Life Cycle of a Moth by Rowe Irvin review – captivating story of maternal love and male violence

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In the woodland, beyond the fence, inside the old forester’s hut, Maya and Daughter live in a world of rituals. The fence is secured with “Keep-Safes” – fingernails, Daughter’s first teeth, the umbilical cord that once joined them – to protect them from intruders. While their days are filled with chores, setting traps for rabbits and gathering firewood, every night they play a game they call “This-and-That”, in which they take it in turns to choose an activity – hair-brushing, dancing, copying – before saying their “sorrys and thank yous” in the bed they share.

From the beginning of British author Rowe Irvin’s captivating debut novel, it is clear that Maya has created this life for herself and her daughter – who calls her mother “Myma” – as a refuge from the brutality of the world beyond the fence’s perimeter. Irvin’s tale switches between two narrative strands: present-day chapters narrated by Daughter, a naive, spirited girl who is as much woodland creature as she is person; and more distant sections detailing Maya’s rural upbringing with an alcoholic father and withdrawn mother, and the acts of male violence that led her to flee.

Maya has taught Daughter only the words she needs for their existence, so although Daughter is 15, her language is childlike: “Sweat dries in the furry unders of my arms.” Later, Daughter is out in the woods: “Touch finger and thumb together now to make a circle for peering through. Move slow, pointing my seeing-hole at ground and tree and sky.” It’s a feat that Irvin maintains this playful, almost incantatory voice in all Daughter’s sections across these 300 pages.

Maya tells Daughter that their rituals protect them against “Rotters”, people living beyond the fence, who are “empty on the inside … hollow”. If a Rotter were to intrude on their sanctuary, they would be eaten away like “gone-bad apples”. “Shudder with the thought of it,” Daughter thinks.

But as the novel progresses, the manner in which Maya controls Daughter’s understanding of the world grows more frightening. When Daughter finds a glove in the woods – she thinks it is a “blue hand blanket”, and laughs at “the way the long fingers flap empty at the ends” – she takes it to show her mother, thinking it will make her laugh too. It doesn’t. “It came from a Rotter,” Maya says. “One must have got in during the dark and left it as a trick … You shouldn’t have touched it.” Later, she is warned against being too inquisitive when she meets Maya in the ash copse, a rope around her neck and a stump beneath her feet. Maya tells her: “If I step off my neck will snap and I’ll be dead … The questions you ask, she says then, they can do damage, Daughter”.

Daughter only has more questions when she finds the Rotter who dropped the glove. The intruder, a man named Wyn, is the first human she has ever seen apart from Maya. Her mother rages against Wyn, until a strange force stops her killing him. Once Maya convinces Daughter she has “cut the Rot” from him, he is invited inside their dwelling, first roped-up and kept on the floor, and then given a seat at the table.

More and more, Daughter questions Maya’s logic. How did Wyn get over the fence, with all their Keep-Safes? And why is it suddenly OK for them to be around a Rotter? Wyn’s outside perspective further reveals the extent to which the belief system they live by is simply Maya’s coping mechanism for personal trauma. We know she has created this world out of a desire to protect herself and her kin. But with her love, she has also been deceptive, sometimes cruel.

In impish yet tender style, Irvin thoughtfully explores what it means for a mother to care for a daughter in a world where male violence is everywhere. Life Cycle of a Moth is the very best kind of fiction: with the book open, you feel utterly transported; once you close it, you see how cunningly it holds a mirror up to reality. I can’t wait to read whatever Irvin writes next.

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