Maurice Gee: Ellie and the Shadow Man

By MARGIE THOMSON*

Once you start looking for them, there are many shadows in Maurice Gee's latest novel for adults (which, ironically, isn't nearly as scarily threatening as Hostel Girl, the children's novel from which it is extrapolated).

They are there, most obviously, in the paintings that the mature heroine Ellie eventually makes a name for herself with (her shadow figures sparking psychic recognition in all who see them); but they are also there in more subtle ways, like thematic markers, to deepen our awareness of secondary characters' complexity or significance in Ellie's life journey.

There is also a kind of flickering, near-and-far effect, like the shadow of a car as it races against an uneven landscape, that Gee achieves in his narrative. While it begins at a certain time and place - Wellington's Hutt Valley, 1958 - and moves straightforwardly through the next 40 years, it is nevertheless always turning back on itself. Characters play their part, disappear, and emerge again much later, changed by life but still recognisable.

Like a lot of Gee's novels, Ellie and the Shadow Man is a gentle examination of New Zealand and New Zealanders, although this one, more than others, is a panorama of our own becoming. Gee's passion for New Zealand is expressed in broad strokes and little details as telling as any painter's: his characters take and change shape in social and geographic landscapes thick with invisible and visible layerings.

The smallness and small-mindedness of the Hutt Valley in the 1950s, the grey blusteriness of Wellington, the isolation and laziness of Takaka, the languor and warmth of Nelson are foundations for the events that play out in Ellie's life, but also in our collective psyche: the Mazengarb Report, sexual repression and liberation, Vietnam, OE, the Muldoon years, the Springbok tour, the Values Party, Rogernomics, the dream of escape to a lifestyle block in the country ...

Because this book is so much about the linear progression of one woman's life, it reveals much about the power (and dilemmas) of the novelist. How will a person fare in life? What eventual shape will life squeeze out of the soft clay of a child's personality? Is there a linear logic between the child and the mature adult? How does Ellie metamorphose from the sensitive yet direct and rather rough-edged 14-year-old who enjoys life in the bustling hostel where her mother is matron, into the solitude-loving, left-leaning, wine-drinking, Morning Report habitue of the final chapters?

We are all shaped by the people we meet. A true test of character strength, though, is to what extent we can decipher ourselves in relation to others.

"Just be yourself, then nothing can go wrong," Ellie's mother advises her, right there on page one. Despite this, Ellie's mother proceeds to get stuck, absorbed for decades by her new husband and children, and by the harsh, humourless god she chooses to put her faith in.

Ellie, on the other hand, is a far more intact person. While her life has no forward planning - she meanders from librarian, to work with a sheep-shearing gang, to apple-picker, to hippie on a commune, to mother, to wife of a self-centred writer, to artist herself - it has a dialectic that one can see in hindsight.

Gee must have had fun plotting the twists and turns, devising first one lover and then another for his Ellie to pit herself against. For she looks always for love, although not at any price, and will not allow her trueness to be compromised just for the sake of it. To that extent, she is courageous and a free spirit, although her steadfast honesty and prickly directness can render her more admirable than likable at times.

In her late 30s she finally becomes a painter, a possibility hinted at since her childhood but one that required more maturity and self-knowledge than she had earlier. With her canvases presumably modelled on those of Euan Macleod (one of whose paintings is on the cover of the book) Ellie at last is able to represent and ponder the meaning of the shadow man who has haunted her life.

While in Hostel Girl the shadow man is a visceral threat, terrifying yet combatable, Ellie's shadow man exists in the sense of something underlying, just waiting to be revealed. This could be in a simple, literal sense of a woman who tries out many lifestyles and lovers before the right man, who has been hovering just out of sight all along, comes along.

Gee's story can be read like that, although the whole thing feels a bit diminished, a bit not-up-to-expectation if you do so. It's far more fun and satisfying to seek other senses in the shadows.

I like the idea that the shadow man is a part of Ellie herself, the thing that drives her on, unfurls her, leading her to become the fully realised woman foreshadowed by the blunt girl.

Penguin

$34.95

* Margie Thomson is the Herald deputy books editor.

* Maurice Gee is a guest at the Auckland Writers' Festival this weekend.