Introduction

Following on the heels of her critically acclaimed book, “Season of the Witch,” Natasha Mostert's new novel, KEEPER OF LIGHT AND DUST, combines ancient mysticism with cutting-edge science, unveiling a series of mysteries: a secret clan of women called “Keepers” who have healed and protected warriors through the ages; a modern-day vampire who seeks something other than blood; and a succession of martial artists in fine physical shape who have suddenly and mysteriously died. Keeper of Light and Dust explores themes as old as time: violence, the redemptive power of love and the greatest desire of all -- to live forever.

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Excerpt

Rosalia came into his life during his gap year. He had just finished high school and hiking through Europe on his own felt like a great adventure. He was surrounded by beauty: soaring cathedrals, museums like jewel boxes, ethereal frescoes, heroic sculpture. He was happy. It was a year in which time was suspended and reality kept at bay.

But after ten months he was running out of money. Soon he would have to return to England and decide what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. He had no idea what this decision would be, and the knowledge that such a defining moment awaited him made him feel emotionally exhausted.

Palermo was to be the last stop on his journey. He arrived late in the afternoon but still in time to visit the city's most famous tourist attraction.

He drew his tongue over his dry lips; he was thirsty. On his way to the catacombs he had become lost. He did not speak Italian and had difficulty following the broken English of the shop owners he asked for direction. It all felt slightly nightmarish as he walked through Palermo's alleyways, his legs becoming ever more tired and heavy. He looked straight up at the far sky above him and it was a glazed, parched blue. There was no relief from the heat even though the tall houses on either side almost touched each other and threw deep shadows. In here it was cooler and very quiet. The tourist buses had all left. Even the hooded Capuchin monk who had taken his donation with listless fingers had disappeared. He was on his own: all alone with eight thousand mummies.

The most surprising thing was that the bodies did not smell -- there was no odor except for dust. He wondered if they had ever smelled. Perhaps when they were first placed inside their strainers and left to dry there would have been a stench of rotting flesh. Even the porous lime scale would not have been able to damp down completely the fruity smell of human ooze. But after an eight-month stay in darkness, these corpses would have been taken from their cells, washed with vinegar and lime and exposed to open air: fresh as a housewife's laundry.

He looked down at the guidebook in his hands. In 1599, Capuchin monks discovered a way to preserve the dead and Sicilians from all walks of life flocked to be buried here in the Catacombe dei Cappucini. The deceased often specified the clothes in which they wished to enter the afterlife and many stipulated that their garments were to be changed over time.

His eyes traveled up the twenty-foot wall until it reached the vaulted ceiling. The mummies lined the wall in rows: monks, lawyers, shopkeepers, matrons and maids. Virgins with steel bands encircling their heads to indicate their untouched state. All were dressed, and many were standing, some with hands folded across their stomachs and a jolly slant to their heads. Others screamed silently with open mouths. Many had lost ears, or were missing jaws and hands while others had defied the passage of time with more success: the caramel flesh truly mummified and the eyes cradled within dusty sockets. There were even mummies with ropes around their necks, but another glance at the guidebook told him that these were not the corpses of criminals but the remains of pious men. The ropes were not nooses, but symbols of penance, worn by the monks during their lifetime and carried with them into death.

Death. As he walked slowly down the long, death-choked corridors he wondered at the ambiguity of this word. When did death take place? Did death come when the brain stopped? His father, a physician, had told him the brain sometimes continued its electric dance for up to ten minutes after the heart had ceased to supply it with blood. The master switch, was what his father called the brain. The conductor. The commander in chief.

But he remembered his grandmother's death. His father had given permission for her organs to be harvested and she was to become what was known as a 'beating heart cadaver.' On the day she was pronounced no longer alive, he remembered leaning kiss-close and marveling at the color of her skin. Her brain had flat-lined, but she was hooked up to a respirator and her heart was beating. Inside her liver was a pulse. Her hands were warm and she would bleed if she were cut. This was his grandmother. They told him she was dead, but she looked alive.

The practice of mummification was outlawed in 1881. But in 1920 an exception was made for three-year- old Rosalia Lombardo, nicknamed 'Sleeping Beauty'. Her father, stricken with grief, begged a certain Dr. Salofia to keep his daughter alive for ever. Remarkably, Dr. Salofia managed to defeat the process of decay. Rosalia is a marvel and looks like a pretty sleeping doll who might awaken at any moment. Dr. Salofia's secret died with him: no one knows the method he used to preserve the little girl.

She was lying in a glass coffin in the chapel and her face was innocence itself: the nose pert, the mouth sweet, the cheeks infant plump. Her ears were tiny shells, and long lashes feathered her closed eyelids. The soft pink bow on top of her head made her look vulnerable as did the wispy tendrils of hair tumbling over her forehead.

He stared at her, not quite believing how perfect she was.

How could her father have borne it to leave her here? Why preserve a three-year-old child and leave her to sleep under the gaze of a thousand leering scarecrows?

A beam of late afternoon sunlight fell through the tiny, leaded window and made it look as though a sheen of sweat was on her brow. And in that instant he suddenly had a clear understanding of how his future must look. Life-defining moments sometimes happened serendipitously. In that one moment - in that most unlikely of places - the course of his life was set.

Rosalia was not about preserving the dead. Rosalia was about making a wish. A wish to stop time -- a wish, in fact, for eternal life.

Keep her alive for ever. A father's desperate plea. And clever, busy Dr. Salofia with his chemicals and fluids and overreaching genius had gone to work. But he was not a healer, he was a preserver. He had succeeded in keeping intact a perfect shell, but in the end, that was all she was: a shell. The brain dead. The heart dead.

Maybe the master switch was neither the brain nor the heart. Maybe the answer to life lay elsewhere...

When he arrived back in England he enrolled in university to study medicine. His father was convinced he had played the deciding role in helping his son decide on a profession, but that was not the truth. It was not his father who had been key, but a little girl with a pink bow in her hair.

And now, every night before closing his eyes, he would think of darkness coming to the chapel of the Catacombe dei Cappucini and tiny Rosalia sleeping in her glass case, a thousand mummified bodies pressed close around her like an army of the dead. And it would remind him that the strongest desire of all was to live. To live for ever. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. One of the themes in Keeper of Light and Dust is that ordinary life is filled with magic. If you think there is something wholly mysterious that lurks at the edge of your peripheral vision…you may be right! Do you agree? Do you believe in paranormal and mystical experiences? If you don't, did the author still manage to create a believable world within the pages of the book?

2. Who is your favorite character? Please give reasons.

3. Nick loves Mia completely. But he also admits that he is uncomfortable with the fact that she is a Keeper. He realizes that Mia and Ash inhabit a world he doesn't understand. Do you think this bodes ill for their relationship later in life? Do you think Mia and Nick's relationship may be doomed to one day mirror the troubled relationship between Molly and Juan?

4 . In one of the entries of The Book of Light and Dust, Ash writes:

Love and life: locked together throughout evolution like binary stars. Is the desire for love as strong as the desire for life? Which is the prime directive; which the secondary, weaker force? Love conquers all, we say, as though it truly has the power to defeat that older, darker imperative.
Does it?

What do you think? Can you come up with examples in literature and history where either the one or the other has triumphed? In Keeper of Light and Dust Molly held on to the unconscious body of her husband and drowned with him, even though she could have saved herself if she had let go and swam for the shore. Do you think her decision rings true? Do you think this might happen outside the pages of a book?

5. One of the central themes of the book is that the modern world with its ever increasing reliance on virtual relationships drains us of our emotional energy. We form relationships on social networking sites where we're not really sure whether the people we meet are who they say they are. In the dojo, you can't hide, and you can't log off when you are bored with someone's company. Would you agree that this a more real and ultimately healthier environment in which to connect emotionally? Or does the idea of training to fight in the ring cancel out the positive aspects of the camaraderie experienced by fighters in the dojo?

6. Mixed Martial Arts (UFC) is the fastest growing spectator sport in the US. Why do you think that is? Thomas Hobbes described the prime directive as homo homini lupus -- man is a wolf to man --and Freud believed the repression of our aggressive instincts to be at the heart of modern man's feelings of depression. Do you agree with him that the imperative of violence and domination is hardwired into our genes? Do you think that if we repress these urges, they will find other ways in which to manifest themselves e.g. teenagers playing highly violent, if “bloodless” computer games?

7. Has your idea of fighters and the fighting world changed after reading this book? For the better or for worse?

8. And tattoo artists? Do you look at the world of body art differently after reading this story? Has it changed your opinion of body art?

9. At the end of the book, we see Ash as an old, broken man. Do you have any sympathy with him?

10. Would you agree that Ash is the one character in the book that makes a spiritual journey? Why?

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