Is anyone born to write? Maurice Gee surely was. He told the Listener in a 2008 interview, “I just feel sort of useless when I am not writing.” Gee, who died on June 12 aged 93, allowed himself little time to feel useless throughout his seven-decade career, producing more than 30 novels for adults and children and dozens of short stories. Long regarded as among New Zealand’s greatest writers, his death is felt by generations of readers who grew up with his stories and by many of the nation’s writers, who were inspired and influenced by his work.
For most of his career, Gee made regular-as-clockwork appearances in the Listener though interviews and reviews, first popping up in the magazine in November, 1958. It was in an advertisement for Mate, a literary journal edited by Robin Dudding, to which he contributed alongside the likes of Frank Sargeson and Kevin Ireland. Gee would have just turned 27.
He’d begun to publish stories and would leave behind a short career as a teacher (at Paeroa District High School) and a librarian, and release, in 1962, his first novel, The Big Season, about events in a rugby-obsessed community. The book, like many of his novels for adults, contains violence, dysfunction and moments of tragedy – themes in oft-noted contrast to the author’s mild and friendly exterior.
In 1976, his story collection A Glorious Morning, Comrade and novel Games of Choice were assessed by Lauris Edmond in these pages. His milieu was still the same, she said, “a bland and brutish suburbia”. Despite the collection’s jaunty title, many of the stories are grave, some tragic. In the writing there is anger, a lot of defeat and occasional appalling acts of cruelty, she thought, but in the novel in particular the characters often demonstrate a quality of toughness, a resolute refusal to be put down. There are moments that “go straight down to the level of the secret truth-telling that constitutes the inadmissible evidence of our lives”.
Plumb
Gee was best known for 1978’s Plumb, which was once named by the Listener as the sixth-best New Zealand book ever published. It won the country’s top prize for fiction as well as Britain’s James Tait Black award also nabbed by writers such as Salman Rushdie, Graham Greene and Jonathan Franzen, and would feature on university English Lit reading lists for years. The character of George Plumb was inspired by Gee’s grandfather, the pacifist Unitarian minister James Chapple.
Gee’s children’s classic, Under the Mountain, followed in 1979 then the latter two in the Plumb trilogy, Meg (1981) and Sole Survivor (1983).
In 1987, Brian Boyd reviewed Bill Manhire’s short biography of Gee for Oxford University Press, and Prowlers, Gee’s first adult novel since the Plumb trilogy. Boyd thought it not the finest but the most complex of all his novels: “How much life can you squeeze into a slender novel? Think of a quantity, double it, and it will still come short of all that Maurice Gee fits into Prowlers.”
His productive peak continued through the 1990s – The Burning Boy, Going West, Crime Story, Loving Ways and Live Bodies – and into the new millennium with Ellie and the Shadow Man, all critically assessed by Listener reviewers.
In 2003, Elizabeth Alley ended her take on The Scornful Moon this way: “Gee’s dedicated readers will know that the plain language, the measured pace, are all a huge and wonderful deception. There is no contrivance. Where his peers might search for colourful metaphor, Gee writes plain, crafts each word and delivers a powerful message of morality where storytelling remains paramount.”
In 2005 came Blindsight and the reissued, YA-aimed O Trilogy – “one of the quiet masterpieces of NZ writing”, thought critic David Larsen.
Gee on Gee
Gee was born in Whakatāne but brought up in the West Auckland suburb of Henderson, often renamed “Loomis” in his fiction. Critics often took to describing it as “Geeland”, so often did Henderson – and its creek – feature in his writing.
Gee was best known for 1978’s Plumb, which was once named by the Listener as the sixth-best New Zealand book ever published.
Despite repeatedly saying it would not happen, Gee eventually published his memoir, Memory Pieces, in 2018. In the Listener, Stephen Stratford found the boyhood reading was familiar: Robin Hood, Greek legends, US frontier stories. Though Gee, who was raised in a socialist household, said that rather than the Scarlet Pimpernel rescuing aristocrats, “I was for chopping off their heads.”
The period detail of Gee’s childhood and youth was terrific, said Stratford. “I, too, remember getting the strap at primary school, attempted sexual assault by an old boy, practising knife-throwing, nearly drowning in the creek …”
The creek is essential – there is a long section about making a canoe from a sheet of corrugated iron. Gee says in the book it was “one of the great journeys of my life, fixing ‘creek’ as a place in my mind”.
The memoir followed Rachel Barrowman’s majestic 500-page-plus Maurice Gee: Life and Work, from 2015.
His memoir is actually three in one: of his parents, his early life and the story of his wife, Margareta, before they met.
But if you wanted to know the man, Steve Braunias wrote in a 2004 interview, “All you could ever wish to know about Gee is in his books – his anxieties and passions, his good intentions and his failings, the entire cluttered basement of his memories, wretched and benign. Art takes care of the disguise.” The childhood arrived in detail: “mum and dad, his grandparents, school, rugby, God, the creek”.
Because of the darkness sometimes present in his fiction, Gee got into trouble on occasions. He was upset when children’s books doyen Dorothy Butler accused him of “robbing children of their childhood” over The Fat Man. He felt no need to protect children from difficult things if they were there for legitimate reasons, “not put in to excite or disturb”.
He was heartened when Margaret Mahy came to his defence with comments about “truths that children’s writers are generally expected to avoid”. Said Gee: “Those truths – historical, social, psychological, human – are what I’ve tried to write about in both sorts of fiction.”
What was not true was that he thought writing for children was easier than writing for adults
What was not true was that he thought writing for children was easier than writing for adults. It was a misquote which had one librarian saying libraries should refuse to stock his books. It was easier for him to write the sort of books he wrote for children: narrative-first fantasy adventures often driven by the struggle between good and evil, and mystery adventures. The humour was often missed in the books, he lamented. “I can never understand that people don’t find my books funny. They’re meant to be funny.”
Gee on screen
Gee was that rare Kiwi writer who, for much of the time at least, could just write. He wrote briefly for TV for the money and would have liked to do journalism, he told Braunias, but he kept wanting to make things up. People gave him money to adapt his books to film and TV, and he said he often had six books up for film options at any one time. The movies included Fracture, based on Crime Story, in 2004, In My Father’s Den in the same year, and Under the Mountain, which was made into a TV series in 1981 and a film in 2009.
Gee scaled back his writing in his 70s, and didn’t feel the need to review others’ books or any of the usual author things such as festival appearances. In 2020, he moved to Nelson.
“Some swine has probably already prepared Gee’s obituary for the newspapers,” wrote Braunias when the author was 73. “‘Shovel the dust on the old man’s coffin’.” Unlikely.
Two decades on, the only stuff being sprinkled on the man are praise and gratitude.