Patricia McLean 

Maurice Gee: Life and work, by Rachel Barrowman (Victoria University Press, 2015), 543 pp., $60

The biographer’s job is not an easy one. For a literary biographer it’s even harder. He or she is expected not only to dish up the dirt, but to see into the mind of the artist, to illuminate the magical process by which the imagination is transformed into a literary artefact. By carefully relating his early life and his struggle to live and work as a writer, Rachel Barrowman’s Maurice Gee: Life and Work nearly achieves this. Her biography succeeds in both casting light on his fictional world and revealing, behind his well-documented reserve, Gee’s heroic perseverance and self-belief. We discover that Gee was not a precocious talent – and never claimed to be – but a late-blooming craftsman who held onto his dream resolutely.

In his review of Barrowman’s biography in the magazine North and South, Paul Little states, ‘… those undercurrents in [Gee’s] fiction are not so much his artistic vision as the way the world is’. This statement is at odds with the biography, which shows instead that Gee’s literary world is his world, written – often directly – from experience and personal observation. Little’s assertion – this is the way the world is – reflects the claustrophobic closed-circuit in mainstream New Zealand literary culture, whereby white middle-class post-Protestant critics write about white middle-class post-Protestant writers who write about white middle-class post-Protestants. A vision that is necessarily narrow has become normative; a specific experience in a particular part of the world has become universal for being a ‘New Zealander’. And while Barrowman’s biography exposes the extent to which Gee draws on personal experience for his material, its location in this persistent cycle of author/critic/national identity is a fundamental problem. Despite this, the book deftly recounts Gee’s path from the Henderson ‘creek and kitchen’, to an unhappy and confused early adulthood, to finding love and security and taking his place as one of New Zealand’s best known and most admired authors. [Read more…]