Elizabeth Heritage
Sewing Moonlight by Kyle Mewburn (Bateman Books, 2024), 328pp, $39.99
Sewing Moonlight is Kyle Mewburn’s first novel for adults. I was looking forward to reading this pukapuka because Mewburn’s writing for children is very highly regarded, and when I saw her at the Word/Kupu writers’ festival in Ōtautahi a couple of years ago her performance was one of the funniest damn things I’ve ever seen. I was also intrigued by the cover: the design gives dark fantasy vibes, and the title hints at stitch witchery.
The first chapter, set in Queensland in 1990, is told from the point of view of Daniel. His grandparents have just died, and he regrets not having asked them more about their lives. At the funeral a mysterious German man shows up to give Daniel four keys and ‘a piece of greasy parchment’:
The first key, heavy and ornately tubular, looked like something straight out of an Errol Flynn movie. The key to a castle door. Or a cell.
The second was much flatter. The kind that might be hidden between the pages of a book. The key to a pirate’s treasure chest.
The third was obviously a car key, worn smooth with use.
The fourth and smallest key, small enough to hang from a charm bracelet, suggested a diary.
How exciting! This made me think that Sewing Moonlight was going to be about Daniel going on an adventure to discover the secrets of his family history. But no such luck. Instead, on page 12 we flash back to 1928 and the point of view of Wilhelm (Daniel’s grandfather), and we’re with him unrelievedly until page 311 (by which time the year is 1941). Sewing Moonlight turned out to be straightforward historical fiction with no speculative fiction elements at all.
Let me start with what I enjoyed about Sewing Moonlight. True to form, there are moments of humour, mostly physical slapstick involving animals. Mewburn’s books for children often feature animal characters and, although here none of them talk, the animals’ lively antics and personalities light up the page.
Sewing Moonlight also contains representation for horny women, which I appreciate. Gladys, on her pugnacious and determined quest for sexual satisfaction, is unfortunately just a minor character. Sick of bad sex with the same few local guys, she eventually gets the hell out of Dodge. I would have loved to learn more about her.
I was a bit nervous about how Mewburn would make the shift in her prose style from writing for children to writing fiction for adults. And sometimes in Sewing Moonlight, the strategy of telling rather than showing feels awkward. Here’s an example from the first chapter:
Those missing years were intriguing and disquieting in equal measure. Like a locked door in an abandoned house.
This structure, whereby a simile or metaphor is tacked onto the end—often in a sentence fragment—occurs frequently. Then there’s this:
Yet it was the homeliness of the place that intrigued these visitors. The carefully rinsed dishes stacked neatly by the basin. The do-re-mi of shiny saucepans hanging from ceiling hooks. The quartet of sunny dandelions crooning from a blue bottle on the table.
Such descriptive lists are used a lot, so much so that they begin to read like padding. However, when Mewburn’s prose sparks to life with original observations, it’s excellent. I love ‘the do-re-mi of shiny saucepans’—it’s an arresting and vibrant image that brings to mind a familiar sight but in a new way. Sewing Moonlight, though, also features passages of purple prose that I wrinkled my nose at: ‘Despite the obscured moon, the paths seemed imbued with a subtle luminosity.’
But I found Sewing Moonlight to have much larger thematic problems. One such problem is the disconnect between the endless grace the text is willing to extend to its protagonist, Wilhelm, and my reactions as a reader to his words and actions, which are consistently churlish, arrogant, and unkind. Wilhelm is a dour German immigrant with a brutal case of resting bitch face and a holier-than-thou superiority complex:
He’d always been somewhat taciturn, and his face had, over the years, set in an expression of such seriousness that it was often mistaken for disapproval or anger. Most people thought it prudent to keep their distance. The fact he was slightly taller than most men seemed to offend shorter-than-average men, as though his few extra inches had been gained at their expense.
I am not sure how I was meant to take such a lack of self-awareness. To my mind, thinking that people don’t like you because they’re just jealous of how tall you are is ridiculous and self-serving.
Wilhelm has fled his native Germany to escape a personal tragedy. He sails up the Mata-au River (called the Clutha throughout), crashes his boat, and decides to stay at Falters Mill (an anagram of Miller’s Flat, where Mewburn lives). Using wealth inherited from his grandfather, Wilhelm buys a plot of land from Mr Blain, whose son was fatally wounded in the Great War:
[Wilhelm] felt he had an obligation to acknowledge the price the land had exacted from those before him. It was a matter of respect. The land had a lineage too, and Wilhelm would never feel at home if he believed he was there under sufferance.
Our land does indeed have a lineage deserving of respect, but the only parts of this epic history that Sewing Moonlight is interested in acknowledging are the couple of decades or so immediately prior to the events in the pukapuka. When Wilhelm says he can only feel at home if he’s not there under sufferance, he means if Mr Blain doesn’t hold his post-war Germanness against him. The mana whenua of Kāi Tahu is not acknowledged and, for the purposes of this novel, may as well not exist.
Māori novelist, playwright and commentator Renée (Ngāti Kahungunu) made this point about the creation of history in her final pukapuka, Blood Matters: where you choose to start it says a lot. This scene from Blood Matters is when the protagonist contemplates an ‘old New Zealand homestead … a house whose inhabitants would boast proudly that it had been lived in by four, maybe five, generations’:
She always wanted to ask: who was this land taken from those five generations ago? People who’d lived there for eight generations before you came? Another one of good old Governor Grey’s shady deals, helped along by the military? Or maybe it was yet another get-the-guy-drunk-get-him-to-sign-the-paper-judge-won’t-worry-about-any-communal-consent …
Our historical fiction writers have tended to be very fond of this approach and of valorising the hard yakka of European settlers while either downplaying or ignoring te ao Māori altogether. Unfortunately, Sewing Moonlight fits into this pattern.
As far as I can tell, every character we meet in Sewing Moonlight is Pākehā. At one point a local resident says he’s going to Napier to visit his mate Paku (possibly Māori?), who he was close to during the war. But he returns later, saying the two of them are like ‘chalk and cheese’ and he prefers to be among his own people. Someone else disappears for a few months and returns ‘with a Māori wife and child in tow’, neither of whom we ever meet on the page. This perpetuates the old colonial worldview.
As a disabled writer myself, and member of Aotearoa’s disabled writers’ co-op Crip the Lit, I’m always on the lookout for representations of disability in local literature. A common ableist trope is to create disabled characters who are either cured or die, as these tend to be the only fates that non-disabled writers can imagine for us. Near the beginning of Sewing Moonlight we meet Effie, a child who has had polio.
I was initially quite hopeful about Effie as a disabled character. The social model of disability argues that we are disabled not by our bodies but by the profound ableism of the world around us, and this is demonstrably true for Effie. Mewburn is clear that the worst part of Effie’s disability is the cruelty and disgust it inspires in others. Effie’s mother, a wonderfully villainous character, goes so far as to tie her disabled daughter to her bed for days on end. This naturally results in Effie developing what looks like episodes of severe depression. Unfortunately, though, Sewing Moonlight ultimately subjects Effie to both being cured (sort of) and dying.
One reason I found Wilhelm such a tedious protagonist is that he’s very convinced his way of doing things is superior to anything thought of locally, a view that the text continually supports. An early example of this is when he proposes a new form of treatment for Effie that elevates her from a ‘cripple’ to a ‘half cripple’. A decade later he marries Effie despite finding her disabled body repugnant.
She wasn’t agile or robust, dextrous or knowledgeable … Despite having only one good arm, an awkward gait and a fragile frame, Effie was proud that she could carry just about anything, as long as it was in a bucket or basket … Wilhelm found watching her almost unbearable …
We are told over and over again that Wilhelm loves Effie, but this hardly ever manifests in his actions. Instead, we see a cycle of him treating her badly, repenting, and then getting angry at her for making him feel guilty. I ended up feeling very sorry for Effie, not because she has had polio, but because she was surrounded all her short life by people who were profoundly limited in their capacity to connect with her.
Wilhelm is pointlessly unkind to Effie in a variety of ways—for example, when her treasured pet rooster dies, he conceals this from her and lets her worry and search for him. He also refuses to make any accommodations for her, such as getting electricity. Earlier in the story he had to be strong-armed into getting something as basic as a water pump (even though he can afford one) because he’s so in love with the idea of himself as heroically self-sufficient. He barely ever leaves his small plot of land, and because he is the point-of-view character for most of the book, this means that we barely ever leave it either.
As the narrative progresses, we gradually learn the details of the tragedy that pushed Wilhelm to leave Germany. Often when novelists use this device the reader comes to the conclusion that the protagonist need not have been so hard on themselves after all. But in this case, and after having spent three hundred pages mired in Wilhelm’s pompous self-pity, when the truth was revealed, I just thought—yep, that was your fault alright. And not only that, but you’ve perpetrated the same harm again.
Right at the end of the book, Daniel pops up once more. Remember the mysterious keys? Returning to Daniel’s first-person perspective, with its vim and go-getter puzzle-solving energy, is a welcome change. I wish Mewburn had interspersed Daniel’s point of view with his grandfather’s perspective throughout the novel, if only to leaven Wilhelm’s curmudgeonly self-absorption.
A fundamental difficulty of historical fiction as an art form is that the author needs to possess the skills of both a novelist and a historian. In her author’s note, Mewburn says she has been working on Sewing Moonlight for a couple of decades and lists some archival sources she has consulted. She wrote a piece for Newsroom about her research, which focuses on the Pākehā history of the piece of land on which she now lives, only going back a century or so and thus avoiding acknowledgment of the complex violence of colonialism:
Over the years, as I built our grass-roofed house … I’d regularly unearth traces of those who’d walked this land before me. An empty bottle of Baxter’s Lung Preserver. Bent horseshoe nails emaciated with oxidation. Large pieces of plough. A rust-encrusted buckle … Though there were stories under every stone, I never gave them much thought.
Ultimately it is that very thoughtlessness, that lack of curiosity revealed about the land’s previous stories, that means I cannot recommend Sewing Moonlight. Several aspects of the pukapuka combine to give this reader a sense of claustrophobia: the unwavering and sycophantic focus on its obnoxious protagonist; the tightly restricted geographical scope; and, most troubling of all, the shallow and cherry-picked view of local history. Wilhelm was right about one thing—the land and its mana deserve respect.
ELIZABETH HERITAGE is a queer Pākehā book reviewer and freelance publishing professional. She lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington in the rohe of Te Ātiawa Taranaki Whānui.
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