Vale Maurice Gee, 1931
Maurice Gee has died at the age of 93. In a statement sent to media, Gee's children Nigel, Emily and Abigail Gee confirmed that their father died peacefully in his longtime home in Nelson, the inspiration for many of his stories.
'He lived a long and full life and approached death with cheerfulness and calm. He asked us not to grieve,' read the statement. 'Our father touched the lives of many through his words and leaves behind a remarkable legacy in New Zealand literature.'
Since the news of Gee's death broke on Sunday June 15, there has been an outpouring of gratitude from readers and writers across Aotearoa. Gee is the author of Plumb, which in a 2018 Spinoff poll was found to be New Zealand's favourite and best novel. He is also the author of Under the Mountain, one of the most enduring children's books we have. It is rare for an author to be acclaimed for writing both for adults and for children; but Gee took both audiences seriously – he wrote truthfully and fearlessly, always – and his writing in both worlds was equally beloved.
Gee's novels for adults include The Plumb Trilogy – Plumb (1978), Meg (1981) and Sole Survivor (1983) – In My Father's Den (1972), Live Bodies (1988), Crime Story (1994), and Ellie and the Shadow Man (2001). His novels for children include the fantasies Under the Mountain (1979), The World around the Corner (1980), the Halfmen of O trilogy – The Halfmen of O (1982), The Priests of Ferris (1984) and Motherstone (1985) – Salt (2007), Gool (2008), and The Severed Land (2017). He also wrote historic fiction for children including The Fat Man (1994), Hostel Girl (1999) and The Fire-Raiser (1986).
Among Gee's awards and honours is the Robert Burns Fellowship in 1964; the Fiction Prize at the New Zealand Book Awards for Plumb in 1979; the Book of the Year at the AIM Children's Book Awards for The Halfmen of O in 1982; an honorary doctorate for literature from the University of Victoria in 1989; the Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement in 2004; the Deutz Medal for Fiction at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards for Live Bodies in 1998; The New Zealand Post Young Adult Fiction award for Salt in 2008; and in 2017 Gee won the Copyright Licensing NZ Award for Young Adult Fiction for The Severed Land at the Book Awards for Children and Young Adults.
Gee published a collection of short stories in 1986; and in 2018 published a memoir in three parts, Memory Pieces. Gee's biographer is Rachel Barrowman who in 2015 published, Maurice Gee: Life and Work with Te Herenga Waka University Press. It is a remarkably detailed piece of work and one that reveals both the dark and the light of Gee's life. In a letter Gee wrote for the launch of Barrowman's biography, he said:
'Reading Rachel's book has been a strange experience for me. Seeing my life unroll again, or play as though on a screen, made me want to applaud myself for getting so much done, in work and relationships, and at other times had me squirming with embarrassment at my stupidities and shrinking with shame at cruelties and waste.
'It's all in the book. This is the biography I asked for when Rachel and I first spoke about it nine years ago. 'Put in whatever you can find,' I said, not quite understanding that she'd find so much. But I don't like biographies with holes in them. This one has no holes except for those Rachel has uncovered in her research and looked into with a clear eye. The research has been thorough, unrelenting, illuminating — illuminating even for me.'
Many of the messages of gratitude and celebration for Gee are concerned with the sheer impact of his stories. A lot of Gee's struggles and triumphs are inside his fiction. For many, the slim, stunning children's novel Under the Mountain is a core memory. A great imaginative transference that stuck. One of the reasons Gee's story of slug-like aliens called the Wilberforces had such a tremendous effect on readers is that the danger was located in Auckland. It is difficult to look at Rangitoto without thinking of those voracious creatures turning the land to mud. Gee was always concerned with the upending of the environment and the potential for younger generations to heal such destruction.
Gee is said to have described himself as 'a New Zealandy sort of writer living in a New Zealandy sort of place … writing New Zealandy sort of books.' It's this slant on home – that 'y' at the end – that both grounds his work and tilts it. Through Gee's novels we see ourselves from a fresh angle. We meet ourselves in Gee's places and in his ordinary, extraordinary people.
Gee's Halfmen of O series gave his home of Nelson a portal to another world suffering under a totalitarian regime oppressing the voices of the land and destroying itself only for the pursuit of wealth. Gee wrote seriously for children: his worldbuilding is vibrant, startling, textured but it is also deeply enmeshed with the realities of oppressive and violent societies. Like the best children's writers, Gee never underestimated his reader's capacity to walk with him into these dangers and work out what was going on and what to learn from them.
For many years professor Kathryn Walls taught an honours level English paper called New Zealand Children's Literature at Victoria University in which students would study the children's novels of Maurice Gee and Margaret Mahy. A rare example of academia looking at children's books to see how they worked, what they said about their authors; how they might reflect their time, and influence their readers. Like Mahy, Gee was one of the greatest writers New Zealand has ever had and he did not withhold that talent from young people. Gee's body of literature is revelatory in that it expresses a pattern of invention and research across depths and genre, never subjugating one audience for the other, but oscillating between them, using them in different ways. This pattern revealed a great respect for children's writing, and for children as serious readers, that is not always present in an industry that often sees writing for children as somehow a lesser pursuit.
One of my favourite of Gee's adult novels is Ellie and the Shadow Man. It has lingered in me for years because it was one of the first novels I read about a woman living as an artist. Ellie Crowther is a painter whose work rises to acclaim. Only her canvases begin to be haunted by a figure who she calls her 'shadow man'. I have vivid memories of the ways Ellie's history starts to emerge, inform and entangle with her art. It is a novel that showed me that life – ordinary, difficult, eerie, troublesome, surprising life – can make great art.
Every Gee fan will have their favourite novel. New fans have 35 books to explore and discover.
In an interview with The Spinoff in 2024, when asked how he feels when he looks at his body of work, Gee said: 'I feel a sense of satisfaction and a sense that, considering all things, I've done as much and as well as I could have.'
It is moving, painful, to think of Gee's work from this moment of great loss. But heartening to know that the great writer left this world satisfied and with a legacy that will live on for many years, and through many readers, to come.
The Spinoff will be publishing a tribute page to honour the life and work of Maurice Gee. If you would like to contribute please contact clairemabey@thespinoff.co.nz
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The great New Zealand writer Maurice Gee has died. The literary community pays tribute. Maurice was one of the most honest and brave men I've known. Honest about his craft – because he saw it as craft, equal to any art; there was absolutely no bullshit about Maurice when he spoke or wrote of his job. Brave because he was unflinching in his presentation of human and social imperfections, and in his commitment to the precarious business of being a full time writer. I remember his casual mention of the fact that the year's PLL payment had been a decent one, so they could afford a decent Christmas. It was said with absolutely no affectation or pretension – just part of his stoicism and modesty. His contribution to our children's writing was astonishing. He took on topics which hardly any other author attempted at the time; respected and even honoured his young readers by showing characters and issues in their ambivalent and often disturbing complexity. The ugliness, the evil was never glossed over, but his books were permeated by such a strong moral sense. And he mythologised the NZ landscape, made it emblematic in ways which have inspired New Zealand writers since. I was lucky enough – hell, privileged enough – to be hosted by Maurice and Margareta at different times. They were warm, natural, interested as well as interesting: all that you could ask of hosts. I want to acknowledge Margareta's commitment, support and love for Maurice; she was his greatest friend and companion. And I want to mention that once when I was talking to him, Maurice thanked me for writing a small booklet for schools about him. 'It was so good of you to take the trouble.' He thanked ME for writing about him? I'd have crawled on all fours to have the chance to do so. / David Hill Dear Maurice, I was one of your very first admirers in print. In 1962, I took up the book review page in the Rotorua Daily Post, and one of the very first books to land on my desk was The Big Season by a writer nobody really knew. But of course it was you, and your book fairly sizzled with colour and vibrancy, and an immediacy about a world I had been immersed in in my teens, rugby clubs and the high dramas on and off the field. I didn't know then that you had lived for some time in Rotorua but it felt as if you did, that we had watched the same games. That book had the total ring of authenticity, a trait that followed through in all your work, even though the subject matter changed, took on an often sombre tone. But anyway, a couple of firsts: your first novel, my first book review, repeated on the back of your next, A Special Flower, a book I really really liked too. Here's what I said: 'The Big Season is a splash of colour on the New Zealand literary scene. Maurice Gee is an obviously brilliant young New Zealander, with an unerring eye for detail and a sharp ear for dialogue….it is completely fresh and natural and does more towards the authenticity of his New Zealand scene than anything else.' Well, I was young and, if it sounded a bit precious, I was trying to convey just how much I admired your work and, perhaps, how much I wanted to write like you. I mean, I wasn't wrong about your brilliance, was I, although it was something you wouldn't admit to, being, as I found you a bit retiring, almost shy. You let me through once or twice and let me see the man who blazed behind that mild exterior, I think I knew where the books came from. There were some I liked more than others and I sighed when I was shortlisted for prizes behind your winning novels yet again. I'm sorry, you would say, in that self-deprecating way, as if you hadn't quite meant to win, but you did anyway. But there was always the sense of us being part of that company of writers who learned our craft together in those early years, and went on our way, following in each other's footsteps as friends and colleagues for a long time. It's a while since we last met in person, not since you left Wellington. But dear Maurice, I miss you. Thank you for the books, thanks for the friendship, thanks for your own big season. / Dame Fiona Kidman One of the joys of placing Maurice Gee's fiction at the centre of my PhD in Creative Writing was reading all 17 of his adult novels in one intense year. Maurice was our master literary archaeologist, scraping away at the patina of Godzone, coming back at it from another angle — and another and another — until its swampy underbelly revealed its petrified secrets. We've lost one of our greatest writers; there'll never be another like him. Go well, Maurice. / Sue Orr The following is an excerpt from Damien Wilkins' 2015 launch speech for Rachel Barrowman's biography of Gee. Reprinted with permission. There's a great photo in Rachel Barrowman's essential Gee biography. It shows Maurice in a white singlet digging a hole for his septic tank. You don't have to think for too long before coming up with its symbolic appeal. Yes, this writer has been excavating our waste systems for decades. What's especially good about the photo is that it captures the process at its dirtiest. I mean Maurice looks buggered, straddling the hole, the sun beating down on his red face and neck, piles of fresh dirt around, broken bits of concrete. It's been awful out there on the slope beneath the house but you're going to feel good once it's done and you know you haven't paid another man to do it for you. It's an image then we can savour not only for its tempting literary meaningfulness but also for its suggestion of graft, labour, commitment and self-reliance. We use the phrase 'a work of art' fairly loosely and unthinkingly, hurrying to the created thing. One of the contributions high quality literary biography can make is to remind us of how an art form such as the novel is work – a matter of showing up each morning, putting in the hours, being dissatisfied, getting it right – as right as it'll come – and signing off on it before moving on to the next job. You might even get paid. Luckily for his readers, though not always easily for Maurice Gee, the job of novelist seems to have been the only thing he was good at. Although I'm sure he did a fine job with the septic tank. Of course everyone is interested in money and writers are interested in what other writers earn. So the question is: How do you go about constructing your income stream if all you really want to do is make up stories? Read in one way this book is a sort of instruction manual for anyone with an interest in following suit or simply following how one writer did it. And I value intensely Rachel's dedication to such details. She's down in that hole with Gee, getting dirt on her shoes and working up a sweat. But of course the story is much more than royalty statements, grant applications, the odd windfall, the many setbacks . . . For a start there are all those books to read and consider in the light of the life being revealed. This biography is thoroughly engaged with Gee's fiction and Rachel's expert delineation of the family tree, the family Gee, which sets out how one book is connected to another, this is tremendously valuable. And it's never done in the niggardly way which aims to shrink everything to a neat template of correspondences – here's the real creek and here's the invented one. When Rachel tests the life against the work she wants to amplify and enrich and suggest. And I especially like one aspect of Rachel's account of the writing – that is, she always leaves in place the author's own avowals of ignorance ('I don't really know what I'm doing'), of uncertainty ('I tried to get close to that experience but who knows'), of fear ('I seem to have come to an end'). These are recurring notes. Partly, of course, they're a form of self-defence. The aw gee-shucks of Gee. But Rachel understands too that these moments communicate something about writing itself; that it always takes in the possibility of not writing, of not turning up for work. Gee may present as an unpretentious carpenter – look at the cover shot, sleeves rolled as if thinking how to tackle the skirting board – but his life story is remarkably chancy and non-compliant, made from unlikely leaps as much as from dogged toil. From the outside we discern steady progress, books written as regularly as eggs laid, but finally we see inside the life and understand something of its costs, its crises, its victories too. A small example: It's amazing to me that Gee struggled so much with Meg, a novel I think of as kind of perfect. It's amazing that Prowlers was originally called Papps. Let me finish by saying one more thing about the scope of this book. Anyone's life becomes on closer inspection a group portrait and although Maurice Gee's career must do without creative writing courses, Rachel convincingly recreates the friendships and relationships that in many ways mimic the kind of support structure available now. There's a lovely evolving set of insights into how people such as Maurice Shadbolt, Kevin Ireland, Robin Dudding, Ray Grover, Nigel Cook and others interacted with our man. Gee's friends are Rachel's friends too and therefore ours, helping us see her subject from different angles. When Gee was doing scriptwriting for television and earning better money, Shadbolt reports back to Ireland that at the Gee house there are 'hints of prosperity' – 'hard booze in the cupboard now instead of home brew.' I think Rachel's feel for the telling remark, the revelatory incident, from what must have been a large archive of letters, interviews, essays, reviews, as well as the fiction itself, lends her text not only its narrative drive but also its tone. The book sounds like Maurice Gee without being his mouthpiece. It's intimate but also pitched at a crucial remove. This poise allows the book to be fundamentally sympathetic to its subject without sacrificing loyalty to facts which emerge that the hagiographer or even simply the fan might baulk at. I mentioned at the start this business of secrets, new things about Gee's life that will alter how he's read. I'm sorry but I'm not telling. Rachel's biography needs to be read to learn these things. Obviously you'll want to read it to know how the Plumb trilogy came to be written. Or Prowlers. Or Going West. That would be enough. But such is Rachel's achievement that gradually you feel something else going on. Through scrupulously attending to this remarkable individual, the biography's single focus starts to do that wonderful thing: it expands, it blossoms, and somehow captures the broad view of a society in motion; it lets us see not just how he lived but how we lived too. That also feels fully in tune with the working art of Maurice Gee. / Damien Wilkins, 2015 I interviewed Maurice in 1976 for the Nelson College literary magazine. I was 16 and we talked in my bedroom (!) next door to Trafalgar Park in Nelson. He was so gracious and patient even though I'm sure my questions were fairly predictable. I remember his advice to young writers was simply to keep doing it. I've read almost all his books and, in them, I always hear his quiet careful voice. And I still dream of being able to write with his elegance and power. / Darryl Carey There are some artists whose work gives you a way to look at your ordinary life and see something deeper, wider, richer than what you might think is there if you're only glancing; work that is mind-altering really. If we're lucky, these artists can do this over a long career. As a child, Maurice Gee's Under the Mountain and Halfmen of O series opened up a space in my imagination that I'm still trying to extend into as an adult, and I thank him for that. / Kirsten McDougall I feel a huge sadness to hear of the death of Maurice. He has always had a very special place in my heart. I loved his books, especially Meg. I recognised bits of us in some of the books!! Maurice came into my life when he met my half-sister Margareta in 1967, and married a few years later. He had a huge influence on my (part-time) writing life, and I write a bit about him in my new memoir My Father's Suitcase. I'll never forget how he and Margareta supported me with my first book The Serpent Rising (published in 1988), when the rest of my family had turned against me, or were disinterested. I've still got the long letter they wrote after they read the draft manuscript. An excerpt: 'Maurice says it must be published because there is so little written about your experiences. He found it gripping, interesting, very moving and beautifully written in parts. That's high praise from him. We both ‒ at separate times ‒ flew from page to page, chapter to chapter.' I had huge doubts about my writing and could have easily burnt my work, but their validation meant everything to me. I'll always appreciate his help and enthusiasm during all the long years I worked on the biography of my father, his father-in-law. In 2007, he wrote a glowing letter to support a grant for a research tour of the South Island, said this book must be written and I needed all the help I could get. Here is an excerpt from the Author's Note of my book Sundowner of the Skies, the story of Oscar Garden, the forgotten aviator (2019). 'When he [Dad] was alive the idea that someone might write a book about him came up in conversations. He seemed quite keen on the idea, although he was adamant that his son-in-law, Maurice Gee, should not write it. Maurice, an acclaimed New Zealand author, is married to Margareta, my father's daughter from his first marriage. My father reckoned there was too much sex in his books. Not that Maurice could write much about the sex in my father's life. According to Mum, they only had sex a few times and after she became pregnant with my younger sister, Anna, that was it.' Also, a snippet of Maurice's long review, part of which ended up as an endorsement in the book 'An important piece of aviation history and a courageous personal story, vividly told. I found it enjoyable in every way. Beautifully told and bravely too, the width of research is astonishing. Sundowner of the Skies should find enthusiastic readers, grateful readers in the aviation world, and thoroughly engaged ones in the wider one. The way the personal story has been woven into the public one works without a hitch and provides a dimension that any other approach would have missed. I read it like a novel – a what-happens-next story, in both the aviation and the family parts. The sad and tortured final years must have been hard to write. Thank God for the bits of humour, 'Where's the ink?' What a great comic line, in its context. Standing further off I can laugh, but Oscar, in a much smaller way, is part of my life too. The little bit I've written about him comes nowhere near the real man that Mary has put down here. Many years ago, I stole one of Garden's flying adventures and gave it to an invented character in a novel I was writing, Emerson in Plumb.' Again, his validation was important as some family members were not happy about me writing about Dad's flaws. Maurice loved that I told it all. Maurice and Margareta represented, for me, a healthier branch of the very dysfunctional Garden tree. I'd visit them when I was in New Zealand and spent time with them in 2022. I've got a box of letters and emails and memories that I will treasure. Thank you Maurice for everything: your extraordinary gift of writing, your kindness and gentleness. / Mary Garden When I was 16 I discovered worn Penguin paperbacks of the Plumb trilogy on my parents' bookshelf and since then have carried them with me like talismans across rentals and oceans. For me, Maurice Gee is Peacehaven – his work a place of nostalgic, pastoral New Zealandness that feels like home and which I'll return to again and again. / Holly Hunter
