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by Lewis W. Green. Reviewed by Patrick
Killough [07-29-2002] [NOTE: as of July 29, 2002 Lewis Green's new novel is not due to be released until late August. When it comes out, various reviews below will go to various places.] (I) for amazon.com This short novel is about a guilt driven man, his non-Christian religious order, his pet snake, three women associates, long contemplative patrols in space and a project to define and control time. Kadmon had once led warriors onto a comet to dispossess malevolent invaders of his star system. He worked out a truce but then was recalled for consultations by a vaguely political, thinly omnipresent ruling body called “The Order”. Meanwhile the comet disappeared. Confused, Kadmon left the military and became a novice of The Order. Much of his life was then spent aboard spacecraft making patrols. These assigned patrols taught novices techniques while testing their readiness to rise higher in The Order. Kadmon strove to understand time so that he could travel back in it and rescue his men from the comet. He was pledged to celibacy but was allowed by a curious Order to be tempted by three women who show him an outcropping on their home planet where time-related phenomena manifested themselves. Kadmon also carried everywhere a small, docile, pet serprent--whose skin color patterns had fascinated another woman in another time. During assigned patrol after patrol, some in the company of three women, Kadmon came closer to understanding time. Eventually he rescued his troops from the comet and evacuated their enemy as well. He had recollected at crucial moments the wisdom of Albert Einstein, Ignatius Loyola and the Jewish kabala. Kadmon and The Order also found connections linking time warps and black holes to Qumran, the Dead Sea Scrolls and Qumran’s Teacher of Righteousness. What’s past is prologue. Kadmon and the woman Gelda made ready to accept The Order's final assignment to ride the comet back to radiation-sick, manhating mother Earth, to repopulate Earth’s flora and fauna and replant the human race as well. The serpent, too, would play a role. In the novel’s surprise ending author Lewis W. Green has us wondering what comes next. All we know for sure is the novel’s leit motif: that what goes around, comes around--this time with ten times previous mass and velocity. This book is perhaps best
understood by students of the
Jewish kabala or freemasonry. Readers who prefer their science fiction
mystical will also love THE KABBALAH PILLARS. Loyal fans
of
Lewis Green will clamor for their copies. As with his other
novels,
some fans may find this one on first reading tantalizingly complicated
and baffling yet at the same time seducing into rewarding second and
third
re-reads TPK Swannanoa, NC 7/28/2002
(II) for barnesandnoble.com A soldier named Kadmon comes home from a war in which he left his troops stranded on a perceiving, feeling comet. He joins a monastic order and learns to ride through black holes in space back through time to rescue his men. He and a woman seer named Gelda are then elected by Kadmon’s order to ride the comet back to old Earth from which eons before it had been broken off. The couple will colonize an earth which had grown both unhealthy for humands and downright hostile to them. That is the main story. But the tale also teems in overtones. It is enriched by learned asides, discussions of astronomy, space travel and time. The novel draws on or alludes to kabala, feminism, freemasonry, the Jesuits, the Dead Sea Scrolls, epistemology and the power of analogy. At times THE KABBALAH PILLARS reminds of John in his Apocalypse or of Joseph Smith and Mohammed recalling their revelations from God. The novel is science fiction and is largely about religion but wisely chooses not to be a pretentious cultic book of the sort L. Ron Hubbard and some others have tossed off under the SciFi rubric. The religion KABBALAH PILLARS describes is non-revealed, undogmatic, gnostic, power oriented, aphoristic, elitist and therefore occasionally dismissive of “lesser breeds without the law.” THE KABBALAH PILLARS has power. Its many metaphors and aphorisms cannot be rushed past without slowing the reader and inviting reflection. Here are a very few samples. -- Kadmon’s senior monastic mentor Gabrol chides the hero for “spontaneous introspection” and for not using his will to block or summon thoughts, rather than just let them come in unbid. (Ch. 1) --What seems memory may instead be coming from the future, not from past associations. (Ch. 1) --Destiny can be incomplete. Does the future pull a person until destiiny is completed? (Chs. 2 & 12) --”History is a false prophet. It stutters as it repeats itself.” (Ch. 2) --The best choice of which of infinite paths to take at a crossroads is based on “the highest morality you can conceive at the moment.” (Ch. 3) --The biggest secret of the universe is that “whatever goes around comes around, with a tenfold increase in moral mass and velocity.” (Ch. 3 and often thereafter.) --(While Kadmon and Gelda wander among a planet’s poor and homeless:) “It is not our task to ignite aspirations.” (Ch. 5) --”You are supposed to be aware of evertything but attached to nothing, as the old Jesuit order had taught on earth.” (Ch. 5) In this reviewer’s opinion, here Lewis Green is dead right. Ignatian (or Jesuit) detachment from (aka “indifference to") to created good, unleashes enormous personal and social power in the service of an infinite Good or the Kingdom’s “pearl of great price.” Not only Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, sensed this power but so did his very different contemporary Saint Philip Neri who said that with twelve truly detached or indifferent men he could convert the world. --”A strong mastery of analogy is needed. It is the algebra standing between images and words.” (Ch. 6) --”Kadmon briefly saw himself and the women as unimportant afterthoughts in the journey of man, a slightly blurred mistake shooting the tube of a black hole...” (Ch. 7) --”Upon your creation, you were loaded up with a destiny, a purpose, which remains on course forever.” (Ch. 11) --Kadmon thinks of the graves of his buried ancestors “all those from whose blood he had escaped to enter into this life.” (Ch. 11) Finally, one image especially cries out for Lewis Green to poet to isolate it from the novel's context and to versify it. For it has the haunting evocative power of the Irish poet “A.E.”’s memorable “In the lost childhood of Judas, Christ was betrayed.” With equivalent insight Lewis Green alludes to Mary and Martha of Bethany, Lazarus’s sisters, close friends of Jesus. The sisters represent two major dimensions of Christianity: contemplation and action. Lewis Green asks: “they were friends, weren’t they?” Yet, what if they were not? -OOO- TPK Swannanoa 07/28/2002
(III) for the INDEPENDENT TORCH THE KABBALAH PILLARS:
Reviewed by Patrick Killough Lewis W. Green’s fourth
novel is myriad-minded. It begins
by evoking Garry Wills’s JOHN
WAYNE’S AMERICA and quickly morphs into Goethe’s FAUST.
And much, much more. Disheartened, Kadmon leaves the military. Like Faust, he seeks limitless knowledge but finds his salvation elsewhere. Faust, realizing in the end that “it is the eternal feminine which lifts us on high,” became his true self only through the unplanned love of Gretchen, a good but simple woman and through out-sized engineering works mastering Earth for the good of all men. Kadmon enters a powerful Order of thinkers and cosmic engineers, vows celibacy and undergoes training and testing on a series of exploratory journeys in space ships. The Order permits him to keep a small pet yellow and black snake from the planet Torka. As Mentor was guide to Odysseus’s son Telemachus and Mephistopheles was tutor of Faust, the exalted priest Gabrol leads Kadmon into the study of duration and measure of motion. For only after learning to link the ages can Kadmon ride through outer space’s black holes back through time to rescue his men. In warrior days Kadmon had felt women’s gravitational pull but had been slung away from “their splendiferous emotional universes.” Now, by contrast, it appears that the mastery of time, the taming of the comet and the rescue of the lost army can only be done by a celibate priesthood. Women would only distract. But neither Kadmon nor The Order is as self-sufficient as each appears. Celibacy, proving sterile, takes religious and cosmic searchers only so far. For there is also kabbalah, the muted “eternal feminine” latent in every John Wayne’s macho soul. In Green’s “Romance of the Ages” on a dusty planet celibate Kadmon meets Gelda and her two psychically gifted sisters. They display boxes worked into patterns like the snake’s colors. They introduce Kadmon to their world’s recently emerged structure in which whirls and whorls of black dust hint of time travel. The celibate monks are impressed by the seer-like powers and growth potential of these three untutored, untraveled sisters. The Order therefore assigns them, especially, Gelda, roles of increasing importance as associates of Kadmon in his conquest of time and rescue of his men. Although a mere woman, Gelda quietly exceeds her authority and in a complex brain surgery opens up new facets of Kadmon’s spirit. Gelda’s personal agenda calls for mating with Kadmon and bearing his children. She sees a father impulse behind his obsession to rescue his warriors. This lone weak female then deftly manipulates both Kadmon and his celibate Order into rescuing the lost troops and taming the angry comet in a way that allows Gelda and Kadmon to mate and to ride the runaway comet back to the Earth. There, thanks to DNA and specimens supplied by The Order, not only the human race returns in triumph to Earth but animal and plant life as well. Thus John Wayne loses his macho self-sufficiency. Thus Faust rises through love of a good woman (her simplicity was only a snare) to high holiness and cosmic engineering feats. Kadmon becomes truly Kadmon. And the snake comes home, too. Green’s novel invites many
interpretations. To earn the
right to your own, buy and read this compelling work by a master of
imagination. |