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
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Newsroom
22-07-2025
- Newsroom
Maurice and me, by Geoff Chapple: part 2
George Orwell says in one of his essays that a writer's best years lie between the ages of 30 and 45. Maurice Gee has read those essays – what writer doesn't? – and at 44, in 1975, it's late in the day maybe, but for the first time his inchoate life is aligning. He resigns from his library position. Margareta and Moss sell their Mt Eden house, and by November 1975, have settled in Nelson. The house overhangs the Maitai River and has a dirt-floored basement where Maurice separates off a two-metre square room with one small window onto the outside world. He needs to concentrate like never before, and he and Margareta establish a Foot Stamp Chart – one stamp from the floor above signals a phone call, two a visitor, three a cup of tea, four important mail, five an emergency. In December 1975, there's a final affirming flourish to the decision to relocate. Moss is told confidentially that he's won the Literary Fund grant of $6,000. In mid-February 1976, he descends to the basement room and is now alone with the memory of his grandfather at Peacehaven, in the study where a fat and shiny brass Buddha sits on the desk and the library goes up to the ceiling. He'll wander first of all through to the kitchen of the Peacehaven bungalow on Lincoln Road. Later he'll wander at length over the five-acre Peacehaven on Millbrook Road, to the creek, and the eels, and the shadows within the orchard. He begins to write Plumb. Memory is a Maurice Gee strong suit. He's written about his remembering in Blind Road. His youngest childhood memories, as he describes them, seem almost to resemble paintings by old masters, where the light falls on certain prominent features, but the backgrounds are dulled out. Later, as he grows up, the memories are more self-aware, his positional skills increase and the shadowy backgrounds are usually gone. Everything is sharply defined 'as if the sun strikes down from straight overhead'. Yet occasionally as the eidetic explorer moves through these brighter frames the shadows become important, and yes, he'll see which way they fall, and he'll see that they have sharp edges. Memories make up about two thirds the length of Plumb. Throughout the majority of the novel, the Reverend George Plumb is remembering his past life, and at one point suggests his remembering is a skill: 'Memory with me is an active thing, not an undisciplined dreaming. It can be, and was now, an acceptable substitute for reading and writing. I get a hold on acts, words, gestures, worry them out of the corners they've got themselves lost in, and brush the dust away. And yet, because they come from far away, from lost realms and because their shapes are refined and mysterious, they have visionary force.' That's Moss himself laying out, I'd say, his own professional method. His manner was often mild, his face almost bland, but the inside of his head was a vault with a thousand chambers. The beginning of the novel Plumb is brilliant in every way. The Reverend, deaf to the world but not sufficiently worried about the deafness to deploy his big black bakelite hearing trumpet more than occasionally, is suddenly aware of an excited and gesticulating daughter, Meg. She beckons him through to the Peacehaven kitchen, and once there he's further invited to be amazed at the brand-new Atlas electric stove. Meg opens the oven door and there – look Dad –the polished interior. So to the stove top – look Dad – three elements. Meg holds up three fingers, and in a near-theatrical display of the stove's excellence, shifts a pot of boiling porridge off one of the elements and turns the knob below – just so Dad! – cutting off the electricity. The Reverend sees a further sign of approval is needed and, assuming the thing turns cold once the electricity is gone, places his hand firmly onto the element. Turmoil. Family bursting into the kitchen from all over the house. At a stroke we see an old man's isolation from the modern – that is the 1940s – world. In the rush to the kitchen we also see the main family members who'll be important as the novel unfolds. But better yet – a structural point – that for ease of reader reference, the burned hand, immediately treated with Vaseline then heavily bandaged, can serve as a signal. The book's mainstay is Plumb's remembrance reaching across the decades from the 1880s to the 1940s. Those passages run parallel to a month-long present-day narrative, and at each return to that present, the bandaged hand welcomes the reader back, either by direct sight of the bulky white bandage, or Plumb's own comment upon the healing that's under way, or by a concerned enquiry from someone in the 12-strong Plumb family – How's your hand Dad? By the end of March Maurice has written 40,000 words. Ah, at 40,000 words or thereabouts is the passage I first read when I was flying over China in 1979. Moss had inscribed a copy of Plumb for my mother, and she'd passed it on to me as I left New Zealand, part of a four-man team documenting the life, in China, of the kiwi farmer, Rewi Alley. The old DC3 carrying our documentary film team towards Inner Mongolia seemed to move crabwise in a side wind over the dunes of the Gobi Desert, for hours – a good bland background perhaps to be teleported in an instant back to the most vivid New Zealand scene I've ever read. The Night Limited Express of the late 1940s plunges on across the Central Plateau. In one of the sleeping carriages, the 80 year-old Plumb is on his way to visit his three adult children in Wellington. Blistered hand and all, he lies awake: 'The small hours. A moon-rayed closet full of dead air and burnt coal. A swaying circular motion that set my stomach floating as though on oil. . . . Close at hand Mount Ruapehu was shining in the moonlight.' So quick. So tight. Maybe it's just me. This is set in the late 1940s when steam trains travelled the main trunk line and maybe I'm just sentimental for having known those steam trains as a youth. No. I'd rather see it as writing doing the thing it does best, holding something important back from the void, forever. The atmosphere of the Night Limited Express which was once and never will be again is ageless here. Is Moss Gee magic, is one of the gifts that are given by a terrific writer, and one of the gratitudes you may feel. The Faber original, 1979, of Maurice Gee's classic book By mid-May he's written 70,000 words, by July 90,000, and his projected final total of 110,000 will roughly coincide with his 45th birthday. Amidst the Chapple's family's rich history, and his own extensive research, each day's work has felt like the work he's been born to do. He writes to Robin Dudding that the Plumb stuff flows each day 'like dipping into a barrel.' When he'd first begun seriously shaping up the novel he'd reassured his mother that the more he brooded on it, the more distant the Reverend George Plumb was becoming from the Reverend James Chapple. Later though, the Barrowman biography speculates that Moss has begun emphasizing to his mother that the book is fiction, for the very reason that the further in he got, the more the characters came to resemble the Chapples. In the 'Author's note' that concludes Plumb Moss says his aunts and uncles are not to accuse him of putting them in a novel. Despite that, many within the family could pick precisely who was who. Moss Gee's further note though is correct: that the early part of the novel is based on the facts of James Chapple's life, but from 1918 onwards including details of the relationship between Plumb and his wife Edie, it is not. So we approach the novel's climax – set around the early 1920s when Plumb is in his 60s and has just conducted a Unitarian Service for the Peacehaven wedding of his daughter Esther. Guests promenade about, and 'the bowl of the lawn' – part of the original 5-acre Peacehaven – 'is brimful of sunshine.' One of the guests is John Willis, the lawyer who defended Plumb in the 1917 sedition trial. John meets Plumb's 19 year-old son Alfred, at this wedding, and takes an interest in the youth's poetry. A month or two later, Plumb crests a rise in the Peacehaven orchard, sees Alfred and John Willis in flagrante in the grasses below, and is momentarily overwhelmed by darkness. He's clutching the branch of a tree to stay himself as he comes out of the darkness cursing the two of them with Old Testament bloodiness, watching their faces turn 'white and bestial', hearing the male voices that 'croaked like toads'. He flees to his study, grabs a handful of the gold sovereigns stashed there and is back in time to find the lovers crossing the creek bridge that exits the orchard. He flings sovereigns at their feet: 'You are dead. You are dead to me Alfred. Never come here again. Your name isn't Plumb. There's money to change your name.' In the aftermath, Plumb's wife Edie is calm. Plumb tells her he's banished Alfred. Pressed as to why, he speaks of the sin of Sodom, and she remains calm. He guesses she's known Alfred's nature all along and long ago forgiven. The banishment of Alfred becomes an estrangement in some small degree from his adult children who simply laugh at him, but in no small degree from Edie. In the first hours of the crisis it's Plumb the patriarch who forbids anyone ever again mentioning Alfred's name to him, but in that same hour of crisis it's Edie, with the dignity and soft power of motherhood, who insists that he, Plumb, should never speak of Alfred to her again. And it's she who, despite his command, departs often within the years ahead for what he knows are visits to Alfred. Hat and gloves. Departing Peacehaven, and returning, in silence. Eight years on, as a storm shakes Peacehaven, Edie lies dying, and the Reverend Plumb has a vivid and terrifying glimpse of his wife's immortal soul, sees Light and Love, and backs away, knowing suddenly he's thrown away any right to look upon it. She reaches for his hand – 'George ' and their life together rests in the strength of that grasp, but again 'George' her last word that he knows is also a last wish – to take Alfred as his son again. Still, he cannot. Back now to the novel's present-day narrative, Plumb arrives home by car from the Wellington visit. Peacehaven shines for him with Edie's presence. She's the one who chose that name. Her brush painted the nameplate. She's dead now. Eight years lay between Alfred's banishment and her death. Now a further 12 years have passed. Forgiveness. Love. Why has he not? He rests in the summerhouse and the change comes, finally, easily. That he can love Alfred. That too, he can forgive himself. He is a man. Nothing human is alien to him. The reconciliation is arranged to take place in the house of one of the Plumb children. Alfred arrives, ignores his father and kisses the two sisters who are looking on. Plumb seeks to talk with Alfred alone, and the atmosphere turns spiteful – 'Who is this man?' Alf asks – then begins a verbal assault that's brought finally to a climax as Plumb counters with a suggestion that Robert, Alfred's older brother, has a healing touch, has in fact during the recent visit to Wellington, helped Plumb's burned hand to heal, and could help Alfred too. It's an ambiguous suggestion. To help assuage Alfred's entrenched bitterness perhaps, but Alfred takes it differently. 'To stop me being a homosexual?' he asks. ' I did not say that' replies Plumb, but Alfred has begun to frenzy. The big black bakelite hearing trumpet has been tilted to catch his replies once too often, and he batters it away, picks it up and smashes it against the wall. Reflecting later on the impossibility of this or any other possible reconciliation with his son, Plumb says: 'His hatred of me was so great I did not believe he would survive me long.' The last 56 pages of the original Faber and Faber hardback edition are the pages that hold these stark descriptions of love's flip side – Plumb's black curses, and 20 years on, the bitter harvest. Hatred, cold, hard, and ferocious. Yet even as the novel comes up to its end, love is gathering again in bits and pieces, his other adult children support his needs, and look after each other too during any personal distress. And why not? The whole book is an intermittent soliloquy on love – Edie's intimate attendance and understanding of both the children and of Plumb. And the contrast – Plumb's spiritual yearning for Divine love. The book explores both the tragedy and the humour of those two loves, one to another, a separation that's at its most clear as the Reverend sits in his study, writing the ascent of Man, and requests yet another cup of tea by tinkling his teaspoon within the empty cup, a sound faintly heard and drawing a prompt response from the loyal household beyond. But in the course of the novel he will see also, that Edie's love is complete, and that he has fallen short. The novel ends at the summerhouse. Plumb, alone now, talks to his dead wife, tells her the hearing trumpet is smashed and he can't hear whether her thrush is singing, or not. Raymond the favoured grandson arrives to play draughts, and presently Plumb jumps his grandson's last man, and wins. He's ready to die, or love, or whatever it is. He's glad of the good he's done, sorry about the bad. Daughter Meg comes, takes him by the hand and leads him in to tea. Aside from its memorable characters, Plumb is beloved by New Zealanders for its depiction of what Moss Gee has called New Zealandy things. Its trains, its motorcars, its lawns, its language, its pragmatism, its attitude to Catholics perhaps, its idealism. Yet I'd say it was bigger than that too. Plumb won the 1978 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, one of the oldest British literary awards, for the work of fiction judged the best novel published by a British imprint that year, regardless of the author's nationality. With that one proviso of a British imprint, the Tait Black was open to the whole English-speaking world. To put the award into a longer perspective, the other winners in that same decade included Nadine Gordimer, Iris Murdoch, Lawrence Durrell, John Banville, John Le Carré, and William Golding. Portrait of author Maurice Gee, 1990s, photographed by Reg Graham. Ref: PAColl-6458-1-08 Alexander Turnbull Library. The book sold internationally, and when Marilynne Robinson won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2005 for her novel Gilead, which detailed the life and family ties of an aging Congregationalist Minister in Iowa USA, Plumb was the novel that various literary critics reached for in their comparisons. I'd suggest also that the novel made an international impact because it gave voice to the hopeful vocabulary humanity has erected to cope with infinity. Plumb is a flawed man, but he's studied religion, the poetry canon, also the literature of enlightenment, and he's unafraid of the big words. Let's hear it for the Salvation Army's blessing upon the newly dead – they're Risen to Glory. Let's proceed further with Heaven on Earth 'where I, the imperfect, can adore my own Perfect', or where 'man comes in sight of Man'. Or, let's catch sight of the eternal in the vivid glimpse of Edie's immortal soul. Or sight some ineffable Light that earthly mortals can glimpse, but cannot, on this earth, live within. On the day of Esther's wedding, after the Unitarian Service, the 60-year-old Plumb is pierced by such a light, and to describe the vision will reach for the words of the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:51: 'Behold I show you a mystery.' Plumb tells us that on this day he beheld just that mystery –'Which was made plain – a great light, a bliss, a splendour, a white radiance streamed through me.' You don't have to believe any of it, but these are words you've heard before, not often, perhaps but nonetheless, embedded, and in Plumb out they spill and on we go – it's terrific. Lastly let me recall a few of the more memorable meetings with Moss Gee over the years. In 1983 the Listener had agreed to a proposal that I write and photograph a regular fortnightly column as, with Miriam and my three children aboard, I manoeuvred a housebus anti-clockwise around the South Island. I knew already that when I reached Timaru one of the episodes would centre on the Reverend James Chapple. Moss was the man to talk that through with, and after we rolled off the inter-island ferry, we drove straight to his Nelson house. Moss brought out the Reverend's Bible, and we leafed through it together, the first time I'd seen the extensively inked monument. I told Moss about a recent visit to the United States to look up my Uncle Aynsley there and a few of my cousins. Aunt Dora, the local poet at Carmel California was the oldest of the Chapple children, and was now dead, but her son, David Hagermeyer still lived in Carmel and David suggested I talk to the last of my living American aunts. He called her up, and soon enough an American voice purred down the line – – Hello, it's your Aunt Mercy here – and who are you again? – Geoff Chapple – – Ah Geoff – Son of Geoffrey? Yes, I remember him well. And what do you do Geoff? – I'm a writer. – Oh that'd be right. That's the Chapples. Teachers, writers, or neurotics. I looked at Moss and refused to pass judgement. Moss looked at me, and, I hope, did the same. Under the Mountain was by now flying off the shelves. Plumb was doing edition after edition and the family trilogy with Meg (Faber and Faber 1981) and Sole Survivor (Faber and Faber 1983) was now complete. A little later those three novels, all inspired by the Chapple / Gee intergenerational line of Reverend James, Lyndahl, and Moss Gee would be gathered together by Penguin, published under the title The Plumb Trilogy, and reviewed by Michael King as 'One of the finest achievements in New Zealand literature.' It would feature on its cover a photo of the Reverend James Chapple – Moss's grandfather and mine. A meeting in Menton April 1992. I'd been the ideas guy for the main film the New Zealand pavilion showed at the Seville Expo 92, in Spain. This is New Zealand had separate images projected on three screens showcasing the country's landscape and culture including perhaps some wacky stuff like chooks pecking away at the country's NZ initials, laid out in wheat. I can't now remember if that one made the final cut, a lot of my ideas went west, but the pay was good, and so Miriam and I set out to catch the opening of the Expo on April 20. That same year Moss had won the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship, and once we'd landed in Paris, Miriam and I diverted to Nice then took a local train to Menton, walked up to the enormous pastel frontage of the Palais Lutetia, up one floor, and knocked on Moss's door. He hadn't known we were coming. The door opened and Moss stepped back and threw up his arms – 'Geoff! Rachel Barrowman's masterful 2015 biography of Maurice Gee After leaning awhile on the balcony with a glass of wine and contemplating the mighty Mediterranean, the three of us walked down to the nearby Katherine Mansfield writer's room. In 1920 Katherine Mansfield did her actual writing in the Villa Isola Bella which stood above us, locked, and we were down in a basement room that would have been, in 1920, a gardener's hangout, or perhaps a lapinière for raising rabbits. White concrete walls, a bed, a chair, a desk, an exercise book where Moss had been hard at work hand-writing his novel, main text on the right of each opened page, and revisions on the left. Crime Story (1994) was under way. I had something to tell him – I'd known that his research for the Plumb novel, years back, had turned up a former pupil of the Reverend James Chapple who'd said the Reverend had told her that he, Maurice Gee, of all the Reverend's grandchildren, was the one who'd have the most trouble finding himself, but was also the one most likely to carry forward the Reverend Chapple's life's work. Wrong. At the time of the Reverend's death in 1947, the one who'd come closest to doing that was running around somewhere in Mt Roskill as an energetic 7-year-old. He was the son of the 12th Chapple child, Joyce, who'd married Phil Reanney, a trucking contractor. In due course their son, Darryl Reanney, would gain PhD level qualifications in bio-chemistry and molecular biology. He lectured at Canterbury University, then La Trobe University in Melbourne and in 1982 became an Australian media figure as presenter for the ABC-TV's 7-part science programme Genesis. Early in 1992, Darryl had come across from Australia for a conference in Auckland, and I'd sat with him over a beer on his side of the harbour bridge. To cross that span, he told me, he'd need a whisky to settle his fear of heights. It was 36 years since I'd seen him last, and he was keen to talk. He'd recently published a book called The Death of Forever – A New Future for Human Consciousness (Longman Cheshire 1991) and he laid out the book's central thesis – that the insights of science now validated the insights of the sacred tradition. That every atom of the human body was generated first in the heat of a star. That the star-child, humanity, was a conscious entity, self-aware and part then, either a large or small part, of a cosmos awakening to understand what it was, so it could understand what it is, so it could understand what it may be. This tripped off Darryl's tongue with a practised ease, but became speculative with the proposal that as part of that forward momentum consciousness survives death. Not the individual ego, but a joining of some sort with a greater power. After that, Darryl lost me in subtle arguments about wave / particle dualities at the quantum level – except I remember him saying the wave part of the duality was 'very like a thought.' But yup, Moss agreed, as we leaned on the balcony again later and looked out over the Mediterranean, that certainly sounded like something the Reverend James Chapple would approve. Moss must have gone on to research Darryl further, for in the essay, Double Unit, he notes Darryl was 'a brilliant boy' who'd gone on to write two books on human consciousness and the interface between science and mysticism, the second published in 1994. Moss noted 'Of all James Chapple's grandchildren, he would have pleased the old man the most.' In August 1998 I was just coming to the end of route testing Te Araroa's proposed North Island trail, Miriam was walking with me, and we dropped down off the Mt Kaukau walkway straight into the Ngaio suburb and the Gee house in Chelmsford Street. I unslung my pack on the front porch, then knocked and delivered a prepared greeting as the door opened – – Moss, I've walked 1700 kilometres to your door. – Then please, theatrically with a sweeping arm, do come in. We had a good night of reminiscing the various Chapple foibles and scandals. Moss had just won that year's top fiction award, the Deutz medal, for his novel Live Bodies (1998), at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, passed it across, and Miriam and I got to weigh it in our hands. He was by then finishing the young adult novel Hostel Girl (1999) and about to start on another adult novel – Ellie and the Shadow Man (2001). His industry was always, to me, sobering. In the morning as we walked down Chelmsford Street towards Trelissick Park and the Tinakori Hill track into Wellington central, Miriam turned to me – – Did you see that your cuzzie had one of his slippers done up with a plastic clothes peg? We called in again in January 2014, Moss had relocated to Nelson by then, and, with an occasional eye-roll at his own stupidity, recounted how he and Margareta had sold up their Nile Street house there and opted for a cottage in a retirement village. They'd been in the village just two weeks when they knew they'd made a terrible mistake. They contacted the Nile Steet purchaser, who'd bought the house for his daughter – would he consider selling the house back? Luckily the purchaser was having misgivings about his purchase. So yes, he would. Maurice and Margareta then lost their deposit on the retirement cottage, but got back the Nile Street house and its high enclosing hedge. I'd been hosted to Wellington for a panel discussion at the Wellington Art Gallery and Miriam and I then popped across to Nelson, for a chat with Moss. I'd just read his second-to-last book, a junior fiction novel, The Severed Land (Penguin 2017). The land is Galb, and the indigenees have erected an invisible but effective temporal seal between the aristocratic colonisers at one end, and themselves at the other. But the invisible wall, held in place by the Old One's will, is starting to decay. The novel, I said to Moss, seemed set up for as sequel. He agreed, and offered that I wanted to take that on, he'd to pass it over. I re-read the book, but declined, and Moss subsequently gave the sequel rights to Tony Chapelle, son of my Uncle Hollis, but who'd changed the spelling of his name after a dispute with his father. Tony's sequel was endorsed by Moss Gee before publication, Truthmaker (Penguin 2021). In 2018, a Unitarian Group in Canada had discovered an unpublished hand-written manuscript by the Reverend James Chapple that Moss himself had donated to the Turnbull Library. The Canadians wanted to published it online, and after some family discussion, David Chapple, son of Leonard Chapple, the second of the 14 Chapple children, volunteered to type out a soft copy to send to the Canadians. Moss and I discussed copyright and decided that was irrelevant, Moss then withdrew from the project commenting that he was 'all Chappled out', but did think the Reverend's title on this one – The Growing Point of Truth – was a good one. The book was duly published on the aptly named website. In Late November 2023 he came to the door of his Nile Street house and welcomed us in, then returned to the sitting room to settle into his big chair. The sun was coming in through window. We talked and came up to the point – – I've lost the urge to write. I challenged that statement but he replied – It's the words Geoff, I'm losing the words. We noticed also that he was keeping a sharp eye on Margareta as she pottered about in the kitchen. When we got up to leave, he rose too quickly from the big chair, momentarily lost balance and stood swaying. I stepped forward to steady him, but he'd righted himself quickly, saw us to the door, and gave us the usual cheery farewell. We'd felt, though, an obvious change within the Nile Street house. In the course of testing the North Island Te Araroa route in 1998, Geoff Chapple drops in on his cousin Maurice Gee. (Note plastic clothes peg on Gee's slipper.) Photo: Miriam Beatson On February 12 this year I sent an email to Moss asking him to identify one of my Chapple cousins in an old photograph that shows my mother Dawn , his mother Lyndahl, then Florence and the Reverend James all in a line and my sister Bronwen being held by my father. I can date it easily, February or March 1944 because my mother is obviously pregnant, and I'm not yet there. I wrote to Moss that I needed the identity of the unknown cousin because I was thinking of including the photo in a memoir of my own and might need a caption. His answer came three days later – Deorwyn the 10th Chapple had a couple of sons and the cousin in the picture was one of them, Malcolm Fergus. Good luck with the memoir Geoff, he wrote. I'll hang on in the hope of reading it. It wasn't to be. Moss had talked to me more than once about seeing death as the last great experience. When the news came, I didn't know at first it was an end of life choice, but in the following days his family forwarded his final letter, and that made it clear. The family also sent me the note, hand-written on lined notepaper, that listed what should happen when he was found. Each separate item was given its own space upon the page, with the first two words at the top of the list encircled to indicate priority: no service – – family and friends – cremation – river or hill or burial. I learned also that he'd last visited Margareta on June 3, nine days before his own death on 12 June 2025. Margareta was then in a Nelson Hospital ward. She was no longer recognising him, and was about to be shifted to a full-time care unit at Stillwater Gardens, so loyalty to her was no longer a consideration. I thought then – so of course, my beloved cousin, you wanted to experience death and to do it before you were too wrecked to appreciate the last great experience. So how was it? I've seen it written that some perfectly crafted airtight door opens. Death's door, and with the slightest of sounds – tk! – through you go. And maybe this side of the divide, a slight suction at its closing. A thing of minimalist beauty. I hope there's something in there –maybe the tk! – that you might place, thrillingly, in your own minimalist, hard-edged prose. # The timelines and many of the details in this remembrance are taken from Rachel Barrowman's meticulous Maurice Gee: Life and Work (VUP 2015), and Maurice Gee's Memory Pieces (VUP 2018). Peter Beatson, the Associate Professor in Sociology at Massey University, now retired, was helpful in suggesting that the so-called evil in Gee's novels is not theological, and usually pertains to human cruelty of whatever kind. Helpful also in pointing out the structural similarity between Plumb and In My Father's Den. The 'Death's door' description leans on an episode in David James Duncan's Sun House (Little Brown and Company 2023). The opinions on how Maurice's life unfolded and the conclusions reached are my own. Part 1 of Geoff Chapple's memoir of Maurice Gee (August 22, 1931-June 22, 2025) appeared in ReadingRoom on Tuesday.
The Spinoff
11-07-2025
- The Spinoff
The Unity Books bestseller chart for the week ending July 11
The only published and available best-selling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books' stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington. AUCKLAND 1 A Different Kind of Power by Jacinda Ardern (Penguin Random House, $60) Still going strong. 2 Abundance: How We Build a Better Future by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (Profile, $40) If books could rule the world. 3 There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak (Penguin Random House, $26) A moving, generous intergenerational novel that shows how water connects us. 4 Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Vintage, $26) The kind of novel you can read in one day and then think about for months. 5 Butter by Asako Yuzuki (Fourth Estate, $35) Could make some comparisons to a certain mushroom trial over the ditch but it might be too soon. 6 No Words for This by Ali Mau (HarperCollins, $40) The Spinoff's Alex Casey and Claire Mabey had a lot of thoughts and feelings about this memoir. 7 Eurotrash by Christian Kracht (Serpent's Tail, $30) The road trip novel that's really about intergenerational trauma. 8 On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (Vintage, $24) The predecessor to number nine on the Wellington list. 9 The Safe Keep by Yael van der Wouden (Penguin, $26) One of life's perfect novels. 10 The River is Waiting by Wally Lamb (Simon & Schuster, $40) A new father, freshly addicted, struggles with his relationships. WELLINGTON 1 A Different Kind of Power by Jacinda Ardern (Penguin, $60) 2 Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Vintage, $26) 3 James by Percival Everett (Picador, $38) Terrific novel that Taika Waititi just might be getting his fingers into for the film adaptation. 4 Delirious by Damien Wilkins (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38) Another terrific novel that would make a beautiful film, also. 5 The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38) 6 Pūkeko Who-Keko by Toby Morris (Puffin, $21) Dad jokes for the win! A terrific and terrifically fun new picture book by beloved Toby Morris who has taken the humble Pūkeko and given him a witty, adventurous book that will delight all ages. The genius is that the question and answer format makes a read aloud experience interactive and funny while also helping children (and adults) stretch their vocabulary and think inventively about language. Bravo! 7 A Voice for the Silenced by Harry Walker ($35) Harry Walker gave a fascinating interview over on RNZ's Saturday morning show about this book which gives voice to people in prisons. 8 M ātauranga Māori by Hirini Moko Mead (Huia, $45) If you're unaware of Professor Mead's work, here's a bit about him: Distinguished Professor Tā Hirini Moko Mead Mead (Ngāti Awa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāi Tūhoe, Ngāti Manawa and Tūhourangi) is the author of over seventy books, papers and articles. He was foundation professor of Māori Studies at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington and was an inspired founder of Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi in Whakatāne. A scholar of Māori language and culture, Tā Hirini was made a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2006 and received a knighthood in 2009 for his services to Māori and to education. 9 The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong (Jonathan Cape, $38) In the Times Literary Supplement, Claire Lowdon writes: 'The Emperor of Gladness shares much with its predecessor [On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous]. The protagonist, Hai, is the gay Vietnamese American son of a refugee mother who works in a nail salon. He has fond memories of a schizophrenic grandmother. Once again, he is a teenager – just. 'He was nineteen, in the midnight of his childhood and a lifetime from first light.' In both books, the opioid crisis haunts the narrative and claims the life of a young man beloved of the protagonist. Above all, the two novels have a common poetic telos: to discover beauty in lives lived on the margins of society. 'My dream was to write a novel that held everything I loved', says Hai, 'including unlovable things. Like a little cabinet.'' A post-apocalyptic tale of women and friendship. The Spinoff Books section is proudly brought to you by Unity Books and Creative New Zealand. Visit Unity Books online today.
The Spinoff
09-07-2025
- The Spinoff
‘Keri Hulme brought me thumping back to earth': Ross Calman's books confessional
Welcome to The Spinoff Books Confessional, in which we get to know the reading habits of Aotearoa writers, and guests. This week: Ross Calman (Ngāti Toa, Ngāti Raukawa, Kāi Tahu), author of The Treaty of Waitangi which is a finalist for the Elsie Locke Award for Non-Fiction at the 2025 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults. The book I wish I'd written Gee, what a tricky question, there are so many great books, but each is so individual that it's almost impossible to think about them being written by someone else, let alone by me! Without overthinking this one, I'm going to go for Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. I have read this several times and always marvel at its perfection. There is not a word out of place and it builds inevitably to its devastating conclusion. And it blows my mind that English was Conrad's third (or maybe even fourth?) language! Everyone should read New Zealand writers because they speak to us about what is important for us in this country now. I believe that focusing on our local communities is very important, especially in this time when there is so much trouble abroad in the political and environmental spheres. The book I want to be buried with Maybe not actually buried with, but a book I have a lot of fondness for is Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence. It's a book that meant a lot to me when I was aged 18–21. I haven't read Lawrence for a long time and doubt it would have the same impact on me now as I am at a different stage of life, but it is special because I read it when I had just left home and was finding myself as a person. The first book I remember reading by myself It may have been the Berenstains' Bike Lesson, or this may be a memory that I am borrowing from my own children when they were small and could 'read' this book. Either way, it is a brilliant book with wonderful timeless humour – an absolute classic! Fiction or nonfiction I am totally on the fence, I love both and the boundary between the two is getting blurrier all the time! I was a judge for this year's Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and had to read 55 non-fiction books towards the end of last year. Since then, I've read nothing but fiction to compensate, all by New Zealand writers, including Poorhara by Michelle Rahurahu, The Mires by Tina Makereti and Delirious by Damien Wilkins, all of which I have loved! The book that haunts me The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. It is a compelling ghost story and mystery, and one of my all-time favourite books. The Moonstone by the same author is not far behind. Most underrated book Going West by Maurice Gee. I fricking love everything by Maurice Gee and particularly this book, but you never hear it being mentioned when there are discussions of New Zealand's best novels, or even Maurice Gee's best novels! Encounter with an author In 2000 I was in Dunedin for Aukaha Kia Kaha festival, a Ngāi Tahu arts festival. During the festival I was lucky enough to attend a writing workshop that was being run by Keri Hulme. I remember describing my ideal writing situation, how I had this vision of a cottage by the sea where I would be away from all the distractions of modern life and I would be able to write my masterpieces. Keri brought me thumping back to earth, saying that I was really just procrastinating, that as writers we need to find the time and space to write, wherever we happen to be. It was such good advice that I still follow now. Wherever I am now, I try to start my day with an hour of creative writing (or half an hour if I am pushed for time). Greatest New Zealand book The Bone People, without a doubt. No other book has stayed with me, as this one has, after first reading it more than thirty years ago. I have read it four times and I am looking forward to reading it again soon to find out what it says to me now, in my current phase of life and with the current state of the world. Greatest New Zealand writer I am going to go nonfiction and say James Belich. No other New Zealand writer has brought the past to life with such vibrancy and made it seem so vital. He has had a huge impact on my own career exploring the worlds of my tūpuna. Best thing about reading It's a low-tech activity that you can do alone and in many different spaces: on the bus; waiting for a haircut; in a café; lying on the beach; lying on the couch. Best food memory from a book Midnight in Sicily by the Australian writer, Peter Robb. It's a mix of mafia, recent and more remote Italian history, and Sicilian culture, with lashings of food and wine. I also recommend his A Death in Brazil, where he does the same thing for Brazilian politics and culture. Best place to read I used to love reading in the bath, but now that I wear glasses, this is not so practical, as they fog up. I also love reading while on holiday, at a bach or even in a tent. I walked Te Araroa for two months over the summer of 2023/24 and I used to love the half an hour or so at the end of each day lying in my tent reading. Sometimes I was so tired though, that I could only manage a few pages. What I'm reading right now Owen Marshall's short story collection, Return to Harikoa Bay, and I'm absolutely loving it. Each story is a perfectly constructed artefact, a tiny world that it is fun and stimulating to inhabit. They are the perfect length to read at bedtime. The Treaty of Waitangi by Ross Calman ($30, Oratia Media) is available to purchase through Unity Books.
