of righteous people who
will warn and save the world at a time of crisis. In Xenopolous’s telling,
these are twins, of whom the female child is the miraculous one while her
brother is her protector. And guarding them, in each generation when they
appear, is a mentor. These three will be reborn at times of crisis for their
people.
And so the story starts in the long ago
past in Ethiopia where the small Jewish community is under threat. The priest,
Zadoc, guards and guides twins Gudit and Sissay from their birth on the night
of an eclipse until their tragic end. But Zadoc knows that they, and he, will
return.
They next appear as wealthy Viennese Jews
on the eve of the Holocaust as again their world heads into disaster, though
enough can be saved to continue the tradition. From there, we travel to Cochin
in India where growing greed and materialism shake the society. Next, we are in
South Africa in 1976 on the eve of the Soweto uprising.
Then back in time to Spain at the time of
the Inquisition where the twins’ protector is Black Caezar, a pirate based in
the Caribbean. Again the twins won’t save the world, but will put a brake on
evil. And then we move into a distant future where, following some kind of
man-caused apocalypse, people live in pods, all connected by a grid, a kind of
super-internet that controls thought, memory and imagination. And here, in this
all-too-plausible world, perhaps the miraculous child will fulfil her destiny,
once again in Ethiopia.
It is an extraordinarily ambitious novel,
moving with assurance between its different times. Xenopoulos suits her style
to each period, and while I found the simplified spelling of the distant future
an irritant, maybe that is indeed where we are heading.
Perhaps a little judicious pruning would
have been a good idea – both the first section and the tale set in Cochin are
overlong. But beautiful writing and a clever and fascinating idea carry the
book.
The
Season of Glass is published by Umuzi: ISBN
987-14152-0957-8 - Margaret von Klemperer
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