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Otago Daily Times
4 days ago
- General
- Otago Daily Times
Obituary: Maurice Gee
Maurice Gee was one of New Zealand's most decorated authors, his books for children and adults winning awards at home and abroad. For more than 50 years Gee wrote about ordinary people and ordinary lives, often with the narrator looking back at events that caused damage and unhappiness. "I don't deliberately set out to do this, but the stories turn in that direction following their own logic," he once said. "All I can do about it is make the narrative as interesting as I can and give those people lively minds." Born in Whakatāne in 1931, Maurice Gee was the middle child of the three sons of Harriet Lyndahl Gee (nee Chapple) — a some-time writer whose published work included a children's picture book — and carpenter Leonard Gee. Gee's grandfather, controversial minister James Chapple, was the inspiration for his grandson's most famous character, George Plumb. Gee was raised in the then rural Auckland suburb of Henderson — where, thinly disguised, many of his books were set. After attending Avondale College Gee went to Auckland University, where he completed a Masters in English. All Gee wanted to do was write — he had already had work published in magazines and journals before graduation — but, then as now, making a career as a full-time author in New Zealand was a fraught enterprise. He became a teacher but resigned in 1956 to dedicate himself to his craft. Grants in 1960 and '61 from the New Zealand Literary Fund kept the wolf from the door and in 1962 Gee's debut novel, The Big Season, was published. An unusual mix of rugby and crime, it was well-received, and helped its author earn the 1964 Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago. During that stint in the South, Gee wrote his second novel, A Special Flower, before he trained as a librarian — his day job for several years to come. Gee, who had a son from an earlier relationship, married Margareta in 1970, having met her four years previously at the Alexander Turnbull Library. They had two daughters. Gee's third novel, In My Father's Den, was published in 1972 and has proven to be one of his most enduring works: in 2004 it was adapted into a successful film. A collection of short stories, A Glorious Morning, Comrade, appeared two years later, and it went on to win Gee the first of many awards, the fiction prize at the 1976 New Zealand Book Awards. By the late '70s Gee was at the peak of his powers. In 1978 he published Plumb, which drew on Gee's ancestors for what was the first of a trilogy about three generations of a family. It won Britain's James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction in 1979, as well as another fiction prize at the NZ Book Awards. "I can't look at my books the way I read other books. I look at them quite differently," he once said. "I'm intimately connected with them and probably wouldn't be able to identify my voice in them, if someone asked me to." A year later Gee wrote Under the Mountain, his best-known and most-beloved children's work. An eerie sci-fi thriller about aliens slumbering beneath Auckland's volcanos, it was a popular book and well-remembered TV series, and was later converted into a stage play and feature film. In 2004, Under the Mountain was the recipient of the Gaelyn Gordon Award, awarded annually to a children's book that did not win an award at the time of its publication. "Children's writing seems to be easier than adult writing, because it's coming off a different level," he once said. "There's still some pleasure to be got from both and I try to do each as professionally as I possibly can, but the thing that really engages me fully is adult fiction." Whatever his level of engagement, Gee still wrote excellent work for children for many years, including a science fiction trilogy which featured The Halfmen of O, which won Children's Book of the Year. In the late '80s Gee struck up a relationship with Victoria University, being awarded an honorary doctorate of literature in 1987 and a writing fellowship to Victoria in 1989. Three years later Gee received one of New Zealand letters most prestigious prizes, the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship. There Gee wrote Crime Story, a stinging critique from a life-long lefty of the policies of the Lange Labour Government of the 1980s; it was later filmed under the title Fracture. In 1993 Gee published his most autobiographic novel, Going West, a book which has been recognised by providing the name for a long-running West Auckland literary festival. It also won Gee another NZ Book Award. The Fat Man was another Children's Book of the Year award winner, and in 1998 adult novel Live Bodies won the Deutz Medal at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards. In 2003 Gee began to receive awards which reflected his astonishing career. He was named as an Arts Foundation "Icon" and the following year received the rich Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement for fiction. More award-winning novels (Blindsight, Salt) followed, and in 2015 he was the subject of a biography by Rachel Barrowman, a book whose subject described it as "illuminating even for me". Three years later, Gee wrote his own memoir, Memory Pieces, a work which was shortlisted for the non fiction prize at the 2019 Book Awards. In 2020 Gee and Margareta settled in Nelson, as the author of many of New Zealand's favourite books retired from writing. Maurice Gee died on June 12, aged 93. — APL/RNZ
The Spinoff
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Spinoff
‘Dear Maurice, I miss you': tributes to Maurice Gee, 1931
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
