Maurice Gee

Maurice Gee (born August 22, 1931, Whaketane, New Zealand) is a New Zealand novelist best known for his realistic evocations of New Zealand life and his fantastical tales for young adults.

Gee earned a master’s degree in English (1954) from Auckland University College of the University of New Zealand (later the University of Auckland). After gaining certification from Auckland Teachers’ College (1954), Gee worked from 1955 to 1965 teaching, taking odd jobs, and publishing short stories. He completed a course at the New Zealand Library School in 1966 and spent the ensuing 10 years as a librarian. In 1978 he began to write full-time.

Gee’s adult fiction often focuses on small-town New Zealand society. He portrayed relations between the sexes as distorted by personal limitations and social expectations. His first novel, The Big Season (1962), about the goings-on in a community obsessed with rugby, and his short-story collection A Glorious Morning, Comrade (1975), are set in this milieu. The novel In My Father’s Den (1972; film 2004) explores New Zealand social mores by way of the childhood reminisces of a teacher in the wake of the murder of one of his students.

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Gee’s best-known work is his Plumb trilogy, which examines the lives of three generations of a New Zealand family. The first book, Plumb (1978), covers the period from the 1890s through 1949; it is based on the career of Gee’s grandfather, a Presbyterian minister who was tried for heresy by his church and jailed for sedition by the state. Like the succeeding volumes of the trilogy, Plumb is narrated by a central character who interweaves the historical past, the personal past, and the narrative present. The remaining volumes, which carry the story through the 1980s, are Meg (1981) and Sole Survivor (1983).

Similarly, Prowlers (1987) traces the history of a prominent family through the recollections of one of its elders and the investigations of a younger member. Crime Story (1994; film 2004), about a burglary, highlights Gee’s much-remarked talent for depicting violence. He scrutinized social ostracization in The Burning Boy (1990), which iterates the traumas endured by a burn victim; in The Champion (1994), which explores the travails of a black American soldier stationed in New Zealand; and in Live Bodies (1998), which tells the story of an antifascist Austrian Jew who is interned at Somes Island in Wellington Harbour during World War II.

Ellie and the Shadow Man (2001) chronicles the meandering life of a woman who ultimately becomes a successful painter. Gee continued to investigate his preoccupation with family secrets in such works as The Scornful Moon (2003), which centres on the efforts of a former journalist to collaborate on a detective novel while his brother-in-law pursues an ill-advised political campaign during New Zealand’s 1935 elections; Blindsight (2005), which delves into the fracture of the relationship between a scientist and her brother; and Access Road (2009), which reflects on the fraught history of three siblings who gravitate toward their childhood home in their dotage.

Gee also wrote a number of fantasy and science-fiction works for younger readers. Under the Mountain (1979; television miniseries 1981; film 2009) was an adventure about a brother and sister who must save the world from a group of wormlike aliens. In the same vein, the O trilogy—The Halfmen of O (1982), The Priests of Ferris (1984), and Motherstone (1985)—concerns the efforts of two children to defeat evil forces that threaten an imaginary world. The dystopian series comprising Salt (2007), Gool (2008), and The Limping Man (2010) was lauded for its unsparing descriptions and careful characterizations. In The Severed Land (2017) a girl who has escaped slavery and a revenge-seeking drummer boy join forces to undertake a perilous quest. Gee later published the memoir Memory Pieces (2018).

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