Maurice Gee's last novel, Plumb, was the story of a New Zealand Presbyterian minister who preached pacifism and socialism, left the church, and was sent to prison for sedition. The narrator of Meg is his daughter, a woman in her early fifties. In using her as a mouthpiece Gee has set himself an even trickier task than that of speaking through her obsessed and unforgiving father, but there are no lapses of style or tone: the narrative voice is consistently convincing. Meg is the youngest of George Plu...
[Sole Survivor] is the final novel in a New Zealand trilogy which began with Plumb, the story of a fierce and egotistical nonconformist minister turned heretic, socialist and pacifist. The second book, Meg, took the family saga forward into the 1960s using the gentler, more tentative voice of George Plumb's favourite daughter. The eponymous narrator of Sole Survivor is her son Raymond Sole…. We watch his progress from boyhood through a shy adolescence haunted by unpredictable erections …...
Very little happens without deliberation in Maurice Gee's … [Games of Choice]: it comes as no surprise to discover that the "games" of its title are not fun—but more to do with the thwartings and false starts of the hero's life, and his careful consideration of the consequences. Kingsley Pratt, whose generally gloomy voice grips the narrative, is a provincial New Zealand bookseller, who, having married above his station, finds himself the owner of a luxurious house ...
The equipment required for proper appreciation of "Sole Survivor" includes a familiarity with New Zealand politics since 1950 and a taste for the sordid…. Its perversity lies partly in the name given to the narrator—Raymond Sole, inevitably shortened to R. Sole by his detractors. This crude device encourages the reader to search (vainly) for double entendres in the other names and suggests an allegorical quality the book does not possess.
[Plumb] is narrated in the first person and tells the story of George Plumb, lawyer, parson and ex-parson who places conscience before career and suffers an unhappy life. Gee discloses that much of the early life of Plumb and his wife is based on the lives of his grandparents. Father of twelve, Plumb in old age recalls his long life in a series of flashbacks, which unfortunately interrupt the continuity of his story and do little to heighten the tale or hold the attention of the reader, partly because they ...
Maurice Gee's skill is confirmed in Meg, whose story of a family with more than its fair share of misfits, lechers and drunks would be the stuff of soap operas in the hands of a lesser writer. Gee, however, creates a sense of time and place that is beautiful and moving. Meg, who tells the story is, in the eyes of her family, a prig. Sentimental, censorious, goody-goody; she's their conscience, a born survivor, hard to forgive. (pp. 98-9)
Outstanding on its own, this story [Sole Survivor] is considerably enriched by the past explored in previous Plumb books. Characters with this much history and development gather their own momentum, creating, as they do so, a picture of the Human Race as circuit not progression. In this trilogy, Gee spans almost a century of New Zealand's history and touches on many a universal truth. Sole, as the title implies, is essentially a survivor, and the book, the Plumb story, ends on an optimistic if poigna...
Meg, Part Two in the stifling saga of a family called Plumb, is the everyday tale of profoundly dull New Zealand folk…. It isn't Mr Gee's fault that he has no ear for dialogue, but he could at least resist the appalling name-dropping syndrome…. He writes from the mind of his heroine, the earnest Meg, and there he lodges with acute lack of conviction. In desperation he attempts that so-called women novelists' forte, the noticing of the small detail. These details, in his ha...
Sole Survivor is the third volume in Maurice Gee's New Zealand saga of the Plumb family. The rise and fall of Duggie Plumb, an ambitious politician, is charted in tones of limpid irony by his cousin, the journalist Raymond Sole, known more familiarly as Raymond or R. Sole. Duggie's wily ruthlessness may originate in childhood trauma (hysterical mother, philandering father), but the point is not laboured; Gee, notwithstanding the raw pun of the title, is a writer of great subtlety…. [Gee...
Mr Gee is a solemnly earnest writer, but Plumb carries conviction as an honest chronicle of the life and times of a New Maurice (Gough) Gee 1931– Courtesy of Maurice GeeZealand family through two generations; many of the facts have been taken from the writings of the author's grandparents. On the last page, his cherished ear-trumpet shattered by the homosexual son with whom he has made an unsuccessful attempt to be reconciled, ...
