This is Kyle Mewburn’s first novel for adults, following stellar success as a writer for children. Her candid, vivid memoir, Faking It: My Life in Transition, garnered attention and accolades and is, perhaps, a book with a clear target of adult readers. This novel occupies a middle ground.
Sewing Moonlight takes a wide sweep from the 1920s until contemporary times, with most of the story focusing on the period between the two world wars and the years of conflict in the 1940s. For the most part, events are skilfully woven in – the polio epidemic of the late 1920s; at mid-novel, the burgeoning depression pre-World War II; the mistreatment of men in work camps; and the war itself and how it was experienced from the distance of New Zealand. There is the occasional lurch, when some of this history is given baldly from an authorial perspective, breaking the usually consistent close third-person point of view.
Mystery is introduced in the first chapter, with the return of a young man to the family farm in Queensland. Daniel is aware his grandfather was German and also that he spent some 20 years of his life in New Zealand. After the old man dies, Daniel is given an envelope with four keys and a piece of “greasy parchment”. He then drops out of the narration, not returning until the final chapter, where he puts these heirlooms to use.
Wilhelm, Daniel’s grandfather, comes to fictitious Falter’s Mill, Central Otago, in the winter of 1928. His arrival is dictated by fate, or rather the release of water from a dam, which destroys his boat and prevents him from going any further. Despite some resistance from the locals, he finds his niche there, taking up land, and farming it according to Rudolf Steiner’s biodynamic principles. The seasons pass, crops flourish or fail, and along the way we get to know a cast of characters, human and animal.
Wilhelm is an appealing, open, honest and decent man. There are locals who don’t like him for his nationality and his strange ideas, others who provide company for him and sometimes more than that, the possibility of love. He is a solitary being, happy to spend long periods alone, working through the day and reading his beloved Goethe by the fire at night. Mewburn has a palpable respect and understanding of Goethe’s work and this adds a layer of enjoyment for adult readers.
Mystery trickles through the main body of the novel, too, with the details of the tragedy that propelled Wilhelm away from his native land into his long sojourn in New Zealand.
Metaphor is occasionally hackneyed; a character is seen drifting “along a dusty street like a ghost-town tumbleweed”, for example. These lapses are redeemed by startlingly original ones: “a single tap dripped a rusty surrealist landscape on to the porcelain canvas below”; a character in receipt of a new notion rubs “the idea like salve across his chin”.
Where the novel seems to edge over into writing for children is in the animal characters. Gerhard the rooster, Gretl the pig and Mr Bumble the cat are delightful, but perhaps there is a little too much of them for adult tastes. There are also stylistic dimensions that are more common to child readership: simple sentence structure, a gentle pace, the use of repetition, ellipsis and German translated in parentheses.
For many readers, this dynamic will not be a problem. If we still lived, as many did for centuries, taking turns to read aloud by candlelight in the evening, the whole family would look forward to the next instalment.
Mewburn has an instinctive, generous feel for character – even the locals who are cruel and destructive are redeemed. In Sewing Moonlight, she has created that rare and valuable thing, a novel that will appeal to readers of all ages.
Sewing Moonlight by Kyle Mewburn (Bateman, $39.99) is out now.
