The World Around The Corner by Maurice Gee

That, for me, is how literary criticism should work. In The World Around the Corner (1980), Caroline discovers some magical glasses that enable her to see the world with enhanced clarity, and reveal things that are usually invisible. Sight and insight have always been important metaphors for Gee. Two essays bring the edge of sharper insight. But, in a looser sense, the essays here are companionable enough, being enthusiastic in tone, extensive in coverage, accessible in the writing, and mostly free from academic pretension (apart from some pious genuflections, when big names like Bakhtin or Bloom get their toes kissed to give authority to notions that are perfectly simple). I suppose those phrases look less than seductive in a 2015 bookshop. It’s what used to be called “a collection of critical essays” and, before that, “essays by several hands”. Its first subtitle, A Literary Companion, is a bit misleading, since it’s not a “companion” in the accepted sense, of being a combined reference work and literary commentary in alphabetical format. This volume makes a pretty good start, with some useful if undemanding summaries of plot, character and moral theme, no serious weaknesses, and two outstanding contributions to appreciating Gee. The overall aim, announced here in a joint note by Hale and Jones, is to “discuss all of Gee’s published fiction, from ‘The Widow’ in 1955 to The Limping Man in 2010” and to “present all of Gee’s fictional worlds, from twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century New Zealand to the post-apocalyptic work of the Salt trilogy.”

The treatment of Gee’s adult fiction, by Lawrence Jones, will follow. It is part one of a planned two-volume series. This one is a collection of eight essays by six writers, with editor Elizabeth Hale providing three. So a book of serious critical commentary on the work for young readers is to be welcomed. Mostly it’s because Gee’s later books for young readers make apparent that he writes them with the same meticulous care as his work for adults, with the same moral concerns, and using many of the same finely-honed techniques of melding narrative and setting with metaphor.

That’s partly because Gee has doubled his young readers output since then, partly because attitudes to children’s literature in general have matured. Any assessment of Gee today has to describe the complete oeuvre, and give his work for young readers more space and centrality than, for instance, Nelson Wattie and I gave it in the mid-1990s in the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature. It was a success in print and on TV, but for some years it was possible to regard it, and his subsequent work for young readers, as a sideline, a paying Saturday morning job that freed him for the serious adult writing. Maurice Gee published Under the Mountain in 1979. Maurice Gee: A Literary Companion: Fiction for Young Readers

The World Around The Corner by Maurice Gee