Blind Sight and Access Road by Maurice Gee

The more of Maurice Gee’s novels I read, the more I enjoy them.

These two are from his more recent works, and they demonstrate a much more mature, polished writing style than his very early work, for example, The Big Season.

It’s a bit like comparing the music that Mozart wrote when he was a child, with his later masterpieces.

One thing that I really notice about Gee is the recurring common themes in the plots of some of his novels. For example, in both Access Road and Blind Sight, the story is told in the first person, by a mature woman, and the story mainly focuses on her brother, and explores her relationship with him, with many flashbacks to their shared childhood.

There are also other common themes. In both stories, there is a murder: in both cases the brother has a deep, dark secret, that involves the murder, and in both cases the implication is made that this drives him a little crazy.

In both stories the family grew up in the fictional West Auckland town of Loomis, not far from the Great North Road. Loomis also features in some of Gee’s other works, for example in the Plumb Trilogy, and is based on the Henderson of Gee’s childhood.

The creek that runs through Loomis figures heavily in many of Gee’s novels, and it appears here again in both of these. There are the usual childhood scenes of paddling home-made canoes in the creek, and mention of eels hiding in the creek’s dark waters.

To me, the creek symbolizes a lot more than just a creek. There is often mention of deep, dark places, under the water, of hidden secrets, in some cases terrible secrets. This comes to the fore in Access Road, near the end of the book, when Lionel’s deep dark secret is revealed. It involves something nasty from the past, hidden in the creek for all those years, and hidden in the deep dark places of Lionel’s mind also, nagging away at him, relentlessly, until it literally drives him sick.

I was reminded of a variation on the deep dark secret of Loomis Creek from one of Gee’s earlier novels, “Sole Survivor”, where one of the main characters witnesses a suicide in the creek, and keeps quiet about it for many years. Powerful, spine-chilling stuff. Cold water, slimy stuff in the water, opaque, dark water, hiding horrible yukky secrets from the past.

Gee is a master at exploring relationships between family members, and in both these stories he demonstrates this skill impeccably.

In both novels, there is also the influence of the parents, which has a major effect on the main characters, but (just like in many of his other masterpieces, eg. In My Father’s Den), this influence of the parents is skillfully woven, and not over-done. This is in contrast to his earlier work, for example, in The Big Season, the father looms incredibly large, in a very unsubtle manner.

In fact, in The Big Season, it is the domination of the main character, Rob, by his father, and older brother, and Rob’s struggles to break free from this, which is the main theme of the story.

In both Access Road and Blind Sight, the influence of the parents is stated much more lightly, more by implication. However, it is still a major factor, and Gee never lets us forget this, especially in Blind Sight, where he opens the novel with the line “Father taught us how not to love”, and for good measure, he ends the novel with the same identical line.

As always with Gee, the characters are extremely well-drawn, especially in cases where the author is deliberately drawing out an emotional reaction from the reader, like when he describes the reappearance of the childhood bully, Clyde Buckley, in Access Road. His description of Clyde, right down to the blackheads and flakes of dry skin, certainly achieved a reaction of disgust in this reader.

Despite their similarities, and their shared themes, the two stories are quite different in some respects. Among the similarities, in both cases, there is the mystery, the question of “Why? Why is the brother acting like this?” What was it that transformed the brother Gordon, of Blind Sight, into “Cyril”, the homeless recluse? Why is it that Lionel, the former dentist in Access Road becomes a bed-ridden hypochondriac? What is the deep, dark secret of each of these men, both of them obviously deeply affected by something in their past?

And, interwoven into each mystery story, Gee displays his usual characterization skills. The way he describes how Lionel just lies there, unmoving, unmovable, silent, unresponsive. And, the same with his description of Cyril, the homeless recluse, as he walks his daily route through the streets of Wellington.

I used to live in Wellington, about the same timespan that Blind Sight was set in, and I used to often see a few homeless men wandering the streets. I can vouch that Gee’s description of Cyril (both the original “Cyril”, and the later version) is absolutely accurate. I had a strong feeling that Gee must have spent hours intently watching one or more of these men, in real life, in order to get the degree of authenticity that his writing displays.

Both novels, eventually, reveal the secret: the deep dark happening from the past, that was a major contributor to what made each of these two brothers become what they now are.

In Blind Sight, the truth is quite startling, unexpected. Though, there is also the larger, brooding background issue of the influence of the parents, especially the father who “taught them how not to love”. This is also skillfully, and lightly, demonstrated by the main protagonist’s own life story: how Alice has had a number of men in her life, but none of them being all that satisfactory.

In contrast to this, the first-person story-teller in Access Road, Rowan, has been married to the same man for many years, but one gets the feeling that the marriage is a bit of a mis-match, the man being a real 100-percent “bloke”, a former rugby player who did not quite become an All-Black.

This theme is a repeat of a similar marriage in another of Gee’s novel’s, “Meg”, where Meg’s marriage to Fergus, the plumber, is also rather similar in some ways, almost a mis-match, but not quite.

Gee is just so good at describing these family relationships. It’s one of the things that make him such a genius, and almost certainly New Zealand’s greatest living novelist.

He is also a master at describing social relationships and issues, especially as they were in the New Zealand of his childhood and youth, ie. the 1930’s and 40’s. Both these novels are no exception, with plenty of meaty material of how it was back then.

For example, in Blind Sight, the father is a pharmacist, and the teenage Rowen works in the pharmacy. Gee skillfully works into the story an insight into pre-war New Zealand social attitudes and mores, for example with references to the gang of teenage boys hanging around outside the shop, teasing one of their number about going into the shop to buy his “Frenchies”.

There are other sly references to pre-war sexual social customs, when he works into the story-line about the pharmacy customer who regularly buys her “Wife’s Friend Pessaries”.

And, as in many of Gee’s novels, there is mention of how “progress” changes the landscape of NZ in the post-war years. This is alluded to in many of his novels, a good example being the new blocks of shops being built by commercial property developers on the Great North Road, and how (in Blind Sight), the chemist-shop father misses out on the opportunity of a lifetime when he runs foul of the developer, is locked out, and his business then slowly stagnates and dies in its old location, as his old customers gradually transfer their custom to the shiny new competitor up the road in the new shop.

One wonders what Gee makes of the late 20th century property development frenzy, and the rise of such enterprises as The Warehouse and Michael Hill?

It’s not that he passes judgement in an overt way at things like property development, and other similar 20th century industries. Gee has a skillful knack of, even from within the first-person perspective of the narrator-protagonist, of stating the bare facts of what happened and leaving it to the reader to decide. His most striking example from the property-development industry probably occurs in the Plumb Trilogy, when Fred Meggins gets his comeuppance, and Meg’s husband, Fergus, has been sucked into the get-rich-quick schemes.

Anyway, back to Blind Sight and Access Road. Both, as is usual with Gee, are replete with plenty of light-handed social commentary, skillfully using the relationships between the characters as the scenario for this.

However, with both of these novels, it is the possibility of the “deep, dark secret”, the “hidden monster from the past”, that dwells within the minds of the protagonist-narrator’s brother, that is the main focus.

As Gee skillfully narrates the story of each of these brothers, and develops the narrative of their unusual behavior, the reader is left wondering “Why? What is the deep, dark secret?”

The same theme comes up very strongly in one of his other novels, In My Father’s Den, where, once again, a brother of the protagonist-narrator (this time a man rather than a woman) is drawn into a difficult situation because of the inner demons of a brother (I refer here to the original book, not to the film adaptation, which has a totally different story-line, focussing more on the father than the brother).

So, there you have it. These novels have a bit of everything. Murder, complex family relationships, and social commentary from the times they were set in, especially from the childhood times of the characters: all skillfully woven together in a tapestry of a plot that keeps the reader guessing until the final chapter.

Highly recommended.