Season of Ash tells the story of three young men whose lives intertwine at the height of a time when politics, culture, and ethnicity collide. Visiting Alex Stanzis discovers what it means to be American and white in the foreign town of Soweto, Africa after he loses his way trying to find the airport home. His car is stolen, he can’t speak the language, and his white skin acts as a red flag to the authority of Soweto. Stanzis is recognized by Bornwell Malaba, a former game ranger who met the American at the camp where he was recently laid off. Bornwell returns to Soweto but leaves his heart with the animals and sunsets at the reserves. Chanda Radebe, Bornwell’s cousin, is thrown into the mix when he finds the thirsty and helpless Stanzis and tries to hide him from David Themba, the leader of Soweto’s dangerous political faction, the Kusasa.
As the novel unwinds, David gets his hands on Stanzis and guarantees him safety and a ride to the airport if he represents the Kusasa at a political rally. Chanda is confronted with the direction he wants to take his life: joining David and the Kusasa or succumbing to a ‘make ends meet’ kind of life. Meanwhile, Bornwell wants nothing to do with politics but to return to the nighttime sounds of the wildebeests and cool wind of the African reserves.
Justin Bryant introduced me to a world I previously knew nothing about. His language exposes the natural beauty of the African terrain, focuses on the effects of a country now able to vote, and more distinctly captures human nature in its raw form. ( )

I found this story to be very gripping, especially since I read it just after watching the movie Invictus (the story of Nelson Mandela's attetmpt to unite the people of South Africa through the national rugby team, the Sprinkboks). Reading "Season of Ash" has only inspired me to read more about what happened in South Africa both before and after Nelson Mandela was elected president. ( )

Speaking personally, as someone who has spent time in South Africa, both in the cities like Johannesburg and the game preserves and ranches, a.k.a. the “bush”, Justin Bryant’s writing is so vivid and spectacular, so picture perfect when it comes to landscapes, so active when concerning the city and shantytowns, and his characters so true to life, in mannerisms, in speech, in attitudes, that in short, this book swept me to a place where the fiction, my imagination and memories comingled so that I was able to be there again. His prose is succinct, point of view non-intrusive.

I’ll quote a passage here that made me remember what it was like to be in the middle of nowhere in Africa: “He sat for a very long time, watching the sun edge across the oceanic blueness of the sky. Surely, he thought, there is no sky bluer than that in southern Africa, where the hue is so rich it loses the appearance of depth and becomes finite and one-dimensional, like a freshly painted ceiling.”

Before I start daydreaming about that, leading this review nowhere…Season of Ash concerns itself with a few different leading men, and a scattered ensemble cast. One strength of Bryant’s is that he can write such depth into his wide range of characters. Though the principal story is set in 1994, before the first elections took place in which blacks were given a vote, we are given two early looks at David Themba, as young boy in the 1976 during a protest turned ugly, and again in 1983 as a promising but isolated student in a brief experimental high school in London.

The fact that David, as he says, has only know oppression greatly influences him to form a resistance/political group, a group known for its thuggish tendencies, and one that may lay claim to another of our lead men, Chanda, an entrepreneurial type who believes in making his own luck, though luck in a Soweto slum is hard to come by. Not particularly hard working, but clever, Chanda defies the life of a coal miner, his father’s hazardous job, and in Chanda’s opinion, the symbol of servile black labor. Chanda possesses a deep awareness of his Sowetan people and culture, one that you gain from being able to go nowhere else, and while he may not be as active/aggressive in politics as David Themba, he knows that South Africa is at a tipping point and he can go two ways: waste the personal sacrifice of the Sowetan fathers and be a complacent miner or local drunk, or join in with David, an ominous figure albeit charismatic.

Chanda will not consider the choices of his kind cousin Bornwell, who only wants good things for Chanda, but whose political interests have been supplanted by his love of the wilderness. Bornwell (whose point of view the above excerpt is from) studies the landscapes, the bush, the animals with passion and diligence, but due to circumstances out of his hands is forced back, temporarily, to Soweto.

The single other most important character, other than enigmatic Africa herself, is that of the bumbling American tourist Alex, who gets lost in Soweto after his stay on the lodge that Bornwell worked at. His presence and the events surrounding it literally bring the three men, David, Bornwell, and Chanda together, making Season of Ash the beautiful cross section of South African life that it is.
Tender. Suspenseful. Funny. Uncertain. Justin Bryant has written this book in the way that South Africa was at the time period and in many ways still is. ( )