Interpellating Maurice Gee.

Smith, Anna

Review of Maurice Gee A Literary Companion: The Fiction for Younger Readers, edited by Elizabeth Hale (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2014).

A lot of things are going on in the new collection of essays on Maurice Gee's writing for children. This busy-ness gives A Literary Companion a stimulating and at times provocative voice, but it also makes for a bumpy reading experience. The introduction indicates that the contributors will talk across and to each other, one of the potentially interesting and valuable modes of discussion in the book as it offers a sense of the praxis of evolving literary criticism about a major New Zealand writer who produces work for both adults and children. Here is the opportunity to strike out into new territory, to provide a groundbreaking journey across one of the few author-specific surveys of local children's literature. Although other critical essays have been published elsewhere on Gee's writing for children, Hale's is the first to assemble a number and to reflect collaboratively and in foundational ways on the oeuvre.

The fact that Gee has frequently represented his writing for children as 'open cast' mining as opposed to the deeper excavations of his adult writing is revisited a number of times by contributors, each of whom find it a less than satisfactory trope. Yet the danger is of this common thread becoming repetitive simply through restatement, obscuring other distinctive ways of seeing what each essay may offer. Despite the editor's best intentions, because the cross-chapter conversations fail to coalesce analytically, they equally obscure the other crucial task of the collection, which is presumably to showcase the most insightful, individual critical writing on Gee as a children's author.

The book opens with a chapter by Claudia Marquis on Gee's early fantasy novels, from Under the Mountain through to the trilogy' of 0 books. Of all the essayists, Marquis is the most ambitious theoretically. Her contribution turns the body of academic criticism on fantasy including key works by Derek Brewer, Colin Manlove and Farah Mendlesohn, Todorov and Tolkien into a companion which allows her to make connections between international conversations about imaginative literature and the darker side of Gee's fantasies for children. I would recommend this to higher undergraduate and Honours students. It is sophisticated, tightly argued and shows clearly how the fantasy genre for children does not need to be superficial. And how Gee's narratives distinguish themselves from standard genre expectations through representing a distinctly Kiwi register and culture within which maturation occurs.

Diane Hebley's essay on Gee's quintet of realist novels for children published between 1986 and 1999 is at its strongest when it picks out the ironic reversals of speech and behaviour between adults and children (p. 65) to be found throughout. She is alert to the feeling for local historical and moral discourses Gee provides as a background for each of these texts set during World War 1 (The Fire-Raiser), World War II (The Champion), Henderson at the time of the Waterfront dispute, and the 1970s (Orchard Street and The Fat Man respectively), that provide a colour and emotional depth not so readily found in the early fantasies.

Chapter Three belongs to Elizabeth Hale. Here she explores Gee's later trilogy of futuristic novels for young adults (Salt, Gool and The Limping Man) and asks to what extent good can prevail in a predominantly evil environment. Survival, she argues, depends on 'fighting back' (p. 93) and entails a more complex kind of heroics and moral patterning. I was intrigued to see Hale's ambivalent reference to Roberta Trites. Known for her contribution to critical readings of adolescents in youth literature, Trites's position is essentially Foucauldian with some important qualifications over subjectivity. Hale points out that Trites's model for coming of age does not entirely work with Gee (p. 94), whose characters might grow up but remain relatively independent, frequently isolated physically (in the fantasies) or intellectually (in the realist novels). She stresses that disintegration must precede a new, optimistic order. This perspective seems to take on a model of history closer to Hegel than to Foucault. If this is the case, I would have liked to see the debt acknowledged and its implications teased out more explicitly.

The fourth chapter investigates connections between Maurice Gee and the writer's mother, Lyndhal Chappie Gee. I found this essay the most provocative of the seven. Taking the sphere of influence model explored by critics like Harold Bloom, Katherine Walls asks how agonistic was the mother/son pairing (p. 117) and finds some intriguing parallels and reversals between their story-telling. For example, the scenario of author destroying source receives a shake-up when Walls shows the still-live voice of the source in the 'sole' author. She suggests that insufficient attention has been paid to the maternal relationship and summons evidence from Lyndahl's little-known published work. As Walls implies, 'Double Unit' might be read as exemplary of a writer learning to find her voice. For whatever reason, however, Lyndahl doesn't advance beyond the world of static binaries. I could nudge Walls's position here and suggest that while mother and son both mapped out essential archetypes in their work, it was Maurice who brought binaries into conversation and added a necessary third, turning archetypal building-blocks into an 'original' story. This chapter for me was at its most convincing when it moved away from trying to find connections between echoes of the mother's voice in the son's and instead addressed the way Gee's novel Meg ventriloquises the making of a writer who is also a mother.

Louise Clark mixes her genres in Chapter Five, writing on Gee's early fantasy for readers under ten (The World Around the Corner) and his most recent realist novel for young adults, Hostel Girl (1999). Vision and voyeurism map two very different novels and while there are some perceptive observations and a helpful cultural history of Wellington in the 1950s, Clark does not develop the figure of looking. For instance, the transition between the inner eye of the imagination and the outer one of the magic glasses in The World Around the Corner could have been measured against the adult inner eye looking wrong in Hostel Girl. Psychoanalysis need not be invoked in order to suggest crucial structural differences in ways of seeing that may be represented in (Gee's) fiction for children and young adults, respectively.

Careful sifting of detail is the strength of Chapter Six. Vivien van Rij follows the changing patterns of power between adults and children in two couples: Jack and Rex in The Champion and Colin and Herbert Muskie in The Fat Man. Unlike Hale, whose approach to the representation of historical struggle may serve a kind of Hegelianism, van Rij advocates a Jungian reading of integration and archetypes. The child protagonists eventually learn to free their adult others from unmodified evil or ideal hero, finding 'wholeness' in the process. In this case, Jungian glasses add to the conversation in other chapters, going particularly well with Walls's reading.

And, as Hale concludes in the seventh and final chapter, if young adult literature lends itself more readily to conveying darker truths, throughout his fiction for children Gee worked consistently at containing 'the truth within a safe structure' (p. 179). His most frightening character of all, Herbert Muskie, 'nearly dragged them under but not quite'. (1) This chapter discusses Under the Mountain and The Fat Man from the perspective of readers: adults as critics and parents, and younger readers claiming fiction marked as theirs. It details the controversies at the time of publication over both texts and cites the example of the Australian Sonya Hartnett's young adult Sleeping Dogs, but omits a more telling example of Ted Dawe's challenging novel Into the River, which won the New Zealand Post Children's Book Award in 2013 and led to a subsequent modification of award categories for young readers in New Zealand.

This first volume of A Uterary Companion (a second is to follow on the adult fiction) is an excellent conversation opener in critical reflection, whether at secondary or tertiary level, on Maurice Gee's fiction for children and young adults. It begs almost as many questions as it answers but that ought to be taken as a healthy sign. Simultaneously editing and contributing to a volume carries its risks, though, and Hale could have extended the field of her contributors in order to further diversify the offerings published here. She notes the volume's task as a 'critical guide to ways of seeing the literary worlds represented in [Gee's] works for young readers' (p. 11), announced through Gar)' Hebley's illustration on the front cover--the fantastic world on the point of jumping out from everyday Nelson when a young girl puts on a pair of magic glasses. Perception and ways of seeing could have been used more consciously throughout the collection as a unifying trope--a companion or a 'come-with' that links one place, one age, one mode with another. Because the collection lacks both numerical strength in terms of contributors and a strategic consistency, a sense of imbalance between the critical reach of the individual contributions has been addressed, but with limited success.

More generally, I wonder if any editor wishing to contribute a range of voices to the discourse of children's literary criticism in New Zealand faces a similar challenge. Perhaps the dilemma expressed in Meg's difficulty in 'writing her way past' (p. 114) the forest of capitals--sentiment and archetype--is emblematic of these difficulties. In a similar vein, A. S. Byatt's The Children's Book (2009) represents the passage from childhood to adulthood as the transformation of the childish world of fairies and fantasy into fragile Virtues and Vices that survive, but only just, during the disillusion of trench warfare in Europe. Capitals remain as necessary shadows flickering against the walls of any text, just as local critical writing about fiction for New Zealand children needs to be reminded of what Lyotard names master-narratives. There is still too little critical writing on children's literature here and it remains for the most part constrained by regional boundaries. Appropriating hierarchical academic discourse on writing for children--negotiating a path through the 'capitals'--requires a particular insertion into the conversation about literatures in New Zealand that might steadily work at the process of reconfiguring an international discourse into the local. Elizabeth Hale's Companion is a fine beginning in this process, a text which other voices will surely revisit, challenge and modify.

Notes

(1) Maurice Gee, The Tat Man [1994] (Auckland: Penguin, 2008), p. 119.