PASSION and betrayal are bedfellows, sometimes welcome sometimes not. Jacqui L’Ange’s debut novel, The Seed Thief, is their story.
Cape Town botanist Maddy Bellani is sent to Brazil, where she was born, to retrieve the seeds of a tree, Newbouldia mundii. Originally from West Africa, where they are now extinct, the trees harbour a possible cure for some cancers. There are rumours that there is a stand of the trees on land belonging to a Candomblé community — Candomblé is a syncretic religion developed from the West African religion of some of the world’s most horribly betrayed people: slaves.
Maddy must convince the Candomblé to let her take enough seeds to provide a batch to the international seed bank at London’s Kew Gardens, and another to SA’s Kirstenbosch. Her mission is made more urgent, and emotive, because her boss Kirk is watching his wife waste away with a cancer that might be cured by the trees, her arrival in Brazil is poignant because her estranged father lives there.
Details
- TITLE: The See Thief
- AUTHOR: Jacqui L’Ange
- PUBLISHER: Umuzi
It is a bereft and barren Maddy who enters this emotionally charged new world. Her relationship with Nico and his repeated infidelity over, she agrees to go, feeling a change can only help. For Maddy, as for the slaves who — probably unwittingly — brought with them the Newbouldia mundii seeds, the kernel of new life, ready to be drawn out of tragedy, lies in the soil of this new world — for the slaves a new existence complete with a regenerated religion, for Maddy new love in the form of Brazilian plant expert Zé.
It’s a scenario ripe with potential for passion and betrayal. L’Ange has dug layers of both into her story, her words creating a rich loam from which they germinate, the roots of one becoming the food for another. Right from the start Kirk uses his passion for his wife, along with Maddy’s passion for seeds, to prepare fertile ground for his betrayal of his wife, his co-worker, his noble intentions to save his wife and everyone’s trust.
When L’Ange’s book opens with Maddy stuck in an airport while Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupts, grounding planes across the world, the relationship between herself and seeds is already a mirror. As she endures the hiatus caused by this volcano with the unpronounceable name, she thinks of the Newbouldia mundii seed, which would also have endured enforced dormancy before finding new soil in which to put down roots.
For the seed the soil is Brazilian, for Maddy the new terroir is Candomblé, especially as represented by plant expert Zé, who we first meet beating a drum in a Candomblé ritual. It is through the Candomblé community that Maddy is drawn to Zé, and through Zé that she deepens her immersion in Candomblé, but as Ernesto tells Maddy, "Ignorance can be a dangerous thing when you are in unfamiliar territory," and so it proves.
Zé is both Maddy’s avenue into the Candomblé world she must embrace to get the seeds, and someone she must — even if unwillingly — betray for them. Passion and betrayal are here as inextricable as they are in the story of Maddy’s mother’s death by Drakensberg lightning strike. The incident sparked the estangement between Maddy and her father, who retreated into a grief no child could understand, and no adult who was that child could completely forgive.
L’Ange’s lissom prose carries a sense of place, and purpose. Passion and betrayal ooze from Salvador’s stone streets, "breathing in sea breezes and steamy city perfume", and are part and parcel of the stories Maddy unearths of the many Candomblé orishas — deities based on similar beings in the Yoruba, Fon and Bantu traditions. The author has managed to weave love, lust, menace and mendacity into a charming page-turner of a novel. It’s an impressive feat.
A sort of whirling dance is part of the Candomblé rituals described by L’Ange, whose story picks up pace in much the same way as a twirling dancer, rising to a crescendo that leaves the reader — and Maddy — disoriented and helpless in the way of a person who has spun until out of control and who must sit or lie still until the world stops swimming. If this is a first, it is hoped the seeds of many more lie in the quiet soil of the L’Ange mind.
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