Kate De Goldi on rereading Maurice Gee
It seems fitting to begin this blog with the rereading I’ve been doing since hearing of Maurice Gee’s death.
Rereading Maurice Gee
It seems fitting then to begin with the rereading I’ve been doing since hearing of Maurice Gee’s death. It was very moving to hear the tributes from readers and writers who testified to the power of Maurice’s novels in their reading lives and the importance of that fiction in our literary and wider culture.
Still, my sense is that Gee’s formidable body of work has slipped from the sight of most contemporary New Zealand readers. This is inevitable of course; the reading public and much of the publishing world are, understandably, preoccupied with the current moment, the new promising book, the one after that … Writers respond to and reshape the culture they live in, and readers are eager to read books fresh from the ongoing moment.
But Maurice Gee’s stories and novels chronicle a stream of 20th-century New Zealand Pākehā life that spoke to — and speaks to us still — of our past, the social systems and beliefs that formed so much of this country’s settler culture and still rumble beneath it. Among much else, a country’s fiction is always a useful way to track and understand the nation’s preoccupations, its development and regressions. It would be so interesting to know what Millennials and Gen Z made of the New Zealand and its discontents Maurice Gee so thoughtfully explored.
Penguin Books New Zealand have kept a number of Gee’s titles in print, and more still are available as eBooks. Alternatively, if you’re keen to explore his oeuvre for the first time or revisit both his adult and children’s books, you can borrow them from your local library. Our stupendous metropolitan library systems have almost all of his work available.
I look forward to rereading several of Maurice Gee’s adult novels, but the book I reached for first is one of my favourites from his backlist of children’s books.
Maurice always made a distinction between his fiction for adults and children. The children’s stories ‘came more easily,’ he said. Perhaps, remembering his childhood reading self, he channelled Philip Pullman’s observation:
Children aren’t interested in the least about your appalling self-consciousness. They want to know what happens next. They force you to tell a story.
All the same, the matters that preoccupy him in his adult novels are also there in the children’s books — and in a couple of cases, a children’s book speaks back to or calls forward to an adult novel. Family secrets, puritanical mores, sexual repression, violence, the relative powerlessness of children and women, the mysteries of adult behaviour, wariness of institutional authority — all are present to one degree or another in The Fat Man.
The Fat Man
The Fat Man (Puffin Books, 1994)
The first line of this children’s novel is just about my favourite in all NZ literature:
Colin Potter was a hungry boy.
Seldom has a seemingly simple line seemed so sinister and freighted. Placed alongside the novel’s title, the DNA of the novel is immediately made plain: a child-adult relationship is in play; need and greed haunt the characters and stoke the plot. The opening continues:
His mother said he had a hole in his stomach and one day she’d get a needle and thread and sew it up.
A queasy joke that sets the tone for the novel: unease.
Colin is hungry, not least, because the Depression is underway — ‘They were hard times. They were hungry times.’ And it’s his yearning for treats that entangles him with the Fat Man, as Colin thinks of Herbert Muskie — a blubbery man-child hell bent on revenge for indignities visited on him in childhood, and whose unwilling accomplice Colin becomes.
The story is set in Loomis, also known as Henderson, the landscape of childhood that sang in Maurice’s imagination and so often became a story setting. Colin’s father has no regular work and is vulnerable to Muskie’s temptations; Colin’s grandfather, too, is compelled by Muskie’s rough glamour and promises of booty. Colin — ashamed of his complicity with Muskie — is immobilised, unable to warn his family of the Fat Man’s malevolence.
The ‘watchful child’
Rereading, I was struck all over again by Colin’s agonised witness to adult behaviour and events. He sees much — he is the ‘watchful child’ so prevalent in children’s literature — but only half understands what he sees — a dissonance that fuels the plots of many enduring children’s stories. By story’s end, Colin has gained some hard-won and complex self-knowledge; he has glimpsed the complications waiting beyond the relative safety of childhood; he’s chastened and a little wiser.
Herbert Muskie is certainly one of the more terrifying figures in children’s literature, but the book’s triumph is the sympathy both Colin and the reader come to feel for Muskie— an understanding of the great wound beneath his vicious behaviour.
The portrayal of Muskie, the book’s violence, both simmering and explicit, and Colin’s moral compromises caused some controversy when The Fat Man won the 1995 Book of the Year Award at the then AIM book awards. (NZ children’s book awards in their various iterations have been prone to these flurries of outrage — subsequent books-of-the-year, Dare, Truth or Promise by Paula Boock (1997) and Into the River by Ted Dawe (2012) were both caught in post-award cross-fire — a testament, you might argue, to the considerable power people invest in literature for children.) The accusation against The Fat Man was that the story left a child reader without hope, that Colin’s experiences in effect robbed him — and the young reader — of their childhood. This was a recurring anxiety that haunted global children’s literature commentary for several decades.
Reacting to The Fat Man now
It’s interesting to think about how adult readers, mindful of children, might react to The Fat Man now. Prevailing beliefs about childhood are in constant flux — as culture evolves — and writers for children (as all writers) are often in conversation with the prevailing orthodoxies; they prod and argue. It’s thirty years since The Fat Man was named children’s book of the year. I like to think that new readers would respond differently now, appreciating the book as a powerful, morally complex and artfully written story of childhood shock and aftermath.
My own feeling when I finished The Fat Man this time round was unalloyed admiration and gratitude: for the intensity and thrill of the reading experience; for the sleekness of the storytelling and the finely judged sentences; for the distillation and nuance of character; for the arresting detail of the period and setting; for courageous truth-telling about human weakness and perfidy; for the respect shown to the young reader: here you are, the novel asserts; this is how it can be; but you have the capacity to understand.
Ngā mihi Maurice.
Other excellent books featuring watchful children in perilous circumstances
Hostel Girl by Maurice Gee.
This novel was published as young adult fiction in 1999. It is set in Lower Hutt in the mid-1950s and shares much of the same peaky territory as The Fat Man.
Ailsa, fourteen, observant and curious, lives in the Woburn hostel for young women where her mother is matron. Ailsa becomes emotionally involved with a spiky young man, maimed by polio. At the same time, she is pulled into the troubling matter of her roommate Gloria’s stalker, a faceless but palpable presence. The social claustrophobia of the 1950s and its effect on both individuals and relationships is powerfully evoked, and the agony of helpless sexual deviancy is explored with compassion.
The Golden Day by Ursula Dubosarsky.
We are in Sydney in the 1960s at a small private girls' school.
Cubby and her friend Icara are both fascinated and repelled by their charismatic and faintly alarming teacher, Miss Renshaw. One school morning, after informing the class that a man is to be hanged that very day in Melbourne, Miss Renshaw leads an expedition to the local public gardens where, she insists, they will all think about death. Later, Miss Renshaw’s ‘friend’ the poet-gardener leads the class and teacher in an exploration of nearby caves. The children return to school without Miss Renshaw and she is never seen again.
The subsequent story — in which the class are probed and beseeched by school authorities to explain, and in response impose a collective silence — brilliantly limns the oddities of childhood perception and the gap between adult and child experiences of human behaviour. Creepy, compulsive, and haunting.
The Red Shoe by Ursula Dubosarsky.
Dubosarsky’s recurring subject is the fall from innocence into an apprehension of adult instability. The Red Shoe begins her sequence of ‘colour’ novels (including The Golden Day & The Blue Cat) and is a quietly disturbing narrative of family silence and its effects.
The story is told from the perspective of Matilda, who is six years old and sees everything. Elizabeth, her older sister, refuses to go to school but sits at home instead, watching their mother. Her middle sister, Frances, is silent and ‘grey like a koala’. Meanwhile, Uncle Paul cavorts at their house while their father is away on his ship, looking through his binoculars for the enemy. Another brilliant story of stifled emotion and deep unease – but also unexpectedly funny.
The White Darkness by Geraldine McCaughrean.
Sym is in love with ‘Titus’ Oates, Antarctic explorer and self-sacrificing hero — she knows him in her bones and hears him in her head. But Titus has been dead for nearly a hundred years. Then Sym’s dangerously charming Uncle Victor offers her a trip to Antarctica, a journey into the heart of Titus’s last days. But Uncle Victor is not what he seems — and neither is Titus.
Both a tour de force adventure and an eerie portrait of obsession.
Silent to the Bone by EL Konigsburg.
Connor's baby sister is in a coma. His friend Branwell is accused of hurting Nikki and incarcerated in a juvenile detention centre. Connor feels quite certain that Branwell is innocent, but Branwell has taken refuge in selective silence; but Connor can hear him screaming on the inside and resolves to help his friend. Konigsburg excels at psychological portraits, at the pain of family expectations and suppressions, and the saving grace of quiet, determined friendship.
The Other Side of Silence by Margaret Mahy.
This is my favourite of all Mahy’s splendid novels.
Hero is also selectively silent. She lives in a noisy family but spends her days climbing trees around ‘Squintum’s house’ — the fairy tale name she gives to the property where odd Miss Creedence lives. Hero is living her true (invented) life when she does this — a quite different thing to the real life she lives with her family.
Real life is what you are supposed to watch out for, but an invented life, lived truly, can be just as dangerous.
Once Hero accepts a job offer from Miss Creedence, great danger is loosed. Margaret Mahy’s novels riff again and again on the twin powers of parenting and creativity — the thrill, hubris, responsibilities and betrayals of both undertakings. In The Other Side of Silence, she uses the coordinates of a lesser-known Grimm fairy tale, ‘Jorinde and Joringel’, to explore the sometimes-dangerous enchantments of intellectual brilliance, story-making, and fame.
Order or borrow books
The Fat Man is still in print. You can order it at your local bookshop or borrow from your nearest library.
And don't forget that schools and home educators can borrow from National Library's school lending service.
About my blog
I hope this blog might embody the ‘inspiring’ aspect of the Te Awhi Rito role. I mean to read energetically. I’ll write about that reading here and also offer thoughts on reading’s place across the evolving ages and stages of our lives. I’d like this to be a resource, an encouragement and sometimes a provocation.