This is such a beautifully written book. So elegant, with space to breathe between the lines. I had the feeling, when I finally put the book down, of having been read to while I sat with my eyes closed.
It’s the early 1920s when our man in exile, Wilhelm, sails across the world from Germany and up the Clutha River until his progress is stopped dramatically. There are lots of ways to arrive in a town and this bizarre arrival has a strange ring of truth. He decides this is a sign he should give up the travels and put his feet on the ground here, in a place called Falter’s Mill. It’s as good a place as any to build a new life from scratch and find happiness.
He is a gentle man, and although this small town has its xenophobics there are kind responses from a few and he builds friendships slowly and carefully. He buys a piece of land and works hard: he renovates an old shack for his home, begins farming on Steiner principles, reads Goethe and becomes a resident outsider in the community.
He has chosen to left his past behind, painful memories of a dead brother, Andreas, a sad family and a war he didn’t believe in. He grows a beard, “…a beard he’d only grown so Andreas couldn’t catch him unawares in the mirror each morning. In fact, he’d done so many things to try to put more than miles between him and the past that he sometimes wondered if he was still himself at all. He’d travelled to the end of the world, accepting a life of solitude and exile, days scrubbed clean of familiar voices, familiar faces. He’d forsaken his family and his past. He’d willingly forgone every comfort for fear it might harbour a memory.“
His past is behind him but, as they say, you always take the weather with you. His way of looking at the world, his love of music, philosophy and culture and above all his methods of caring for the land are very European and he is has no intention of letting any of that go. His friends accept him for who he is. His garden is his main companion for years and he works it assiduously with bio-dynamic principles: building the soil up; creating free draining beds; companion-planting; crop rotation; nitrogen infusions. There are cow horns and homeopathy and alignments with lunar and universal forces. To me, all this sounds very German and must have felt very foreign, disconcerting to the locals who had recently come through the propaganda of war.
His garden does thrive and he grows and cooks and preserves. He always does something special on Goethe’s birthday. You get the sense that things might turn out all right. The inappropriate Gladys comes and goes, taking a little bit of him with her. The depression does the same and there are troubles with the locals, friendships and loves that change or are taken away. When things seem on the up comes a flood, with so much lost, and another war in which he, gentle Wilhelm, is again the enemy.
Despite the hardships and troubles Wilhelm’s life – and he didn’t always make good choices, he was no saint –I felt I was in the presence of a good man. I like to think I would have recognised this if I had lived back in the 1930s, when we were taught by the prevailing culture that strangers were dangerous and not to be trusted. We are, perhaps, more open-minded now. Or perhaps not.
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