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THE NOVELS OF MAURICE GEE 

(1962-1994): 

Gee's New Zealand: In the Throes of Entropy 

A thesis in partial fulfilment of 

the requirements for the degree of 

Master of Arts in English 

at Massey University 

Mark Robert Lyons 

2000 



Mark Lyons: MA Thesis: "The Novels of Maurice Gee" 

Some Corrections 

p.i, par 2, line 10: A Special Flower [not The] 
p.iii, par 2, line 2: certainty, [add comma] 
p.v, par 1, line 5: investigation [delete comma] 
p.l, par 2, line 3: mixed [in italics] 
p.2, par 2, line 10: Their 
pp.2-3: two lines repeated 
p.3, par 2, line l: tales [add "s"] 
p.8, par 3, line 6: flying [add "I"] 

par 5, line 5: deserving [substitute "ing" for "ed"] 
p.10, par 5, line l: [Gee's] 
p.11, par 1, line 7: it was especially [add "was"] 
p.12, par 2, line 5-6: where he [delete "Gee"] 

line 7: name, - are re-used, and his 
p.15, par 3, line 3: documents [add "s"] 
p.16, par 1, line 7: corresponds [better than "complies"] 
p.17, par 1, line 11: judgemental 
p.18, par 1, line 18: bugger! 
p.20, par 2, line 3: (1990) are [delete comma] 
p.21, par 3, line 7: they could or might mean [for "that could or might be"] 
p.27, par 2, line 3: the gap [add "t"] 
p.29, par 4, line l: those 
p.53, par 3, line 3: poses the [delete comma] 
p.68, par 2, line 3: biographer's 

line 5: subject-position [add "j"] 
par 3, line 5: self-importance; 

p.69, par 4, line 4: render [delete "s"] 
par 5, line l: entropy" 

p.78, par 4, line 11: Ejaculations 
p.91, par 1, line 11: all [for "a"] 
p.93, par 1, line 2: lie 
p.96, par 2, line 7: quotations 
p.97, par 3, line 5: parents' 
p.98: heading: Adults' 
p.110, Worthington book: title should be in italic. 



Acknowledgements 

Introduction 

CONTENTS 

Chapter One Gee's World of Indeterminacy: Early Influences 

Reworked and Developing Themes 

Chapter Two Prowlers: The Collapse of Modernism's 

Governing Principles 

Chapter Three Biography in Prowlers and Going West 

Conclusion 

Bibliography 

,. Abbreviations": 

BS 
SF 
FD 
B 
GC 
GMC 
PI 
M 
HofO 
SS 
CS 
p 
GW 
CS 

The Big Season 
A Special Flower 
In My Father's Den 
"Beginnings" 
Games of Choice 
A Glorious Morning Comrade 
Plumb 
Meg 
The Half men of 0 
Sole Survivor 
Collected Stories 
Prowlers 
Going West 
Crime Story 

ii 

1 

30 

63 

92 

98 



Acknowledgements 

I would like to offer my deepest gratitude to the following members of staff at 

the School of English and Media Studies, Massey University: to John Muirhead 

and to William Broughton for their assistance in the early stages, and especially 

to John Ross for his continued support and encouragement. I am eternally 

grateful for their moral, as well as their professional support throughout this 

project. I am also eternally grateful for the continued support of my family and 

friends, especially to my dearest friend and wife Joanne E Ward, and to our 

wonderful children Justine, Anita, Samantha, Fraser and Wainui. I thank you 

all for the patience, understanding, and encouragement that you have selflessly 

demonstrated during the last five years. Thanks is also due to my dear friend 

Jane Prochnow, to Steven La-Grow, Alla Seleznyova and Edward Hodgeson. 

Special thanks is also due to Bill and Dorothy Matthews of Nelson, and their 

daughter Caroline, for their loving kindness and encouragement throughout my 

University studies which began in 1989 at Victoria University, Wellington. 



ii 

INTRODUCTION 

This inquiry explores the dualistic aspects of Maurice Gee's novels, particularly with reference to 

Prowlers and Going West. I will be highlighting the juxtaposition of opposing characters (the 

observers and the doers)i and the opposition of mind and body - of idealism and empiricism - as 

developed in these two novels. I will also be investigating how Gee's novels explore the dynamics 

of human relationships, accounting for the recurrent themes of language, fear, death, love and 

madness, as they appear in his oeuvre. Chapter three explores how Gee's fiction deals with the 

difficulties of writing an objective account of someone's life. All these areas of investigation reveal 

an overall view that Gee's New Zealand society has gradually shifted towards a state of chaos and 

uncertainty within the last one hundred years. 

In chapter one I will explore the images and events , as depicted in Gee's autobiographical essay 

"Beginnings," that have shaped his creative imagination . I will show how they have been 

transformed, or re-worked , in his fiction , as well as how and why they stress the importance of 

imagination. I will be arguing how, through his characters, Gee continues to exorcise the traumas, 

conflicts and confusions of his own pasc as well as demonstrating the didactic functions given to 

this process by his subjecting his main characters to similar experiences. I will show how Gee 

investigates the negative effects of a puritan heritage, and ultimately, how it can be damaging to 

the growing and developing adolescent psyche, causing confusion , and distorting one's perception 

of the real , particularly in the way it is expressed in the novel In My Father's Den. I will show how 

Gee's abhorrence of 'bureaucratic and institutional repression' is expressed in The Big Season, 

and the 'O' trilogy - at the level of community, - and in the two novels, The Special Flower and 

Games of Choice - at the level of family. More specifically, I will show how the narratives 

emphasize the need for the individual to break away from these constricting forces in order to find 

his own shape, and achieve a firm sense of personal identity. I will inquire into the ways in which 

Gee explores the idea of 'the mixed nature of the human condition' in the 'O' trilogy, and will 

commence a discussion of how this theme is developed in Prowlers and Going West, which will be 

expanded in the remaining two chapters. I will discuss how the sense of feeling 'special/ and of 



iii 

being in possession of 'special knowledge', can create the illusion of feeling privileged, but also 

how this can be seen as a burden, and how it can generate a sense of 'isolation,' thereby 

alienating the individual from the outside world. I will show how Gee's vision of the world can be 

interpreted as dualistic. 

By tracing the changing and evolving moods of Gee's fictive New Zealand since the publication of 

The Big Season ( 1962), I will show how that world has shifted from an apparently secure and 

meaningful world of certainty as expressed in Plumb, towards a state of perceived aimlessness 

and emptiness, or, in other words, a perceived state of entropy, as expressed in Meg, Sole 

Survivor, Prowlers, and, to some degree, Going West. The collapse of modernism's governing 

principles, particularly with regard to language, will be discussed further in chapter two, with an 

inquiry into another dualistic aspect of Gee's fiction , that of the division of mind and world , or, of 

idealism and empiricism. 

Chapter two will also explore Gee's radical shift into the post modern arena with the publication of 

Prowlers (1987) . This novel explores 'the collapse of language.' It demonstrates the ambiguity of 

the medium of language, and attempts to resolve that situation by dissolving the opposition 

between being and knowing . Through the discourse of science, Noel Papps (first person 

narrator), initially believes that he can 'get directly at the world or at the unique particular sensory 

otherness of objects' (Annstrong 24), but that belief can be construed as illusory. 

The novel's underlying question is, how is a life measured? As an empiricist Noel begins his 

narrative not recognising that the mind, through the medium of language, transforms external 

nature, thereby altering it. As he begins to write his memoirs, he discovers human behaviour 

requires a specialised mode of discourse to describe its dynamic nature, that of figurative 

language. He experiments with this mode of discourse, and initially he struggles. It is a mode of 

expression that he had always dismissed as idealistic, but as his narrative progresses he comes to 

terms with it, and eventually finds it appealing and best suited to his needs. Simultaneously, he 

begins to comprehend the complex and ever-changing nature of human behaviour, which is seen 

as 'shifting and mutable.' 



iv 

I will utilise Descartes' mind-body model to explain the role that Noel's mind plays in the acquisition 

and analysing of knowledge. Following on from my argument in chapter one, where I show how 

Gee's fiction demonstrates the constricting forces of community and family, and how they prevent 

the natural growth of the individual, suppressing spontaneity, I will demonstrate how Prowlers 

expresses the view that certain modes of language, being cultural constructs, can restrict the 

natural growth of the imagination, and the ability to understand oneself clearly. Eventually, as 

Noel's narrative progresses, and with the aid of his grand-niece, he learns to accept, acknowledge 

and appreciate the role that metaphors play in assisting consciousness to make sense of the world. 

Noel's narrative regularly 'takes on a life of its own,' inventing and embellishing the facts. The 

novel stresses the importance of the use of imagination for the promotion of spontaneity. 

Noel has never experienced a fully satisfying and long-lasting loving relationship. I will show why, 

throughout his life, Noel has avoided a commitment, in this sense, with another person because of 

its association with trauma, fear and ensuing emotional pain. This view is supported by his 

statement that 'the world I find back there is hardly plenum - it's atom and void , a multitude of 

bodies rolling about and damaging each other when they come close'. I will show how he resolves 

this fear through his developing relationship with his grand niece, Kate Adams, and concludes that 

'solitary isn't our natural state' (p.133) . 

Noel eventually confronts his sense of the metaphysical void, and at times begins to lose a sense 

of himself as whole. I will be looking at the concept of madness in this chapter, and how Noel, at 

times of crises, occupies his mind with 'learning skills' and reciting technical data as safeguards 

against going over the edge, or, losing his mind. His conscious-self is seen to protect the mind as 

a whole from the imaginative power of his subconscious-self. 

I will show how Prowlers demonstrates that the process of exploring one's past, and getting it down 

in written form, is what is important, rather than the end product. Moreover, Prowlers demonstrates 

the importance of otherness, that is, meaning is defined in terms of what some entity is not, more 

so than what it is; meaning and truth are constantly deferred, that there are no absolutes. 



V 

In chapter three I will be exploring the biographical aspects of Prowlers and Going West. I will be 

examining Gee's own sentiments regarding the 'imperial' aspects of biographical discourse, i.e. 

how far a biographer should go when reproducing someone's life for public consumption . Being 

mindful of his published expressions of his feelings on this matter, I will be advancing a case that 

the two novels under investigation; are attempts by their author to establish important guidelines 

that should be adhered to when reproducing someone's life for public consumption . Thus, the 

spurious nature of biographical discourse will be illustrated. 

I will show that both novels demonstrate that the closest one can come to a true and authentic 

account of a life, including one's own life, is 'an approximation .' I have utilised Michelle Dawson's 

excellent thesis, "Biography and the Writing Subject," to assist me with this aspect of the inquiry. 

Her arguments are an extension to my inquiry - in chapter two - into the nature of language, the 

question being , 'Do we write language, or, does language write us?' Noel Papps, in Prowlers, and 

Jack Skeat, in Going West, through the process of writing their narratives, unavoidably 'construct' 

what Dawson refers to as their own 'subject-positions.' 

Related to the biographer's constructing his own subject-position is the question of motive. Despite 

their respective assertions to be the best qualified to write the life of their subjects, both Noel and 

Jack reveal motives to suggest that they may deliberately, or, subconsciously, re-present an 

inauthentic account of their subjects. I will show examples of how they feel inferior to the subjects 

of their biographies, thus demonstrating good reason, from their perspectives, to marginalise, or, 

misrepresent them. 

The perspective from where each novel is presented becomes an important factor when making 

judgements about the reliability of its narrator. I will also be examining the point of view of each 

novel for this purpose. 

One of the effects of the 'inevitable' re-construction of the biographer's subject-position is that this 

person undergoes a process of growth, that is, an increase in self-knowledge and self-worth. I will 

show how Noel and Jack 'gratify their own desire to resolve [their] own sense of fragmentation 

through the unity or story of the lives of others - and implicitly [their] own' (Nadel 9). 



vi 

By exploring the development of the principal moral concerns and narrative strategies of Gee's 

fiction - from 1962 to 1992, - I will show that the values, morals and ideas that had once reinforced 

the individual's sense of identity and self-worth, in Gee's earlier depictions of New Zealand society, 

have been displaced, for succeeding generations, revealing a contemporary world of uncertainty. 

Gee's contemporary narrators demonstrate their sense of a dislocation, or, a slippage, between 

the signifier and the signified. There is a sense that the individual self appears hollow, empty and 

fragmented in a world of 'free-floating relativism' (Williams 184.) Gee's New Zealand, as 

expressed in his novels up to and including the publication of Going West (1992), is presented as 

being 'in the throes of entropy.' His fiction presents an overt sense of indeterminacy within family 

and community. Many factors are shown to be responsible for this apparent state of chaos and 

disorder within Gee's New Zealand society. I will be highlighting these factors within the context of 

the discussions indicated above, and show how Gee's main characters resolve these significant 

matters for themselves . 



Chapter One 

Gee's World of Indeterminacy: Early Influences Reworked and Developing Themes. 

This investigation will include most of Gee's publications between 1962, when his first completed 

novel, The Big Season, was issued, and 1994, with the publication of Crime Story. 

The first part of this chapter will look at the influences that continue to stimulate Gee's interest in the 

human condition. It is a theme that has always dominated his novels and has become an obsession 

for him . Through his narrators, he explores the 'tension between the inner and the outer' aspects of 

the human mind. His narratives strive to demystify the complexities of what it is that drives his 

characters to do the things they do, particularly the darker, more sinister aspects of their behavior. 

In all his novels, including his fantasy writing for young adults, the human condition becomes the 

narrative's main point of thematic focus. From the concentration of this focus emerges what has been 

called the 'mixed [my italics] nature of the human condition' (Manhire 11 ). Other themes that are 

explored in this chapter are, the repressive nature of puritanism, the employment of imagination, the 

metaphysical void , Gee's dualistic vision , and isolation. All these themes contribute to an overall 

portrayal of New Zealand society as being 'in the throes of entropy.' 

Firstly then, with the aid of one of his few, though informative, autobiographical writings, I will 

explore some of the more significant events of and images deriving from Gee's recollections of his 

past, that I recognise as having given vital force to his literary works. An account of how Gee 

started out as a young writer, and of the early influences that have shaped his creative imagination, 

will be a useful starting point. 

Gee endured a rigorous apprenticeship as a short story writer, writing part-time, between 1955 and 

1962. During this period he endeavoured to refine his art until he felt confident enough to embark 

on his first novel. He continued writing short-stories until 1975, when "Buried Treasure 

Old Bones" appeared in Islands 4 (1975). Between 1968 and 1988, he also published a series of 

essays, the most significant being the autobiographical piece "Beginnings" (1975). 



2 

In the following passage, from "Beginnings," Gee recalls his mother, Lyndahl, and her passion for 

writing , and for telling stories. It also reveals the original stimuli that generated his interest in the 

past - a theme that permeates many of his novels - and created an awareness of the importance 

of the employment of imagination for the writer, as artist and creator: 

When her day's work was done and her husband and children in bed she sat with her feet 

in the range oven and wrote stories and poems in exercise books [writing by hand initially, 

the organic way, and in exercise books, is a tradition that Gee still continues] . She had 

natural gifts, but her circumstances were wrong . She needed to write hard, she needed 

practice. There was never sufficient time. She could not discover what it was she wanted 

to say ... Now and then she came near to her subject. Frank Sargeson included her story 

'Double Unit' in his anthology Speaking for Ourselves. One can see she would have never 

been a writer. There should have been other stories, better ones. But she did not have 

the time. Her family swallowed her ... [Gee's grandfather, James Chapple] was a writer 

too ... But it was not his story that captured me, it was my parents . There struggles and 

triumphs became a part of my history. Through tales my mother told - tales full of point 

and colour and detail - I came to know the Depression as Enemy, and Len and Lyndahl as 

heroic beings. The life of my imagination stretched back beyond my birth. I saw their 

moonlight flit from their smoky tin shack on Ngamotu ... I saw dad pedalling his bike after a 

loaded timber truck ... I saw Dad's father, who had been a builder, painting white lines on 

the roads, and Mum on her feet at the Labour Party meeting tell ing everyone straight what 

had to be done. Some of it may not have happened. It all happened to me (8 289-290) . 

Gee later adds that 'Mum had love and mental passion and deep roots in her past' (8 292) . 

Women with their 'feet in the range oven,' composing poetry or prose- i.e., Meg, in the novel of 

the same name - or, 'on [their] feet at the Labour Party meeting,' - i.e., Kitty Hughes in Prowlers -

have featured in Gee's fiction. His recognition of Lyndahl 's inability to refine, and to fully realise her 

writing ambitions, may well have formed part of the impetus for Gee's own desire to succeed as a 

writer. He made a conscious decision, at the age of forty-five (1976), in his own words, not 'to stop 

writing for the rest of [his] life .. . [but], a rather daring thing to do, with a young family growing up,' to 

become a full-time writer (Manhire 8). His plight is therefore not dissimilar to Lyndahl's. 

His being cognisant of the fact that one 'needed to write hard, ' and 'needed practice,' in order to 

write well, suggests his conscious awareness of the art of writing as a craft. Gee asserts that 'a 



3 

His being cognisant of the fact that one 'needed to write hard,' and 'needed practice,' in order to 

write well , suggests his conscious awareness of the art of writing as a craft. Gee asserts that 'a 

craft has to be learnt and it has to be learnt the hard way, through constant practice, constant 

putting-of-pen-to-paper .. . I like to think that the language I use has overtones and reverberations -

that it carries more weight than the actual dictionary weight, so to speak' (Gee: Manhire 12). 

Commenting on Gee's third novel , In My Father's Den (1972), Manhire says 'It is a short novel, 175 

pages, but does not seem so. While the printed text seems sparse, each word counts fully. The 

novel is densely textured , layered with resonant images and motifs; words carry more than their 

dictionary weight' (Manhire 23) . 

The 'tale [his] mother told ,' Gee's own childhood recollections of the Depression and the war years, 

and 'other influences, and events [he] could not understand that set up a trembling in [his] mind 

going on till this day' (8 291), are reworked and transformed through Gee's imagination. I will 

show how they occur repeatedly, in various forms, in his novels. 

Prowlers, which is the pivotal novel in this thesis, focuses mainly, as we will see in chapter two, on 

the employment of 'imagination' in the forms of invention and embellishment, as a means of 

presenting the narrator's story in an interesting and colourful way, with a view to captivating the 

reader. For Gee, imagination, as in 'fantasy and magic,' has the potential to 'aid discovery and 

intensify' life's experiences (Man hire 9), and also to enable the verbal evocation of experiences 

that could not be adequately dealt with except through metaphor or symbol. 

The 'other influences· Gee refers to are the novels he consumed during his teenage years. At the 

age of fourteen Gee 'discovered the novels of Zane Grey. He read thirty or forty in the space of 

six months' (Manhire 5) . Gee recalls : 

For all his faults [Grey] had moments of clear cold sight. .. With his aid I was able to take 

my first long look at 'the human condition' . I saw that human beings were lonely, that they 

lose what they most desire, that the passions that shake them produce cruelty more 

frequently than kindness. Most important, for one brought up in a non-religious household, 

I learnt that there was no help from outside, that a man makes himself or destroys 

himself .. . without the books to free my imagination, give it range, provide figures for it to 

travel in, I might not have been able to take a really firm grip of these 'facts' that have 

served me as mental furniture ever since (Manhire 5). 



4 

Other works of literature that have influenced Gee were those he borrowed from a neighbour, 

whom he calls 'Ben Hart.' Not enough money was available in the Gee household, during the 

Depression, to purchase books. He recalls, 

he [Ben Hart] had lived in Newington Road longer than us, behind a high hedge with his 

lace-capped wife. But there I was one year sitting in his living-room playing draughts with 

him .. . I was sixteen. Mrs Hart, a tiny china lady, brought us cups of tea and plates of cake 

[images that occur frequently in his novels] . But what I was really after was Ben Hart's 

books. I had flown with Rockfist Rogan over the coast of France and ridden into the 

badlands with Buck Duane. Now I was on the track of something better. The real point of 

my visit came when the game was over ... I went to the book-shelves and chose my next 

Dickens novel and carried it home ... In six months I had read my way through Dickens 

[Paul Prior, the narrator of In My Father's Den, exploring his past, makes a similar 

comment, 'I took Dickens at a gulp' (p.55)], Pickwick Papers to Edwin Drood ... then I tried 

Hardy. It was not the same. I borrowed Tess from the school library- and somehow I 

was no longer seeing Ben Hart (8 292) . 

Gee's grandfather was a conscientious objector during the 1914-18 War, and he went into exile in 

the USA with his family. When he returned to New Zealand he was jailed for 'sedition' (Manhire 6) . 

This story was reworked in Plumb (chapters 54 and 55). Gee remembers: 

Grandpa was real. He was a writer too. I could take down The Divine Need of the Rebel 

and A Rebel's Vision Splendid and look at his photograph in the front - a bald-headed man 

with his finger laid thoughtfully on his cheek. Even without colour you could tell his eyes 

were blue, they cut through people. He wore black clothes and a parson's collar. We 

knew he was important, and somehow very brave. He did not wear his collar any longer. 

He had quarrelled with his church and been to prison (8 289). 

Much of George Plumb's history, in the novel, Plumb (1978), is similar to that of James Chapple. 

Meg, from the novel of the same name (pub. 1981 ), is modelled on Gee's own memories of his 

mother. Many of the events and characters that appear in "Beginnings", are reworked in the Plumb 

trilogy. 



s 

Gee was seventeen when he began to write his first novel - it was never completed - 'a pacifist 

one [that he believed in his youthful naivety] would end war forever .. . It was about a young man 

called Mr Graham. He wore black clothes [like James Chapple] and spent a lot of time telling a boy 

(me) why war was evil. I gave it up after about half a dozen chapters. I like to think I started it 

because I was a Chapple and saw it was no good because I was a Gee' (8 291-92). 

The influence of Zane Grey's fiction emerges in Gee's first completed novel , The Big Season 

(1962) , which focuses on conformity. A lonely character, identified as 'the honking man,' gets 

spied on lying on his bed in a single-room of the local boarding-house. When nobody else was at 

home he 'was always reading a cowboy story or a detective story with girls and guns on the cover. 

Except on the nights of the parties . Then he just lay with his lights on looking at the ceiling' (BS 

13). Two young boys, Rob and Arthur, are spying on him through the window, from the dark and 

seclusion of the garden . These two young boys would often sneak out of the local picture-house 

when the movie was 'no good,' and go up to this local boarding-house to spy on the people there. 

The boarding-house is forbidden territory for them: 'the people who lived there,' Rob's father tells 

him, 'were the wrong sort of people and it didn't do a person any good to be associated with them. 

He told Rob there were two sorts of people, the good and the bad and the good couldn't touch the 

bad without starting to go bad themselves' (BS 14). 

The first page of the narrative is headed '1946-7 Prologue' (BS 5) . Chapter one, following the 

Prologue, is simply headed, '1958' (BS 15). Gee had been 17 years old himself in that year, and 

was playing rugby in Paeroa - The Big Season deals with the dynamics of a rugby orientated New 

Zealand provincial town. The remainder of the novel consists of numbered sections, finishing with 

number '15' (BS 179). These numbered sections, or, chapters contains Rob's experience over a 

six-month - rugby season - period, prior to him leaving town, at aged twenty-one .. As the 

omniscient narrator begins the narrative, young Rob Andrews and his school-mate, Alfred, had 

been 'at the river all afternoon,' and were presenting Alfred's mother 'with a rich haul, half a 

kerosene tin of whitebait. .. She said Rob could come round for tea, but he said he couldn't - his 

mother had visitors and he had to be there. They were having lamb. They always had lamb on 

Saturday' (BS 5). So immediately the reader is presented with an insight into the degree of 

conformity that Rob is subjected to. The spontaneity of accepting an invitation for tea, and 

enjoying the fruits of their afternoon's labour together, is suppressed by the routine and tradition of 

Rob's family situation, which has become an accepted norm of the late 1940's. He knows he has 

'to be there,' at home with the family, and his parent's friends, regardless of his own wishes. Rob's 



6 

parents demonstrate little tolerance for his preferred activities. As we will see, Rob's father is 

shown, by the narrative, to be excessively controlling of Rob's life. He rules the family with an iron 

fist, or, more specifically, 'a willow stick,' which he is not ashamed to administer fiercely, as and 

when he deems it necessary, such as when he finally discovers that young Rob has disobeyed his 

instructions not to go up to the boarding-house. If Rob's father's strict regime is not adhered to, he 

will beat it into his boys. Rob's childhood background is presented in the Prologue, prior to the 

main part of the narrative, which deals with Rob's resistance to his family's, and the community's, 

oppressive conformity, when he befriends the people at the 'boarding-house', just prior to his 

twenty-first birthday. This strategic timing illustrates the excessively long period of time a young 

adult had to endure their parent's rule, at that time in history. 

The Big Season also explores the mysteries of sexuality for young adolescents, or, more 

specifically, the suppression of their natural desires. When this theme arises in Gee's fiction , the 

inference is always that the Puritan ethos is to blame. Also, as I will show, voyeurism, in its diverse 

forms, is another of Gee's preoccupations. The following passage from The Big Season 

demonstrates how deftly, and inoffensively, the author presents this delicate subject. The event 

presents Rob's self-righteous father as the ogre, rather than Bill Walters, the supposedly 

undesirable resident of the boarding-house. In fact, in this initial incident, Bill is presented as a 

level-headed, if not, heroic figure, compared to Rob's father. Russell Haley once commented very 

astutely that he 'can feel something bulging the surface of the prose ... a hidden sexual charge ... an 

overwhelming sense that [Gee] can reach something numinous and atavistic when he deals 

imaginatively with place' (Haley 7) . This 'charge' is most notable in Gee's short-story, "The Right­

hand Man," but is present also in the following passage. The reader is drawn into the action, and 

becomes the voyeur. Later on in the Prologue, following a number of spying adventures, at 'the 

boarding-house, a terrible thing happened' (BS 14): 

There was a party, and in the middle of it the honking man came out of the lavatory. He 

was wearing only pyjamas. The boys [Rob and Arthur] went back behind the coal-box and 

waited for him to go inside. He came out of the lavatory and stood at the kitchen window 

looking in. There was a lot of people in the kitchen but after a while they went away and 

only the woman [who had earlier purchased whitebait from Rob and Arthur] with the flat 

nose was left. She was taking things out of the fridge. The man watched her. Then he 

went inside. He walked in a funny way. The boys crept back to the window. The man 

was inside when they got there. His back was towards them and he wen up to the woman. 



7 

Her mouth was open and she called out something and went into the comer. The man 

followed her. Then Bill Walters [whom Rob would befriend later on in the narrative] came 

and Scarface after him. Scarface laughed and suddenly got angry and picked up a bottle 

by the neck. Bill Walters pulled it away from him and rolled it across the table and went to 

the honking man and pulled him round. The fly of his pyjamas was open. Rob couldn't 

believe what he saw, Bill Walters grabbed a tea-towel and held it round the man and 

helped him out of the back door . 

. . . Rob couldn't forget what he'd seen when the honking man turned round. He knew 

some of the stories he heard at school and some of the drawings he'd seen were true. But 

now he wanted to know what really happened. He asked his mother once how babies 

came and she said it was a very beautiful thing but he was too young to know about it [as 

with Gee's recollection of his own mother (B 287)]. She said, no, a woman couldn't have a 

baby without a man, but she wouldn't say any more than that. Now Rob remembered what 

he'd seen and remembered his mother saying it was beautiful and he couldn't work things 

out. So one night he asked [his brother] Donny. He told Donny what he'd seen. 

Donny told their father, but only some of it, and their father got more angry than he'd 

ever been before and gave Rob a hiding with a willow stick and made him tell the rest. (BS 

15-16). 

Gee had experienced similar beatings from his own father, Les (8 286). 

Puritanism 

Rob experiences pressure in various forms from family and institutions to induce him to conform to 

their expectations of him as the local hero of the provincial rugby fraternity. Gee, having himself 

been a keen and able rugby player (see Kevin Ireland's comments in Kate Brett's article), and thus 

familiar with its protocol, deftly portrays the ambiences and idiosyncrasies of New Zealand's 

national sport. The novel is not about rugby though, but the phenomena provide the ideal 

conditions to explore how people try to manipulate and control others at the levels on both family 

and community- which is a kind of 'extended family.' Rob finds that the subtle, conscious and 

unconscious manipulations by his father, mainly, and friends, are formidably constricting. Through 

writing about Rob, as a young adolescent, Gee is able to explore the confusion and the mysteries 

he himself had experienced during his own adolescence, as delineated in the following passage, 

again from "Beginnings." From this passage there emerges another of Gee's preoccupations -



8 

explored in greater depth in In My Father's Den (1972) - that of the long-term damaging effects of 

what Gee sees as the constraining, confusing, and potentially distorted teachings of puritanism. In 

Gee's New Zealand, puritanism has the potential to prevent the natural growth of individual lives, 

by setting up an inherent confusion in young minds. He shows how these conditioning forces can 

distort perceived reality, suppress natural inclinations, and inhibit spontaneity, particularly, as in this 

instance, through the suppression of sexuality in adolescence: 

In that world [of school] I did well. I was quick in the playground and quick in the 

classroom ... I was in the school football team that trampled the nun-coached Cattle-dogs 

into the mud. But all was not well. Clyde found me out. He was a little blond wiry fellow I 

shared a desk with in standard 4. He discovered what I carried with me like a handicap of 

lead. He bounced up and down in his seat. I knew what he was doing, but he leered at 

me devilishly, made me ask, 'What are you doing?' 

'Practising. ' 

'What for?' 

We usually talked about it as 'having a go.' I did not believe in that activity - it was a lie 

as well as a 'smut. ' I asked my mother and she said a man and a woman had to be 

together to start a baby, it was a beautiful thing . I would find out about it when I was older. 

When she had gone my younger brother looked at me with contempt. 'You know people 

have to have a go.' I denied it. If the thing was beautiful it could not have anything to do 

with 'down there.' The word Clyde had chosen knocked my pretences flyng. I could not 

hide the facts from myself any longer. But that did not mean I had to like them. My disgust 

filled him with glee. He grinned at me and practised. I detested him, and could not take 

my eyes off him. For some months I was his follower. He left the school at the end of that 

year, ending a nightmare for me . 

... My best friend was a boy called Harry ... I infected him with my puritanism. We made a 

pact not to swear. We were a two-man purity squad, patrolling the playground listening for 

bad language (B 287-88). 

The practice of puritanism can lead to the misconception that one is 'special,' or, worse still, 'better' 

than those who do not practice its precepts. Rob's father, Ray, condemns the existence of the 

boarding-house, and especially its residents, whom he barely knows. He demonstrates his 

condescension with his reference to them as 'bad people.' He is hypocritical, extremely prejudiced, 

and more deserved than they are of the derogatory comments he aims at them. This is 



9 

demonstrated by his beating of his son, his looking down on others, the glory he hopes to reap, at 

the expense of his son's, and of the other team players he coaches, and his attitude to his wife and 

children, particularly Rob, who is more active than his passive brother, Donny, who complies far 

more with his father's expectations of him. 

Ray plays the holier than thou/self-righteous father-role, after discovering what his son had been 

exposed to while playing 'the voyeur,' spying through a window of the local 'boarding-house' and 

witnessing supposedly sordid events. Rob's father, Ray, shuns his own responsibility for his son's 

supposed misconduct in an attempt to cover up his own embarrassment. Ray is also capitalizing 

on what is in essence just an unfortunate occurrence. Ray has always disapproved of the 

boarding-house because he believed it lowered the standards of the community. He saw this 

business with the 'honking man' as a golden opportunity to close the place down. The author, 

through his narrator, has created a situation where irony will illustrate a case of double standards. 

Prior to Ray taking Rob up to the boarding-house, Rob's mother, and their friends, 'the Millers and 

the Robertsons' (BS 7), cosily share a meal and drinks speculating how they can capitalise on 'the 

boom' - in ways tantamount to criminal behaviour - following the war. Added to this, Mr Robertson 

confesses an example of his dishonesty to his friends (BS 11 ), and Ray, who will condemn more 

innocent goings on at the local boarding-house, continues his friendship with a man whom he 

knows is dishonest and deceitful. The phrase, 'thick as thieves', would be an apt way to describe 

their conspiring . Further to this, they also discuss their association with the 'black-market': 'Mr 

Robertson said you had to have connections to get good whiskey and then you couldn't get it very 

often. It was too soon after the war. You had to go to the black market' (BS 7). They are behaving 

like a rogue's gallery as they conspire to exploit the community which they themselves belong to, 

and ostensibly support. 

After whipping Rob with a 'willow-stick ... [Ray] pulled him [Rob] outside to the car and drove up to 

the boarding-house. He talked all the time but Rob did not listen. He rubbed the welts that had 

come up on his legs and tried to stop crying.' Then, when Ray had conveyed the story to the 

undesirables, 'the wrong sort of people' (BS 14), at the boarding-house, he was 

talking, fast and very angry ... they all talked and shouted together. Nobody heard what 

anybody else was saying [illustrating that people see things the way they want to, and that 

people, generally, are not good listeners, especially when they get angry]. But at last 

Rob's father made them understand and they looked at Rob and at the window. Bill 



10 

Walters [whom Rob would eventually 'hang-out' with prior to finally leaving town] started to 

laugh.' He spotted Rob's welts, and commented, 'I see you're knocking another one into 

shape. I hope to God this one gets away from you' (BS 16). 

The phrase, 'gets away', 'adumbrates the structure and theme of the novel - which deals with 

Rob's attempt to get away and to find his own shape' (Manhire 13), in the same way as Gee 

himself did, and as many of his central characters seem to do. 

Rob's father called Bill 'a drunkard and a criminal' and threatened to 'have him run out of town 

[there is a flavour of Zane Grey in that comment!] ... [and] have the boarding-house closed' (BS 16). 

Bill 'shouted at Rob's father that he was the criminal , he was the one who was to blame for the 

whole rotten mess the world was in and he'd never stop fighting until he and everybody like him 

was wiped out. Wiped ouf (BS 16). All this serves, along with the preceding events (p.11), to 

expose the irony of the situation, i.e. the hypocrisy of Ray's statements and actions. More 

importantly, it illustrates the prudish and arrogant nature of one man's prejudices, and his 

intolerances, as well as the confusion set up in the young boy's mind, to the point that, 'nothing 

made sense' (BS 17). 

As I have said , although the book's title is The Big Season, meaning the rugby season, the story 

has very little to do with rugby. As Manhire observes, 

Rugby is not his [Gee] primary interest here, rather it is a convenient (and almost 

paradigmatic: the connection between team and town is made several times) means of 

indicating the pressures which work upon the individual in urban and suburban New 

Zealand, that world - at once legendary and familiar - which mistakes conformity and 

community, and respectability for the condition of being respected, and which has put a 

narrow, puritan self-righteousness in place of more tolerant ways of being (Manhire 12 -

13). 

The following passage, from an interview by Brett with Kevin Ireland, a close friend, 'and great 

admirer of Gee,' discloses some useful insights into what drives Gee to exorcise, through his 

writing, the 'basinful' of puritanism he himself had endured, while growing up at home. One can 

also justifiably speculate about a didactic, as in an exposing motive behind the exploration of this 

theme, as a result of these findings. According to Brett, Ireland 



11 

Has strong memories of the time [himself and Gee] spent in London in the early 1960's 

[Paul Prior, the protagonist and narrator in In My Father's Den, and Noel Papps, likewise 

protagonist and narrator in Prowlers, also travel to London, and return to New Zealand, 

changed men] ... 'There were the parties and the endless all-night talk sessions where we 

sat around and worked off some of the terrible nonsense we had been brought up with. 

We all suffered to a very large extent from the merciless puritan rigidities of the age, but 

with Moss [Gee] it especially the case because he got an extra basinful at home.' To 

understand this, Ireland says, you have to grasp that in the Chapple/Gee household, 

puritan ideas were inextricably bound up with lofty liberalism: 'The Chapples saw 

themselves pursuing a higher way: social justice, pacifism, republicanism. It meant they 

had to be better people, aspire to greater heights [a sense of feeling 'special ,' and hence 

becoming 'isolated']. All that put terrible strains on marriage and children . Moss was 

caught up in a web of tensions in the family that was terribly traumatic.' Although Gee was 

a 'very lacerated' young man when he arrived in London - all the more so because he left 

an infant son and an unresolved relationship behind - the experience was pivotal in his 

becoming a writer. 'Going to London for him was a great cathartic release. It was 

terrifically important. It provided an emotional distance he had never had before and with 

that came the great power to translate experience into literature [as Noel demonstrates in 

Prowlers] .' Ireland says Gee went to London as a short-story writer with some limited 

publishing success in journals such as Landfall and came back 'a grown-up and fully 

committed writer.' Ireland says one of the lessons Gee took from his adolescence and has 

explored in his fiction ever since is that things are seldom as they seem, that beneath the 

upright, neat, middle-class exteriors, secrets lurk: secret lusts; twisted sexuality; violence. 

Maurice's novels always have the capacity to surprise because they suddenly turn very 

cleverly around and the characters go off beam (Brett 96-99) . 

Brett also adds, 

Kevin Ireland puts his finger on the essential contradiction between Gee as novelist and 

person: 'He's a remarkable man. He's a very pure person with a powerful interest in the 

darker side of people's lives [Gee is a incessant reader of biographies, and his wife reads 

autobiographies: A formidable partnership (Brett 101)]. It's paradoxical, but some writers 

and priests share this common ability to remain aloof from the depravity they deal with and 



12 

yet to understand that depravity profoundly.' .. . Man hire describes Gee as a 'liberal 

humanist - at once resigned to and pleased by the mixed nature of the human condition .' 

He says Gee's novels 'commend tolerance and teach it to several of their characters. Yet 

it is never a tolerance that has failed to see things as they really are. In Gee's lexicon, 

charity and clarity are very close relations.' Charity and clarity. A writer who can look evil 

in the eye, call it by its proper name and then offer his characters the possibility of some 

small 'moral and psychological victory' as a vote of confidence in the human condition 

(Brett 101). 

Gee has himself 'spoken of The Big Season as a novel which explores the pressures of a 

community telling on an individual' (Manhire 15). Wainui , the 'small-town' setting for the novel, is 

the pseudonym for 'Paeroa where Gee taught in 1955-56' (Manhire 12). As we will discover, all of 

the settings for the main actions in Gee's novels resemble very closely the places he lived at the 

time of writing them, or he uses them later, as with Henderson . Henderson, the town where Gee 

he grew up, appears repeatedly, though of course it is re-created , and transformed. The images of 

'the creek', 'the eels', the 'swagger' - he is the fat man from the novel of the same name - his 

'grandparents' home', 'Peacehaven' appears in the trilogy, its name unchanged. The story of his 

uncle's wife who had 'chased [her husband] through the orchard with an axe' is re-worked in Sole 

Survivor. John Kay, whose 'mother believed in Radiant Living and fed him on nuts and raisins' (B 

285) , appears as 'Pitt-Rimmer' , though he is cared for by his daughters, in Gee's well-known short 

story, "A Glorious Morning Comrade" (1975). All these images, and more, can be found again and 

again in Gee's novels. The 'isolation' that results from 'lofty ideals' and a sense of feeling special -

examined in greater depth in the next section - applies equally to Rob Andrews. 

His second novel , A Special Flower (1965) , continues the same theme of constriction, but confines 

it to the dynamics of a single family, rather than a community. It stresses the importance of 

spontaneity in people's lives, made explicit in the following passage: 

We cry too much, we Pinnocks. That's because we're good at it. Tears for all occasions. 

What we're not good at is laughing. We're cursed with a lack of humour. Have you ever 

heard me laugh, Peter- really laugh out loud, the way Coralie used to? Of course you 

haven't. I can't. I'm sterile ( SF 105). 



13 

The novel juxtaposes the exuberant personality of a young woman with the virtually stoical Pinnock 

household. This bringing together - through unlikely circumstances, and seemingly tragic events -

of contrasting attitudes to life, creates the possibility of growth and increased tolerance for the 

Pinnocks. 

In My Father's Den (1972) , as I have said, pursues, in much greater depth and intensity, the theme 

of puritanism. This well-crafted novel has been described by Manhire as a 'novel and murder 

story ... [where] Gee has deliberately used the form of the detective story or thriller, and has 

employed many of the conventions of the genre (a gory crime requiring investigation and 

explanation) as a means of charting a number of deficiencies in the New Zealand character and 

way of life' (Manhire 19). 

Paul Prior, brother to the murderer of Celia, a young schoolgirl whom Paul has befriended and also 

been tutoring privately, has returned to Wadesville, his New Zealand home town, after some years 

travelling through Europe. He returns to Wadesville, a changed man, 'in his mid-thirties as an 

aloo( bookish schoolteacher' (Manhire 21) . Wadesville has changed, too. He no longer feels a 

part of the community he once felt at home in. Like so many of Gee's aging male protagonists, 

Paul experiences a strong sense of loss for the 'wholeness' of the past, a wholeness he associates 

with being a child . Not surprisingly, it is Paul's mother, though more specifically her 'grim and 

fundamental ' Presbyterianism, that had been responsible for his constricting childhood. Although 

he never felt close to his mother, he had a strong bond with his father, who allowed only Paul the 

keys to the garden shed/'den', filled with books and enough comforts of home (FD 47) . He felt 

close to his childhood friends, and sought refuge in the natural environment. Paul's fondest 

memory is of the occasion when he, and his friend, Charlie lnverarity - Celia's father, in the 

narrative present - explored the local creek in a canoe. He uses 'fear, comradeship, discovery' (FD 

46), as the signifiers to describe the experience. Jack Skeat, the protagonist, and his life-long 

friend, Rex Petley, in Going West (1992), also clamber into canoes and try to re-create the 

wholesomeness of their childhood. 'He [Rex] had a sparkle in his eyes. It was not Fiona's [Rex's 

young daughter's] ride any more, it was his and mine/ says Jack (GW 190-192). Adventures, as 

well as misadventures, associated with 'creeks', 'estuaries' , and 'mudflats', become leitmotifs in 

Gee's novels. 

Paul Prior, again, as with all of Gee's protagonists, where the past becomes an issue, struggles to 

come to grips with it. For Gee, it seems imperative that these characters acknowledge their pasts 



14 

in order to achieve a sense of wholeness and a firm sense of themselves. The theme of the past is 

dealt with in the next chapter, but only in as far as it affects Noel Papps in Prowlers, and Howie 

Peet in Crime Story. In the context of Paul Prior's journey, Manhire suggests that: 

Gee seems to feel that those who understand the past and their relationship to it (who 

have, that is, a reflective sense of their own experience) are likely to have a fuller sense of 

identity and personal capacity than those who do not. The novel's structure emphasises 

this. Sections set in the present alternate with those set in the past, and they are brought 

slowly together as the novel proceeds. The present action, the murder inquiry, takes some 

six days in the middle of May 1969. (There are dates for each section of the novel, but no 

chapter headings.) The narrative of the past occupies about 45 years; it tells the life of 

Paul Prior and the history of his town , Wadesville. Each narrative section moves forward 

(day by day in one case, year by year in the other) until they merge (Manhire 20). 

A similar play with time, as a narrative strategy, is used, along with commentary from Gee, in 

Prowlers, as we will see in the next chapter. 

For Paul , part of his own personal investigation into the mystery of Celia's horrific murder includes 

an examination of his own past, in order to understand and resolve events in the present. As 

Manhire succinctly puts it, Paul Prior 

becomes an investigator as well as the object of investigation, detective as well as 

suspect. He reviews his life because he believes he may find clues explaining Celia's 

murder. ("I've got a feeling about you ," says a police inspector. ''You've got 

something for me, even though you mightn't know what it is ." [FO 67]) .. . The police 

seek the truth about the murder, and Paul Prior seeks the truth about himself. [On 

another level] both point to a larger truth Gee seeks - the human circumstances which 

make murder and any sudden eruption of violence possible. In My Father's Den, on 

one level, is a diagnostic investigation into the New Zealand psyche ... the detective 

story is used 'as a means of telling a story of character and environment, not as an 

end in itself (Manhire 19-20). 

'The human circumstances' that drove Andrew Prior to murder Celia, are responsible for his 

confused state of mind. He is clearly guilty of the act of murder, but the many factors presented to 



15 

the reader, that had contributed to the culmination of events leading to what Andrew had perceived 

to be an act of cleansing, complicate the judgement process. Establishing the truth in this novel is 

problematic. The truth is constantly deferred. By the end of the narrative, when the reader is in 

possession of the facts, that is, the facts according to Paul's subjective viewpoint only, and not 

necessarily a// the facts, a reasonably informed judgement could be made. The narrative wants to 

blame Paul's and Andrew's mother, and the 'grim and fundamental ' Presbyterianism that has 

motivated her strange behaviour, her strict discipline and unrealistically high moral judgements, 

that both Paul and Andrew have inherited, although so far, violence has erupted only in Andrew. 

What further supports this view, is the knowledge that it is written by an author who, according to 

Kevin Ireland, has experienced a similar upbringing, and writes, one could say, obsessively about 

it. Gee will always do more than just sketch an important character's past, particularly if any 

judgement is to be made, or sentence passed. Gee's narrative advocates greater tolerance and 

understanding, and the need for the reader to reserve judgement for its characters. Gee uses the 

first person narrative to demonstrate that the single point of view is very limiting and constricting 

when seeking the truth about someone, or something. This is exemplified in the Plumb trilogy, with 

its three complementary first person narrators. 

The importance of the past, such as Manhire ascribes to the dilemmas of Paul Prior, similarly 

applies to many other characters in Gee's oeuvre, such as Kingsley Pratt in Games of Choice 

(1976) , George Plumb, Meg Sole and Raymond Sole in the Plumb trilogy, certainly Noel Papps in 

Prowlers (1987), Jack Skeat in Going West (1992), and several of the characters in Crime Story. 

ii 

The Trilogy · Plumb: Meg: Sole Survivor 

Any comprehensive study of Gee's fiction is incomplete without some reference to the Plumb 

trilogy. Each of the three main characters, George Plumb, Meg Sole and Raymond Sole, 

document his or her experiences of the narrative present in conjunction with those of the narrative 

past, in their individual quests for truth. As in A Special Flower, some of the more significant 

events are viewed from more than one perspective, and sometimes revisited, or reviewed by either 

the same or other characters. Their vision consequently is increased. All this serves to inform 

those involved, including the reader, as to how elusive the truth can be. Growth, or increase in 

knowledge/self-knowledge, and clarity of vision, are important resulting factors . 



16 

The trilogy includes a comprehensive and complex compilation of themes, motifs, imagery, 

characterisation and anecdotes. It provides both the student and the critic with a wealth of material 

to work with, and has consequently generated extensive critical commentary, some of which has 

surprised even Gee himself. The ideas for the trilogy were processed for a number of years in the 

author's mind before he was ready to write it. What renders it particularly valuable for the present 

inquiry, is that it is largely composed from biographical and autobiographical source material. 

Manhire concurs that 'George Plumb's life is that of Maurice Gee's grandfather, James Chapple' 

(Manhire 34). The sketch Gee offers of his grandfather (B 290-1 ), complies very closely with 

George Plumb in the novel. In the 'author's note' at the end of Plumb, Gee explains how he has 

combined the real with the imaginary: 

Much of George and Edith Plumb's early history is Chapple history. Not all. For example, 

James Chapple did not meet Joseph Sullivan. He was though a Presbyterian minister, he 

did take the chair at McCabe's meeting, and he was sent to prison for sedition. His 

religious career, his opinions, his wanderings, were very like George Plumb's. However, 

George and Edith's domestic life is largely imaginary, and after 1918 wholly so. The twelve 

Plumb children are not the fourteen Chapple children . My uncles and aunts are not to 

accuse me of putting them in a novel. Felicity, Oliver, Robert, Alfred - the twelve - are 

fictional beings. Emerson is fictional , although his adventures are those of my father-in­

law, Oscar Garden. In one way Oscar Garden's flight was more remarkable than 

Emerson's: he made it after only two week's flying experience .. . (PI 272) . 

As we saw in the last section, 'in the Chapple/Gee household', Gee was subjected to the 

combination of 'puritan ideas' and 'lofty imperialism' (Brett 96) which he continues to shed and, as I 

have suggested, part of that process involves a kind of exorcism through the process of writing. 

He is also able to resolve these major issues for himself through the writing of his characters. Both 

Meg and Raymond endure this same process with the lofty ideals they inherit from their father, and 

grandfather respectively. Like Nick and Susan of the 'O' trilogy, which we will look at in the next 

section, they suffered 'the isolation of their special understanding and feel it both their burden and 

their privilege to persuade those around them to see things more clearly' (Manhire 9). Maurice 

Gee seems to have suffered the consequences of being put in that situation, and experienced the 

'isolation' of it. As noted above, Gee came to know his parents as 'heroic beings', and felt an 

obligation to imitate them. 



17 

Likewise, George Plumb experiences isolation in various forms. The nature of his work as a 

minister of the Presbyterian Church isolates him from his own wife and children as he attends to 

matters in the community. Then he undergoes a traumatic 'crisis of faith ' and pursues a 'mystical 

union with the One' (PI 147). He has very little time to greet his family when he returns home 

before tea and withdraws into his study for the evening, becoming isolated again by the four walls 

of his study, which is a symbolic imprisonment. He is isolated even more severely for two years, 

being jailed for heresy and sedition. In the narrative present, as an old man approaching death, he 

is isolated from the world by his deafness, with his 'ear-trumpet' being his main instrument of 

communication. Even that is finally destroyed by his banished son, Alfred, when George requests 

his forgiveness. George decides not to replace it. He has learnt, even if too late, not to be so 

judgmental. He tries to expiate his cruel rejection of Alfred, if only by accepting the destruction of 

his ear-trumpet, thereby expressing his desire for redemption . The condition of being isolated is 

not strange to him; he seems to embrace it in the novel's conclusion. Very early on in Meg's 

narrative she declares her resolution: that she 

has banished ... Capitals altogether: the Plumbs as Chosen Ones, my Father as a Giant 

Among Men. Drunk on family, I lost all judgement. Well , it's over. I see these happy titles 

for the false things that they were. I'm grown up now. The Plumbs have a human shape. 

They're nothing special .' (M 15) 

Each book in the trilogy requires an examination of the past, with a view to gaining a better 

understanding of the present. It is also a story of growth, as with self-knowledge, to achieve a 

sense of 'wholeness' while searching for the ever-elusive truth. Each character carefully and 

colourfully depicts the important events of the past and re-views the dynamics of cause and effect 

and the indeterminacy of chance and fate, so as to 'understand circumstance' (M 11 ). It is 

important to look back and recognise the important factors that had turned the tide of events, 

altering the course of individual lives. As Manhire observes, the reader learns 'how trivial and 

arbitrary are the events which can thoroughly transform a human life' (Manhire 33). Meg 

recognises that she had not seen things clearly as a girl and a young woman. Enjoying 'the house 

and gardens' of Peacehaven, she remembers, 'they had seemed, for a time, outside the laws of 

this place. It was my doing, it was my seeing and blindness, which set them on the outside; and 

now they are subject to reality. Have been for many years. My vision was false, and I learned to 

see with a usual eye, and have learned much more that way, and am happier' (M 11). 



18 

As Meg begins her story, she expresses a reluctance to 'spend [her] time looking back'. She feels 

that she is 'forced to tum there'. She knows that 'much has to be looked at with a cold eye', as 

Gee has said Zane Grey does so well. She is 'learning to see life more clearly without the fog of 

sentimental illusion' (Jones 326) . Kingsley Pratt, in Games of Choice, avoids 'a clear view of 

things: metaphor is his ultimate weapon, a device for spinning up fogs' (Manhire 28). Imagination, 

for Kingsley, 'is a device for throwing up screens preventing action' (GC 83) . Meg likewise is 

aware that 'there is much to be stripped of its clothing and seen nakedly' meaning that she 'must 

avoid the fancies' of metaphor (M 9), the dressing-up of external reality idealistically and 

sentimentally, as she had done in her youth. Raymond, who later becomes a journalist, 'calls them 

[these fancies] coy and clever and tells me [Meg] I must be plain or fall into self-regard and falsity' 

(M 9) . The unconditional love for her son , Raymond, could lead Meg to follow his advice too far. 

Due to his aridness, he would not the best example to follow. She perceives the whole process of 

analysing the past as 'a duty', and a 'need' (M 11). Noel Papps, in Prowlers, experiences the same 

reservations, but he asserts, 'yet I'll go on . I think that if I'm silent I'll soon die' (P 14). Jack Skeat, 

in Going West, proceeds likewise: 'Why do I do this? Why do I start? I have no need of discovery. 

Isn't that what I'm leading to? Not simply memory but the ordering that is a kind of invention .' He 

considers the alternative pleasures with which he could indulge himself now that he is retired , 'all 

that, waiting for me - and what do I do? I shine my torch back into the dark. Stupid buggar! Don't 

go there' (GW 5) , but he does. As with Meg, there is a 'need '. Meg's goal has been to 

hold myself steady in my shape, which is a sensible one, a shape that makes me useful. I 

must look at the person I came from . There was a girl , a sister, a wife, sentimental, tender, 

green, open, painfully open, [and conversely] closed , darkly closed . I was that woman; 

brought surely, unknowing, to my doom - which was to see. See life, understand 

circumstance, know death - to get an eyeful, as my sons would say .. . And to understand 

how, must look at that girl , etc.' (M 11) 

A theme that will be discussed in more depth in the next chapter is 'invention'. Meg recalls that at 

Alfred's funeral, Willis, that is, Meg's brother, 'spoke about Alfred as a boy. A good deal of it was 

invention. Willis had been away at sea. I think he believed it though .. . tree huts and mud dams in 

creeks, and evenings around the piano while mother played, and a church picnic where Alfred tried 

the lucky dip and won a kewpie doll, which he gave to his sister Meg ... Like me Willis was a 

sentimentalist, but it was fitting in him' (M 208) . 



19 

Meg remembers how, as a young girl, she did not want to visit her father in jail, because it would 

not be the same as the one she had formed in her mind. Meg forces herself to attend the trial of 

the young boys, the 'queer-bashers', who had murdered Alfred, and urinated on the body, because 

he had been a blatant homosexual. She does this because, as she says, 'I have to. I'm trying to 

understand it' (M 209) . Her father had banished Alfred from the family when he discovered him 

having sex in the orchard with his homosexual boyfriend. This is just one of the issues her father, 

George Plumb, has had to try and resolve in his mind. It is one of the events in his life he is 'sorry 

about' (PI 271 ). As Manhire has observed: 

Meg's story does not glitter with irony in the way her father's does. She is, of course, 

already at a point of wholeness when she begins her story. She recounts the stages by 

which she has become what she is - and Gee manages the narrative shifts between past 

and present as effortlessly as in Plumb. But the effect is not, as it was there, to display 

irony which the narrator fails to notice. Perhaps she sees more clearly by the end of her 

story; unlike her father, however, she begins with a good idea of what she will see. Her 

decision on the novel's final page to seek a reconciliation with Fergus [her husband] 

confirms the firm sense of self she has achieved. But it does not adjust our view of her, 

or her view of herself. (Manhire 51) . 

In Sole Survivor, the third part of the trilogy, the reader experiences, along with its narrator - Meg's 

son, Raymond Sole - a sense of indeterminacy. Raymond experiences the apparent collapse of 

life 's governing principles, which is shown to be a symptom of the age he lives in . He experiences 

a New Zealand as it enters into the post-modern world. The reader begins to experience a New 

Zealand 'in the throes of entropy'. Raymond's condition at the close of the novel is essentially 

nihilistic. Raymond not only lacks the clarity of vision that his mother had achieved, he doesn't 

even seek it. In response to Russell Haley's criticism, Mark Williams insists that 'Gee's work from 

the late seventies into the eighties calls into question the organising assumptions of the earlier 

work and seeks some adequate formal response to the collapse of meaning, the disappearance of 

depth, and the general aimlessness of contemporary life' (Williams 175). 

This shift, Williams suggests, occurs 

towards the end of Sole Survivor .. . Raymond Sole confronts the emptiness within that his 

forebears had so painstakingly filled with the anxieties and illuminations of their terrible 

obsession with meaning. 



20 

This condition is not peculiar to Ray Sole: it is the condition of his time. Gestures no 

longer relate to any shared meanings. His cousin, Duggie Plumb, the machiavellian 

politician, is not merely an aberration, he is representative. Ray, who has seen himself as 

morally superior to Duggie, discovers himself as merely a dispersed collection of 

conventional roles and attributes. Centreless, drifting - he occupies the ungrounded space 

that is the late twentieth century. 

Sole Survivor ends amid the exhaustion of the energies that had been so remarkably 

present at the beginning of the Plumb trilogy. More than this, it marks the end of the 

historical and ideological framework that had generated Gee's earlier fiction . (Williams 

175-6). 

This sense of chaos and disorder, and of an apparently purposeless existence, is intensified, 

though with a more satisfying conclusion, in Prowlers (1987), and its symptoms explored in The 

Burning Boy (1990). Williams' comments (1990), are confirmed by Bill Manhire, who suggests that 

'Sole Survivor is a novel that finds no answers ... Raymond Sole himself is a man quite without 

expectations; he is used to tracing the trajectory between beauty and ugliness, innocence and 

experience, and in most matters he expects to be let down. There is no struggle in him to achieve 

clarity of vision - not of the sort that characterised his mother's story, anyway' (Manhire 52) . 

Raymond is a successful journalist, but 

he sees only surfaces ... he is no good on depths. He can comprehend parts but not 

wholes. He doesn't understand his wife, and watches helplessly [metaphorically speaking] 

as she swims off to her death ... The one serious piece of writing he wants to do is a 

biography of Michael Joseph Savage - but he cannot 'make a whole round life' . The work 

is all done, but he 'can't bring it together' ... he writes the lives of those that do not matter to 

him. He is a ghost-writer ... His daughter says to him, 'Think some thoughts of your own'. 

As a teenager he briefly inherits one of Duggie's girlfriends; more tellingly, he even 

acquires as his mistress Beth Neely, his father's ex-mistress. He plagiarises Camus ... in 

order to impress her. Some of his behavioural poses and verbal mannerisms sound as if 

they are the result of reading too much laconic, hard-boiled fiction ... His dependence on 

Duggie, conscious and unconscious, is frequently apparent. .. He [Ray] seems inauthentic -

without self and centre. He understands the hollowness in his mother when she has her 

breakdown. She has 'cancelled' George Plumb's faith 'in man becoming Man', but having 

done so can 'discover nothing to fill herself with' [SS 32) .. . However it takes a good deal of 



21 

his life to see clearly the full extent of his own inner emptiness. Like him, the occasional 

women he is involved with after his wife's death begin to find out 'that what they thought 

deep was only empty .. . They complained that I wasn't there, or that only part of me was 

there' [SS 212]. Complementing his [own] sense of inner emptiness is Raymond's 

perception that the world outside him is empty ... Glenda's depression is defined in terms of 

emptiness; and making love to her, Raymond finds that he 'penetrate[s] into emptiness' 

(Manhire 55) . 

Raymond also, albeit very briefly, experiences a kind of 'cosmic emptiness' which again becomes 

one of the main topics of investigation for Noel Papps in Prowlers. From high vantage points, 

above Wellington and again, above Gerriston, Raymond has the impression that, in the first 

instance, Wellington Harbour appears as a 'flat white plate, porcelain and lovely - then a hole that 

opened into nothing'; he says it 'had me in a mild visionary state, and this was my vision : people 

showing glow-worm lights on the edge of nothing' (SS 72) . At Gerriston, he says, 'I felt I was on 

the edge of nothing, hanging on with fingernails and teeth . I was afraid of my tininess . The town 

was made of cardboard . It was accidental. Raymond Sole, sitting on this tower, was accidental ' 

(SS 83) . He perceives himself as a man without substance, insubstantial, not unlike the '19th 

century Russian "superfluous man"' (Reilly 2) . 

Duggie is a man of 'action', one of Gee's many 'do-ers', whereas Raymond is an observer, one of 

Gee's many 'see-ers/thinkers' (Reilly 2). Raymond 'wants to look at things, take them down and go 

away and look at them again; whereas Duggie Plumb wants to manipulate people and be in the 

action [see SS 23] - which makes him a politician' (Manhire 53) . Gee juxtaposes Jack and Rex 

(Going West) in the same way. Rex gets involved; he takes risks. As a poet, Rex just 'describes'; 

he does not search for meanings with his poetry, because he perceives the meaningfulness of 

things intrinsically and does not feel the need to reduce them to something that could, or might be, 

as Jack does. 'Rex refused to theorise, while I [Jack] never got beyond the "need to discover truth", 

which was "the moral role of poetry"' (GW 23) . Such examples exemplify what Gee sees as the 

mixed nature of the human condition. The opposition of terms like action and non-action generate 

'tension, a well known provider of balance', as Papps says, more than once. These binary 

oppositions become one of the main themes for both Prowlers and Going West. The essential, 

and 'complementary' ingredients of 'good' and 'evil', as parts of the human condition, are explored 

fully in the 'O' trilogy and in Plumb. This sort of viewpoint is essentially dualistic, and Gee's novels 

can be seen to demonstrate this perception of the world quite overtly. 



22 

iii 

Gee's Dualistic Viewpoint 

There is a long gap between the completion of the Plumb trilogy in 1983, and the publication of 

Prowlers in 1987. During this period Gee completed several fictional works for younger readers 

including the 'O' trilogy, and The Fire Raiser (1986) . The four main characters of The Fire Raiser 

appear again in Prowlers, but in their adult form, and their names have been changed. This 

strategy continues the author's exploration of point of view and the leitmotif of the need to develop 

psychological growth, tolerance and self-knowledge in the context of looking back into one's own 

past. 

During this period between the completion of the Plumb trilogy and Prowlers, Gee developed a 

dualistic view of the world with his fantasy novels for children . This shift has been foregrounded in 

the Plumb trilogy by the juxtaposition of the themes of good and evil, but it is expressed more 

overtly in the 'O' trilogy. 

The formulation of a dualistic scheme of good and evil in Gee's 'O' trilogy develops the basis of an 

essentially relativistic vision that Gee explores later in his subsequent adult fiction . Because the 

Motherstone philosophy underscores and orchestrates a major part of the action and character 

development in Gee's later oeuvre, it is imperative to examine and understand it before looking at 

its manifestations in his subsequent novels. 

The Halfmen of O (1982) introduces the Motherstone philosophy and foreshadows the two later 

works of the 'O' trilogy, although, naturally, the narratives are 'character centred and story driven .' 

The Motherstone, created by 'Freeman Wells', is described as 'grey, ordinary, a simple slab' with 

'huge powers sleeping in it' (HofO 178). On it must lie the two tear-drop shaped 'halves', also 

created by 'Freeman', to form a perfect circle, symbolising 'Balance' (HofO 70). One half, the 

light-coloured half, represents the 'good'; the other, the dark-coloured half, represents the 'evil '. 

The following passage explains the history of The Land of 0, and the Motherstone philosophy. It is 

told to Susan and Nick - the heroes of the story - by Mama, the widow of 'Freeman'. The 

Motherstone philosophy parallels the Christian myth of the Creation and Fall of Mankind. Susan 

and Nick's mission will be to restore the 'Balance' in 'Humankind' by recovering the 'halves' and 

replacing them on the stone. 



23 

We have not always been Halfies. Only for nineteen turns of our globe. In the beginning, 

in the ancient days, Humankind tore themselves apart. There was no law, only chaos . 

Nothing comes from that time but a memory in the blood. Then a wise one came. Some 

call him Firstman, some Freeman. He found law in chaos. He looked in man and saw 

there Good and Evil , and he gave them names and understood them. Then there was a 

moment when knowledge gave him powers that some would call magical, and others call 

divine. Some say there was a creator who used him as an instrument. I cannot say. But 

Freeman, Firstman, made the Motherstone, and laid the halves on it, and put humankind in 

Balance. Chaos stopped. History began. And Humankind lived for many thousands of 

years free to choose the evil or the good. Alas, there have been countless evil times, vile 

ambitions dressed up in great names. War and oppression stain the centuries. But the 

Balance held. The halves lay on the Motherstone and Humankind stayed in tune with 

Freeman's Law. Light and dark contended and held each other in a deep embrace. Yes 

Susan, that is it, you have the mark on you. There, on your wrist. See how the light bends 

into the dark, see how the dark leans into the light. They hold each other, good and evil. 

And see, if you look close, in the light there is a spot of dark, and in the dark there is a spot 

of light (HofO 68-69) . 

In this complete form, the Motherstone symbolises 'the mixed nature of the human condition. Ruth 

Verryt (Prowlers) , refers to 'Aristotle, Augustine, [as] those "splitters of our nature", those "creators 

of halfmen"' (P 177). The halves were broken apart by Otis Claw; 'the name had a dreadful 

sound. It scraped across their minds like a rusty knife' (HofO 69) . By separating the halves, Otis 

Claw believed he 'would rule Humankind'. As a 'pupil' of Freeman, Otis Claw, then called 'Otis 

Hand', was described as having been 'a golden boy, brilliant and beautiful, who learned the lore of 

the Stone through the pores of his skin .' When Otis Hand's wisdom matched that of Freeman, Otis 

was left in charge 'of the Freeband about the stone', and Freeman and Mama went to Wildwood. 

Mama continues her creation story explaining how they lived in 

Wildwood for many years to study the way of the Woodlanders. We came to love 

Wildwood. We learned many things. We found the sky, and learned its uses, and 

Freeman opened the path to your [Susan and Nick's] world. 

Otis had all the time he needed. He had tasted power, and the seed of evil grew in him, 

and swelled in him, until he was nothing but a smiling face, a fair exterior, fitted over 



24 

evil ... He saw everything was free. That he could not bear ... But first he must destroy 

Freeman's Law. He must break the Balance, pull the halves apart ... he delved into the lore 

- and found a way. 

There came a day when we in Wildwood, Freeman Wells and I, felt a cleaving in 

ourselves. We fell down in a sickness and we screamed in agony as nature broke apart in 

us and the Balance broke. When the fever left we stood and looked at halfies. We were 

Halfmen. All through Manhome, all through 0, wherever humans lived, it was the same. 

Woodlanders were unchanged. And Birdfolk, and Stonefolk, and the People of the Sea. 

They had their own Law. 

We knew what had happened. We needed no one to tell us. Otis Hand had learned a 

way to violate the Stone. Otis Hand had wrenched the Halves from their deep embrace, 

and in every man and woman in 0, good had fought with evil , one last fight, until one or 

the other was driven out .. . We knew that down in Manhome, Darkland now, Darkland from 

that instant, the hordes in whom evil had triumphed hunted down and murdered the 

unresisting Good. We were Good. I say it with no pride. There is no pride in being half. 

Good must be won daily in the battle that never ends (HofO 70-71). 

The final sentence of the above passage will reverberate in any reader's mind who is familiar with 

Gee's adult fiction , that is, wherever he juxtaposes a character who promotes essentially good 

deeds with one who promotes bad or destructive deeds. 

Writing for children requires a plot with movement. Consequently the characters are not as 

complex as those found in Gee's adult fiction . As Manhire astutely observes, 'The element that is 

conspicuously missing from the children's writing is the serious exploration of character. Gee's 

young heroes tend to be granted character traits (one child is dreamy, another practical) rather 

than characters' (Manhire 11 ). 

Also, 'the interesting thing about Gee's work for children is the extent to which it has welcomed 

fantasy, a possibility the adult novels never seem to entertain . Magic and fantasy, however, are a 

means of exploring and intensifying life, not evading it' (Manhire 9). Conversely, some of the 

characters in Gee's adult novels can be seen to abuse and misuse 'fantasy' and 'imagination' as a 

means of 'evading' life, such as we have already seen with Kingsley Pratt in Games of Choice. It is 

important to understand that the employment of 'fantasy', in Gee's canon, can be utilised just as 



25 

effectively to evade life, as it can 'as a means of exploring and intensifying' it. Used appropriately, 

the latter end is achieved, but used inappropriately, the former, undesirable condition results. 

Gee's children's novels are allegorical. The 'power-seekers' , such as the Wilberforces in Under the 

Mountain (1979), and Otis Claw in the O Trilogy, represent 'the leaders of [our] race' (UM 79), as in 

the human race of Western culture, and they 'anticipate a character like Duggie Plumb' (Manhire 

9) . 'Gee's abhorrence of imposed uniformity, bureaucratic and institutional repression' 

(Manhire 10), is expressed in The Priests of Ferris (1984) - part two of the 'O' Trilogy. 

A significant word that carries reverberation, 'beyond the dictionary weight' is Wilberforce, simply 

by its inference to the concepts of will and force. The following passage describes the 

Wilberforces . They are: 

slug-like creatures of the mud [who evolved by] symbiosis ... each one depending on the 

other. The Wilberforces joined with [the] big worms in the mud. It took many thousands of 

years. But what they decide on they do. They became the brain in a huge body more 

powerful than any machine that was ever made, in a sea of food that seemed to have no 

end .' [As the name suggests, the Wilberforces are] 'creatures of tremendous will - no 

imagination, no feeling , no conscience ... they remind me of some of the leaders of your 

race. But ambition, will - there have never been creatures like them. And all turned to a 

single cause - to destroy, to multiply. Their name, we'll call them the Wilberforces -

although Wilberforce is too good for them. You could never pronounce the name they 

gave themselves, but it means People of the mud, who conquer and multiply. See how 

they spread (UM 79) . 

Another preoccupation, which appears in both Gee's children's and adult fiction, is the theme of 

isolation. Regarding this theme, Manhire suggests that, 

The children are charged with special knowledge of a terrible threat to humanity of which 

the world remains ignorant. The children are left isolated, with the burden of their 

knowledge and prospective task, but unable to call on the help of those who are at risk 

[they are preoccupied with mundane thoughts] ... This is a conventional situation in 

children's fiction (indeed, in any narrative), yet if fits with the rest of Gee's fiction. Several 

of his central characters, from Rob Andrews to George Plumb, feel the isolation of their 



26 

special understanding and feel it both their burden and their privilege to persuade those 

around them to see things more clearly (Manhire 9). 

Since the publication of Plumb, other characters to share this hopeless sense of isolation include 

Noel Papps (Prowlers) , Lex Clearwater and Duncan Round (The Burning Boy), and Jack Skeat 

(Going West). In fact, any of Gee's characters who is found in isolation, is usually troubled, or 

'burdened', by the possession of some form of special knowledge or alternative viewpoint that the 

majority do not, or cannot share. 

New Zealand society, as Gee's novels present it, can be viewed very simply, in binary terms, that 

is, in terms of a dualistic viewpoint, or model. Gee's portrayal of the external world , and of 

character traits, are perceived in terms of mixings of opposing forces . Each world becomes 'the 

battleground for the opposed, and equally matched forces of good and evil ' (Manhire 11). We will 

look at how Gee portrays this concept in The Burning Boy, a novel that departs to a large degree 

from his obsession with the power of the past over the present. As an example of this dualistic 

perception of the world , I will examine the idea of 'the haves and the have-nots' of Gee's fictive 

representations of New Zealand. 

Because of the way Gee presents these two groups, in direct contrast, as opposing one another, 

they can be viewed in terms of light and dark. In the majority of cases, those who choose power 

and wealth as their God are portrayed as dark (bad) , like the Wilberforces . They have appeared 

repeatedly in Gee's novels, most notably as Duggie Plumb in Sole Survivor, Phil Dockery in 

Prowlers, and Tom Round in The Burning Boy. Conversely, characters who do not choose power 

and wealth as their god, are portrayed in terms of light (good) . Gee juxtaposes these two extremes 

of character traits in such dualities as Raymond Sole with Duggie Plumb, Kitty Hughes with Phil 

Dockery, and Tom Round with the goodness of a number of other characters in The Burning Boy. 

In Plumb, Plumb's 'good' sons juxtapose Oliver, the vindictive and sadistic judge. Howie Peet, in 

Crime Story, though finally redeemable, is earlier contrasted with his former wife Gwen. 

I want to now explore, in a little more detail, how Gee presents this juxtaposition of good and bad in 

The Burning Boy. Gee juxtaposes the Rounds and the Birtles who live in the 'Wakefield' town of 

Saxton [1]. The Rounds are wealthy; the Birtles are not. As in Crime Story, Gee conveniently uses 

a tragic accident, not simply to unite the two families, but to unite the rich, and, by comparison, the 

poor. This strategy supports the 'chance and fate' element of Gee's social thesis, e.g. 'everything 



27 

we did was circumstantial' (P 212) . Duncan Round is the 'burning boy' of the novel. He has been 

badly scarred by an explosion, caused by his friend, Wayne Birtle. Duncan Round lives, for most 

of the narrative, in his head, until a caring and sympathetic school teacher, Norma Sangster, and 

her close friend, John Toft, draw him out. 

In chapter nine, Gee's narrator divides the 'haves and have-nots' with this description: 'the distance 

between the Birtles' house in Spargo Street, Duckham Square, and the "toasty warm" Round 

house above the river and golf course in Coppermine Valley can be measured socially ... he gap 

between the rich and poor is widening again but that isn't peculiar to Saxton' (p.109); and Norma 

Sangster comments, 'Those Rounds ... just don't care about anyone else. Anyone not a Round is a 

square' (88 62) . Gee has carefully chosen the name 'Coppermine' to suggest wealth , whereas 

'Spargo Street', relatively speaking, does not. 

Firstly, in this chapter, the narrator provides the reader with 'a bit of history' of Saxton. This 

explains how the 'climate, topography, hard work and ambition and greed and commercial chance 

determined the town's shape more than the social theory and distinctions' which became blurred, 

Saxton grew into an egalitarian New Zealand town' (88 109). The distinction between Gee's 

fictive town of Saxton, and the real town of Nelson, is also blurred , as he, through the narrator, 

exposes the darker side of this apparently picturesque, and cultured corner of the world , one which 

is popular with the back-packing tourists from the outside world . 'Saxton is remote, but the world 

passes through' (88 109). The outward expression of Saxton gives the impression that it 'is a 

place free from troubles. Look harder,' suggests the narrator, who proceeds to describe 

'kids ... sniffing solvents from plastic bags ... street-kids squatting in an empty corner-dairy by 

Duckham Square,' where, as the reader has already been informed, the Birtles live. There is a 

'helicopter rattling your teeth .. . making the marijuana sweep. Back in the town school's out and 

schoolboys and girls are smoking the stuff while their older siblings, unemployed, are drinking in 

the pub' (88 110-111). A drunk 'Russian sailor from a tuna boat ... won't make it back to his ship 

[because] local goons .. . roll him into an alley and kick him senseless. He'll be three months in 

hospital and then will be flown home and will never really understand what happened to him in 

Saxton' (88 111). A world of chaos and disorder pervades the narrator's description of people 

and events at the local 

courthouse on a Tuesday. Sit in the waiting room with the butt-scorched floor, with young 

fellows in boots and broken sneakers and jeans and bush singlets and leather jackets, 



28 

listen to them speak, listen to the girls, with their nicotine-stained fingers and red-rimmed 

eyes. It's not the same language used by those lawyers who go by - young fellows, young 

women too. See how they dress. You can illustrate a two-nations' argument here. What 

are the charges when the accused, those in here, those brought in from the cells, face the 

judge? Cultivating cannabis. Possession for supply. Driving with excess breath alcohol, 

blood alcohol. They've pissed in a doorway, punched the neighbour or the de facto, kicked 

in the window of a menswear store. They've stolen from a container lorry parked up for the 

night. Threatened a constable with numchukkas. Threatened a chemist with a knife and 

got away with a pocketful of prescription drugs. They've kicked a Russian sailor half to 

death. They're mill-hands, knife-hands, labourers, bushmen, fish splitters , sickness 

beneficiaries, solo mothers, unemployed. The judge sentences them to prison or periodic 

detention, puts them under supervision, orders reparation . He fines them and disqualifies 

them (the shop manager too . The estate agent, the retired shoe-salesman) . Every 

Tuesday there's a new batch . Shelly Birtles has passed through (theft of a chequebook 

and credit card) . Shelly is under six months supervision (BB 111-112). 

It is not difficult to imagine the author sitting in the courthouse of his home town of Nelson, doing 

his research for this novel. This is the familiar world of the very desperate 'have nots .' Juxtaposing 

this world are the haves: 'the little millionaires and clever bankrupts ... [or] inflation millionaires , 

there are more than a dozen in this town,' we are informed, 'mostly land agents . They buy and sell , 

buy and sell , and produce nothing along the way ... They take the money and other people take the 

debt. You try and buy a bit of land at the edge of town, for a fair price, you can't do it. They own it 

all, these fat fellows, these little boys . You don't believe me? Look at the registration of properties. 

They sit there waiting for the value - ah , not the value, the price - to rise .. . Tom Round. He plays 

their little game with them' (BB 112). Phil Dockery, from the preceding novel, Prowlers, is also one 

of these 'inflation millionaires .' These 'fat fellows' appear again ; in Going West there are the 

'Pittaways', and in Crime Story there are Howie Peet and his cronies . Some of Gee's power­

seekers, Howie Peet included, are redeemable, in that he is a maker, and not just an exploiter, and 

to some degree so too is Phil Dockery. Evidently there is a graduation, or, an hierarchy of bastard­

ness in Gee's model, Duggie Plumb being the worst. 

The duality of Gee's 'haves and have-nots' deriving from his depiction of New Zealand's political 

and economic decline becomes a major point of focus in Prowlers. On an occasion in the narrative 

past, when Kate Hughes (Noel's grand-niece), was interviewing her grandmother (Noel's sister), 



29 

local Labour politician, Kitty Hughes, for a school project, Kitty makes a witty and cynical comment 

that her husband, Des, 'raised me from the middle class to the working class.' Then, in her reply to 

her grand-daughter's rhetoric, 'I thought we didn't have any classes in New Zealand', Kitty asserts: 

Is that what they're teaching you at school? We've got haves and have-nots. That's our 

classes. Top dogs and fancy pants and make believe Englishmen and tax accountants. 

And the workers on the other side, who do all the hard slog and get nothing (P 228). 

Kitty is representative of the many emancipated women in New Zealand who move into positions of 

power within local politics for the good of the community. She is modelled on a real-life figure from 

New Zealand political history, Mabel Howard. Gee acknowledges his debt to David Gee's 

biography of her life, Our Mabel, in the 'Acknowledgments' at the beginning of Prowlers. 

Notes 

1 The topologies of Saxton resemble that of Jessop, in Prowlers . Saxton and Jessop both 

resemble the Nelson of the real world, where Gee was residing at the time of writing both Prowlers 

and The Burning Boy. This is confirmed by the descriptions attributed to Saxton: 'the sunshine 

hours are the highest in New Zealand .. . a hill known as the centre of New Zealand; a boulder bank 

enclosing mudfiats and the port. It's a geological phenomenon' (88 110). and 'the nearest city is 

forty miles by air but if you go by car and ferry you must travel all day' (88 109). 



30 

Chapter Two 

Prowlers: The Collapse of Modernism's Governing Principles 

Prowlers juxtaposes the technical discourses of science and the discourses of literature, through 

the narrating of the protagonist, Noel Papps. He is a retired scientist, who initially demonstrates 

the characteristics of a radical empiricist, always striving for truths and certitudes, the freedom from 

doubt. He has been, for most of his life, a positivist, who has demonstrated a firm sense of being 

connected to external phenomena, i.e. , there is an immediacy between the objects and ideas in his 

mind and the words he uses to describe them. In his professional career, Noel had learnt 'to 

establish boundaries , to categorise and analyse.' He anticipates exercising the same ordering 

power and control over the external world when he begins to write his memoirs, but initially he 'is 

betrayed by his own language' (Williams 182). Unrealistically, he expects to 'measure [a life] in 

micrograms' (P 174), and to 'get [it] down in [its] right balance' (P 5) . This goal has strong appeal 

for him, but this method proves to be unsuccessful , and he finally concedes, 

Some things are going and will not come back - some people gone. Others are 

shrinking in importance - people, events - and multitudes are going to be left out. Yet 

I see the importance of everything. Each thing has its weight. That is what concerned 

me in my work. A life though isn't measured in that way. How is it measured, how 

does it move? That's what I'm busy finding out. That's what I'm not busy finding out 

(P217). 

Plumb, in Gee's novel Plumb, comments, 'There is no science that can measure behaviour'(P 

149). Gee continues his interest 'in the architecture of the old life' in Prowlers. He explains that, 

'There's the fullness, on the one hand, of experience, and the narrowing down of time on the other. 

So as one increases and fills out the other is decreasing. You've got a huge imbalance' (Reilly 6). 



31 

The novel traces Noel's growth in self-knowledge and tolerance. Through the process of analysing 

and documenting his life, and the lives of other significant individuals who have intersected it, Noel 

succeeds in broadening his perception of the world. He encounters numerous obstacles, but 

manages to achieve countless small 'victories' (P 212), plus a few very large and valuable 

ones. Prowlers is the story of 'increase' (P 94 and 117), that is, increase in self-knowledge, and, 

in turn, in self-worth . It is also the story of radical change, a recognition of indeterminacy, and of 

the problems associated with accepting it. As we will discover, Noel is an extremely complex 

character: initially, he is portrayed as being dogmatic and self-opinionated, although, as his 

narrative advances, his persona becomes more colourful and appealing. His initial task in the 

novel is to write about his sister's public and private life. This information is to be edited by his 

grand-niece, Kate Adams, who will integrate it into the narrative of her own biography of Noel's 

sister, and one-time Labour politician, Kitty Hughes (deceased). Mark Williams' comments 

regarding this passing on of biographical data are worth examining at this point, since they serve 

as a useful opening up of my own 'conversation' with the text. He suggests that 

The novel , then, is constructed around a complex and interlocking web of writings. All 

these writings are at one remove at least from the events they describe. They are focused 

through a consciousness dwelling on its past, casting it into written record for another 

character who is herself engaged in a different kind of written account. In short the novel 

is less concerned with the literariness of life than with the literariness of literature. We are 

ushered into a self-enclosed and self-reflexive world of words . For all the detail of the 

novel, its reaching out towards a substantial world, that world is experienced by the 

narrator as well as the reader as one slipping inexorably into language. The novel still 

wants to hold its mirror up to nature, but nature continually eludes the novel's narrator and 

us, who read over his shoulder (Williams 181). 

Williams' reference to the 'complex and interlocking web of writings' needs qualifying. Since the 

reader never actually sights Kate's narrative, it has to be assumed that it is unimportant, at least in 

as far as the novel, as artifad, is concerned. Apart from the first chapter, which presents a number 

of false starts to Noel's narrative, a few crude remarks aimed at Kate, intemnittent records, and a 

few of her own written and verbal responses. Noel's narrative addresses Kate directly. As far as 

Noel is concerned, she is his only 'reader' (P 182). The narrative is complex in the sense 



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that it combines little stories that describe the events in the past. These stories record Noel's own 

conscious awareness of his responses to them at the time they occurred, his responses to his own 

historical awareness of them, his own historical comments upon them, his comments about his 

own narrating process, and his own responses to Kate's actual and implied responses to Noel. 

The reader is naturally 'ushered into a self-enclosed and self-reflexive world of words,' because, 

from a post-modem perspective - and this novel certainly does enter the post-modern arena -

what other perception of the world is there for the modern consciousness? Noel, however, is not a 

product of the post-modern world; rather, he is most certainly of the old school, and he finds the 

transition into this world problematic. Up to this point in his life, he has assumed language to be a 

transparent medium that directly reflects 'the world of nature'. But he is also an old man 

experiencing a rapidly changing world of 'Gay rights, women's rights, Maori rights , rights to play 

rugby with whom we want,' and he asserts, 'I'm glad I don't live in this time. I'm just passing 

through to somewhere else' (P 69) . The novel does not reveal a specific narrative time, but there 

are enough clues to suggest that it is somewhere around the early to mid-nineteen-eighties. 

Noel's interest in his past has been stimulated by Kate's task, which is to complete her 'Lomax 

Institute Archival Project' , about the institution in which Noel had worked for most of his 

professional life, and of which he had become Director, from '1955-68' (P 24) . The stimulus of this 

project, in turn, has created an interest, for Kate, in the public and private life of Kitty Hughes, who 

had been her grand-mother, and had had a high public profile as the local Labour politician for 

Jessop. Kate decides to write Kitty's biography and approaches Noel for assistance. He agrees, 

and this engages him more intensely in his own past. Kate uses a tape-recorder to inte