Book Review: Maurice Gee: life and work, by Rachel Barrowman

Available now in bookstores nationwide.

Maurice Gee is held in great respect by a vast number of readers both in NZ and around the world. He has published 32 novels, for adults and younger readers. I have read most of them and thought I knew a bit about his work.

Well, whatever tiny amount that was, Rachel Barrowman has multiplied it ten thousand times, at least.

This large (543pp) work is a comprehensive interweaving of Gee’s life and work – inseparable as they are – and a really great addition to the work available on NZ writers.

It is a scholarly work: Barrowman explores Maurice Gee’s work in the context of his personal and family history and how that affected his attitudes and his work. Relationships with other NZ literary greats – Charles Brasch, Maurice Shadbolt, to name only two – and with his varied publishers and editors provide fascinating insights into how the literary world worked; sometimes not as smoothly as one would like, it would appear.

The picture which appears of Maurice Gee the writer is inextricably entwined with Maurice Gee the man, as every aspect of his creative life is examined alongside pertinent events in his personal life; connections are cleverly and perspicaciously made between real life and fiction, between one novel and another, between place in Gee’s life and upbringing, and place in his novels. One is easily identifiable as the other, or at least as part of the other, as you read through this fascinating book.

The relationships which Gee had particularly with his mother – but also with other family members – had a profound effect, not only on how he saw the world, but on how he wrote about it – not that this is unusual for a writer of fiction. But Rachel Barrowman writes with a wealth of information and a depth of understanding that makes Maurice Gee and his family and friends really come alive.

The strong family link to writing, the teaching for which he was not cut out, the difficult relationship with his first serious girlfriend, the time had in Napier as City Librarian which didn’t end well (and in which Napier Library was the loser), the tough decisions made to give up work to concentrate on full-time writing, the staunch support of Margareta throughout, the family, the travels, the dynamics of the weird and wonderful world of literary fiction – all of it was mixed and blended, reworked, pulled apart and turned into a prodigious output of really good novels.

It s a seriously good book. While Rachel Barrowman’s sentences are quite complicated, and I found myself having to go back several times to parse them, that could be because much of my current reading is fiction designed for teenage readers: hardly a complex clause to be found!

And I’d like to mention the brilliant indexing of Tordis Flath – it helps enormously with managing the large cast present in this work.

I’d recommend this book to anyone who is seriously interested in the work of Maurice Gee – you’ll learn a great deal about the writer as well as his wonderful novels.

Reviewed by Susan Esterman, Library Manager, Scots College

Maurice Gee: life and work
by Rachel Barrowman
Published by Victoria University Press
ISBN 9780864739926