In conversation with Geoff Walker, Gee talks about his childhood and the huge influence of his grandparents and mother on his writing. He recalls his mother warming her feet in the fire while writing stories, some of which went on to be published in the magazines ‘Mirror’ and ‘Women Today’. Her proudest but final literary achievement was having a story selected by Frank Sargeson for publication in an anthology, and Gee believes she could have continued to become a well-known New Zealand author, if life hadn’t got in the way.

Although he’s never been interested in writing an autobiography in the past, Gee admits he is now working on a memoir. His first reading is from this and recalls his early introduction to literature by an elderly friend, Ben Hart. As a young boy, Gee was fascinated by the characters and adventures created by Zane Grey and says he must have read over 40 of his Old West novels. However, as he describes in his reading, he slowly fell in love with Dickens –it took a page to or two to get into.

Walker points out that many of Gee’s novels are in the style of an older person looking back on their life – Plumb of course being the great example of this. It’s well known that the character of George Plumb is heavily based on Gee’s own Grandfather, though he says the first half of Plumb’s life is the same but the second half is fictionalised. Gee had great admiration for his Grandfather as he does for his character. He says that old people have “whole lives” to look back on while they still continue living in the present. He likes to put characters into a situation where something causes them to reflect on the past, while simultaneously having an ordeal to confront in the present. Gee was expecting a question on this and had charmingly prepared a written answer.

The other question he anticipated with written notes was about the sense of darkness in his writing: “People always ask about that.” Having authored over thirty novels for both adults and children, the sense of darkness has emerged again and again for Gee. He sites Browning’s poem “Childe Roland” as a starting point for this fascination, particularly the end where Childe Roland blows the horn from the top of the tower, leaving the reader to decide what is being summoned. Gee says he read this as calling up the darkness that exists within everyone and pictured Childe Roland doing battle with his own sinister self.

The second reading is from Maurice Gee’s own favourite novel, Prowlers (1987). He says of all his older characters, Noel Papps is the most likeable. He reads with vigour the passage after Kate Adams has left with her tape-recorder; Papps both disgusted and fascinated by her.

Historian Rachel Barrowman is currently working with Gee to write his biography. Gee says he’s enjoying this process and is adamant that nothing will be left out. This is intriguing for a man who so rarely appears in public and who until now we have had to piece together through his characters – Jack Skeat of Going West being the closest to an autobiography as we’ve seen. He even requested no audience questions for this event, and admitted to being nervous in public.

But Gee is content and feels a sense of completion. He says that although he maintains a capacity for invention, he feels in his fiction he is now just inventing the same old things over and over and that it’s perhaps imagination that’s lacking. He accepts that Access Road, published in 2009 is his last novel and says “I look back on 30 or so novels and think “that’s ok”.”

Set in the time of the Cuban missile crisis, poetry and politics are vying for power. Kit Malone attends college in the midwest with missile silos nearby and exiled Russian poet, Falin as her teacher. The novel follows the development of their relationship through Kit’s translations of his poetry and their growing love for each other.

The politics of the time is conveyed through the secrecy of the government – the mysterious Milton Bluhdorn asking questions about Falin’s whereabouts – the radical student groups that form and the tragic reality of Kit’s brother joining the armed forces. Falin tells Kit about his childhood in Russia as an orphan and when she lends him Through the Looking Glass, he seems to relate to Alice’s surreal journey from childhood and being in a world of opposites:

When I read I believed I discovered a flaw in it: would it not be impossible for Alice to pass through the mirror? She would I thought only kiss herself there: face to face, hand to hand, breast to breast. How to pass through? Then I saw, no, this is supreme genius of the book: that if Alice passes through her mirror, then Alice from the other side must also pass through; and while we read interesting adventures of Alice in her mirror, at the same time there is another story not told, the adventures of mirror-Alice here, where she does not belong, strange world where clocks run only one way and you cannont tell red kings from white.

These two ‘selves’ of Falin are evident too, when he discusses with Kit the impossiblity of translating a poem. He insists that translations of his poetry are no longer his and a new poem has been born that could never capture the nuances of the original language (in Russian, Freedom, volya rhymes with Fate, dolya) Therefore, when he asks Kit to translate his Russian poems into English, she soon realises that it’s not a way of preserving his poems but a way for her to create her own work and let go of what she sees as the dangers of writing.

more Tuesday Poems here

The lure of Lucifer’s coal convolutes
flickers with foolish expectation.

A beguiling blaze, delusive delight
wayfarers wander beyond the well-trod

seduced like sailors sung into wrecks.

more Tuesday Poems here

more Tuesday Poems here

It’s charming to think of the young Orwell knowing he would grow up to be a writer and spending lonely days making up stories and imagining conversations. Although he can’t quite seem to put his finger on the cause of his compulsion to write as child, he does say “Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.”

He mentions a love of words, which perhaps one must have to be able to work with them, but then in a very Orwellian way, sets out the four great motives that he believes every writer has to some degree:

1. Sheer egoism.

2. Aesthetic enthusiasm.

3.Historical impulse.

4. Political purpose.

No prizes for guessing which was Orwell’s greatest motivation. He elaborates on each of these with reasonable conviction.

The first is about having a desire to prove one’s cleverness and be known and remembered. A desire to live beyond your years, “to get your own back on grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc. etc.”

The second motivation is my favourite. Orwell explains aesthetic enthusiasm as taking pleasure in “the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed.” I feel like this should be a strong motivation to write – especially perhaps poetry – but Orwell says “The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or a writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons.” !

The historical impulse is about collecting facts, finding out the truth and storing them for posterity. Political purpose, Orwell suggests, is the desire to “push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.” Orwell of course was starting to do this already, and went on to have a huge impact on the way people thought about society, manipulation and control with Nineteen Eighty-four. He was clearly thinking a great deal about these concepts in this essay: “I have not written a novel for seven years, but I hope to write another fairly soon. It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write.”

Orwell ends his essay somewhat harshly:

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.

I have always believed
we should enhance
the literary skills of our young people

and while our literary heroes
may never challenge the glory
and respect given to our

All Blacks,
we still need role models
to inspire us.

From The Listener

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The novel begins dramatically with terrorists swarming an international gathering, looking for the president of the small Latin American country. But it turns out he stayed home from the party to watch his favourite soap opera and, with no plan B, the terrorists let all but one of the women leave and keep the rest of the group hostage while they figure out what to do. The exception is the famous opera singer Roxane Cox, who proves to be a valuable bargaining tool.

The operatic theme is clever, tying Roxane’s morning singing routine into the relationships that form within the captive group. Convincingly, we lose track of time after a while and the characters quickly lose any desire to escape, accepting the house they originally entered for a birthday party as their new home.

It would be tempting with such a confined setting (both time and space are restricted here) to go into long detailed descriptions of the characters’ lives, as a way to broaden the scope and escape the four walls. But this is never indulged and we begin to care about the characters knowing little about them other than their thoughts and feelings in the immediate situation. Patchett has an amazing skill in using perspective, whereby she effortlessly shifts from one character to another at times within the same paragraph, as if gliding freely among their thoughts.

As in opera so too does this novel end tragically. However, like the captors we have become so swept up in the new life they have created, the inevitable ending comes as quite a shock.

The other thing I particularly loved about this book was the importance of the polyglot, Gen. As this is an international gathering, he becomes invaluable translating firstly the demands of the terrorists, but increasingly as a tool for characters to confess their feelings for each other; declaring love from Russian into English and Japanese to Spanish. But he’s not always required and as Roxane knows, language is not the only way to express oneself.