Maurice Gee obituary

The Guardian

02-07-2025

Maurice Gee, who has died aged 93, was one of New Zealand's most respected writers. For over 50 years, in more than 30 novels and stories, Gee mapped what he saw as the violent and sordid character of New Zealand society in psychologically complex narratives marked by unsatisfactory relationships and the rigid expectations of a conformist era.
His narratives about New Zealand's darker side tell of frustrated sexual desires, unhappy families and redemptive love. These values coincide in his best loved novel, Plumb (1978), about a Presbyterian turned Unitarian minister (based on Gee's grandfather, the controversial James Chapple), whose integrity and concern for public wellbeing come at the expense of those nearest to him.
They are played out in later novels: the social injustice underlying Live Bodies (1998), about an anti-fascist Austrian man interred during the second world war on Somes Island in Wellington harbour; fractured family or community relations in The Burning Boy (1994) and Blindsight (2005); criminality and violent impulses motivating the small town characters of Crime Story (1994; filmed as Fracture, 2004).
Gee began by mining the seam of secular puritanism and its ethic of sexual denial, hard work and utilitarianism that shaped early settler society. His first novel, The Big Season (1962), struck a nerve in questioning the social ethos associated with rugby, the nation's sporting obsession.
Written at a time when sport was considered de rigueur, for fiction it ploughed a rich furrow. His second, a crime mystery, In My Father's Den (1972; filmed in 2004) drew on the legacy of puritanism in the ambiguous attitudes of its protagonist, a social outsider, while Games of Choice (1978), about an unhappy family, introduced what became a familiar trope, a cultural alien, in this case a German family.
Although Gee's frontal assault on conventional morality, through stories of violence and repression, was controversial, his craftmanship commanded admiration and acceptance.
In the middle years of the 1980s and 90s came what has been regarded as one of New Zealand's greatest fictional achievements: the Plumb trilogy of novels, spanning three generations: Plumb, Meg (1981) and Sole Survivor (1983).
Like his contemporaries Maurice Shadbolt and CK Stead, Gee continued to expand the reach of realist fiction, through greater historical coverage, social range and psychological exploration, in novels such as Prowlers (1987), about an anti-German riot during the first world war, and Going West (1992), which explores the personalities of two characters – one creative, one scholarly – who may be seen as the two halves of Gee himself. Sympathetic portraits of women appear in the protagonists of Meg, and of Ellie and the Shadow Man (2001), about a woman who eventually discovers herself as an artist.
During these decades, Gee turned to writing for children and young adults, showing a rare ability to move between different readerships without privileging one over the other. He translated his preoccupation with oppressive and totalitarian regimes into fantasy and science fiction in ways comparable to New Zealand's most acclaimed children's writer, Margaret Mahy.
His first, Under the Mountain (1979), inspired by Auckland's many volcanoes, about a world overcome by slug-like aliens and saved by children, was made into both a TV miniseries (1981) and film (2009), while his science fiction O trilogy, consisting of Halfmen of O (1982), The Priests of Ferris (1984), and Motherstone (1985), has been celebrated as an adventurous and accomplished work.
A dystopian trilogy, Salt (2007), Gool (2008) and The Limping Man (2010) was praised for its sharp, unsparing depictions. Gee wrote historic fiction for children including The Fat Man (1994), Hostel Girl (1999) and The Fire-Raiser (1986). His last fiction was Severed Land (2017), the quest of a girl who escapes slavery and an avenging drummer boy. In 2018 he published a memoir in three parts, Memory Pieces.
Gee made New Zealand small towns and suburbia his territory for fictional excavations of dysfunction, violence and cruelty: Wadestown and Karori (suburbs of Wellington), Henderson, Napier and Nelson, all places where he lived. He was born in Whakatāne, North Island: his father, Leonard Gee, was a carpenter and boxer, his mother, Lyndahl (nee Chapple), a socialist and accomplished storyteller.
Maurice grew up in Henderson in West Auckland, was educated at Henderson primary school, Avondale college and the University of Auckland, where he took a master's degree in English (1954).
After gaining certification from Auckland Teachers' College (1954), he taught for a decade while publishing short stories (his key collection was A Glorious Morning, Comrade, 1975). Then, having trained at the New Zealand Library School, he worked as a librarian from 1966 onwards, becoming a full-time writer in 1978.
Gee received New Zealand's highest honours for literature: the Icon award from the Arts Foundation of New Zealand in 2003 and the prime minister's award for literary achievement in 2004. His adult fiction and writing for children and young adults were recognised in nearly equal measure in numerous prizes, while the award of the UK's James Tait Black memorial prize for Plumb in 1978 confirmed early on his international reach.
Assessing Gee's work in The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, Nelson Wattie comments: 'There is always an awareness of living at the edge of an abyss: one false move and we shall leave this abundance for nothingness.' This implies that his narratives of turmoil might also include New Zealand's precarious sense of being a nation at the end of the world, afflicted by geographical distance and remoteness. Certainly they point to a problematic occupation.
Yet, although written on the cusp of an era in which New Zealand/Aotearoa has become increasingly immersed in a Maori/Pasifika world view, they are more than stories about his times: Gee's vision of New Zealanders goes beyond history, geography and politics to apprehend universal concerns about human vulnerability, social stability, danger and salvation.
He is survived by his wife, Margareta Garden, whom he married in 1970, their daughters Emily and Abigail, and his son, Nigel, from an earlier relationship.
Maurice Gough Gee, writer, born 22 August 1931; died 12 June 2025