An Ode to .. Maurice Gee

Newsroom

22-06-2025

The death of Maurice Gee last week came as no real surprise. At 93, he had outlasted most of his contemporaries of late 20th Century New Zealand literature. But it struck me harder than I expected. I had never met Maurice Gee, never heard him speak, never seen him in real life. Yet his presence, or the presence of his work, has been with me for a very long time, locked in from when I first read his children's novel Under the Mountain.
The battered cover of my long-lost copy I remember well. After 40-plus years, my original reading of the book is tangled up a little with the original TV adaptation. That version featured DIY special effects that were nonetheless highly effective at the time. I found the book compulsive reading, and I returned to it several times.
I did again when I heard of Gee's death. His adult novels formed a backdrop to my later reading, but nothing quite had the same visceral sense of evil of Under the Mountain. Other books by other authors had adventures with goodies and baddies. But Gee's story, which in lesser hands could have just been a rollicking adventure with alien baddies, still leaves a chill after decades.
From the opening pages, where the twins Rachel and Theo Matheson are mysteriously rescued by a strange alien force – known as Mr. Jones – there is a brooding sense of foreboding.
Jones is the last of an alien race, 'The People Who Understand.' He is fading out. His only mission is to stop the remnants of another alien race, the Wilberforces, emerging from their long sleep under the dormant volcanoes of Auckland to ravage Earth and continue a trail of mindless destruction across the galaxy. As for the self-congratulatory name of his all but extinct race, Mr. Jones drily reflects, 'We suffered from pride, you see.'
Gee effortlessly fills in enough to locate us in space and time for this showdown. The Hauraki Gulf, the North Shore, Rangitoto – and Lake Pupuke, the deep freshwater lake on the North Shore formed by volcanic craters.
My partner grew up very close by. I asked her whether Lake Pupuke was as scary as it was in the book. Yes, apparently. There were several stories – of learning to sail in an Optimist sail-boat, of dislocated shoulders from wind surfing, of alcohol-fuelled teenage swims, even of being attacked by swans from the lake one day as a small child. Legend has it that sunken waka and unrecovered bodies lie at its bottom. Slimy logs or eels might brush your leg. Lake Pupuke, a tranquil breeding ground for nightmares. And the home base for Gee's great fantastic invention, the alien worm-slug symbiotes, the Wilberforces, the 'people of the mud, who conquer and multiply.' This picturesque harbour and suburban enclaves were the setting for a cosmic struggle.
Mr. Jones describes the Wilberforces as having as much empathy as a school of sharks. The New Zealand speculative fiction writer Octavia Cade has importantly noted how they are intelligent, lethal, and amoral. 'The amorality is key – the Wilberforces have no better nature to appeal to, no pity and no kindness. Yet neither do they appear to have any malice. They kill out of instinct.'
Kill or be killed. The Wilberforces seek to eliminate any threat as quickly as possible. They are implacably driven to expand and consume, to destroy, then move on. Yet Mr. Jones, using the Matheson twins and their special powers, also seeks in turn to destroy their race.
This lack of standard-issue villainy gives the Wilberforces their alien nature, but a nature that is not altogether alien. 'They're creatures of tremendous will – no imagination, no conscience, no feeling. They remind me of some of the leaders of your race,' explains Mr Jones.
Their shape-changing ability is compromised when a Wilberforce comes under stress. A Wilberforce trying to break into the twin's house starts to melt down from its human form (literally) when it comes up against resistance, and returns to its efficiently slug like self, piece by piece.
As the struggle continues inside the house, the Wilberforce is momentarily confused and 'gives a quack of surprise.' Gee, the master at work. Anyone else would have a snarl or a roar in the mouth of the monster – but the otherness of the quack is a moment of beautiful strangeness.
There is no happy ending. The Wilberforces are 'given the gift of oblivion' – utterly destroyed. And Mr. Jones, the last remnant of 'The People Who Understand' dissolves into the air after expending the last of his life energy in the desperate battle.
'His voice passed quietly through their minds. It died. They raised their heads and saw a pale flame floating over the crater. It turned into a mist. The wind broke it and flung it away.'
Theo and Rachel walk back into the city of Auckland, where dormant volcanoes have erupted, creating devastation.
Years later, I would come across Gee's adult novels. Plumb is the obvious masterpiece, a brilliant portrait of a moralistic Clergyman involved in the political and moral debates of the early twentieth century, whose unbending nature eventually wreaks havoc on his own family. Plumb was modelled on Gee's grandfather, the Rev James Chapple.
My favourite adult novel of Gee's would have to be Going West, a psychological study of the flawed but decent Jack Skeat, recently retired archivist, and his major life relationships – his wife, his mother, his long dead father, and the complex friendship with the poet Rex Petley. In these relationships lie complexities and secrets that Jack, freed from a busy working and family life investigates, as well as examining his own life with some trepidation: 'I shine my torch back into the dark. Stupid bugger! Don't go there.'
Going West threads its way through the social divisions of class, adroitly fictionalises the New Zealand literary scene (sometimes waspishly), and slowly pulls back the layers on the devastating consequences of secrecy, sexual puritanism and emotional constriction on the lives of Jack's parents.
In a review in the Listener, the late Kevin Ireland (a contemporary of Gee) described Going West as 'full of cunning touches of craft and stunning insight.' To go a little further, Gee has a startling ability to describe psychological states with a physicality and acuteness. To put into words subjective experiences that are hard to describe, or rarely described.
Going West was published in 1992. Society has changed a lot in the intervening years. Jack Skeat notes changes already taking place when visiting his old haunts in Loomis (West Auckland) in Going West. The world Gee writes about is Pakeha, lower middle or middle class, with occasional characters from the fringes. I suppose Gee could be consigned to irrelevance, a chronicler of the 'Old New Zealand', but it would be hard given the quality and depth of his writing.
Gee was a left winger and an atheist, which comes out in the way his writing is sensitive to corruption and power relationships between people. Yet it doesn't come across as didactic, nor does it draw from an overtly religious framework.
As the world sinks further into violence, genocide and the machinations of 'our leaders' (some of whom reminded Mr. Jones of the Wilberforces), his writing seems to me ever more relevant.