The World Around The Corner by Maurice Gee

Hearing it was to be his last novel felt like bereavement: sadness tinged with the tiniest flutter of relief that the itching and scratching might be over. Gee wrote on through the decades, gifting us Going West, Crime Story, Ellie and the Shadow Man, Blindsight and finally, in 2009, Access Road. For taciturn old curmudgeons, they remain remarkably alive and living, terrifying in good and bad ways. During each of the multiple readings, those old men and their families have revealed something new about the human condition. George Plumb and Noel Papps are so familiar to me, they might as well be my own sulking great-uncles, festering in a dusty corner of a lounge, pretending not to listen. It was a blissful act of fandom.ĭuring the past three years I’ve read all the novels at least once four of them six times.

Then I filled that shelf with every one of his 17 adult novels. I cleared a shelf on my bookcase and pretended for a while that that writer wouldn’t be Gee. I planned to explore the ways in which a New Zealand writer had manipulated the act of eavesdropping in unexpected ways. Twenty-five years later, I began a doctorate in creative writing. The more I came to appreciate the brilliance of Gee’s complex crafting and plotting, his unflinching honesty, the less I cared for other fiction. I loved how they scraped compulsively, relentlessly at the veneer of New Zealand’s moral high-ground. But for all the reasons I feared those masterpieces, I adored them. I didn’t like the way the characters burrowed like tapeworm in my gut. I was frightened of the potency of Gee’s stories of what they knew of watching, listening men and their motivations. Not the me I was then, but the me I would become: a hopeful novelist.

Those novels – The Plumb Trilogy, Prowlers, The Burning Boy – were like a drug, or perhaps a foul-tasting tonic that I knew was good for me. I tried hopelessly to forget what I’d read, but Gee kept luring me back to his pseudo-fictional worlds. Miles away from New Zealand, I understood that the truth of my home – its scarred, damaged underbelly – was mapped out on these pages for anyone to discover. Paul Prior and his repressed, violent kin abruptly cured my yearning, but the book did more than that. The book’s provenance brought on a rush of homesickness I borrowed it and read it. It was a hardcover, as I recall, and Celia Inverarity bore a Mona Lisa-esque countenance, as if she knew she’d be dead by the end of paragraph one. Passing through a flat in London, I found a first edition copy of his third novel, In My Father’s Den, on a bookshelf. I first dipped my toes into the murky eddies (there we go, creek reference out of the way) of Maurice Gee’s fiction in 1987.

The World Around The Corner by Maurice Gee