Maurice Gee: The Scornful Moon

Reviewed by DAVID LARSEN

Hi, I'll be your pilot today. I failed my flying licence, crashed the plane actually, but hey, I walked away in one piece.

Hi, I'm your surgeon. Med school? No, no, couldn't face the exams. But I've stopped drinking now, and I can't wait to get on with your bypass.

Or how about this one: Hi, I'm a failed novelist. I have an unpublishable manuscript in my bottom drawer that represents all my crushed hopes and dreams. I'm pretty bitter about it, but there you go, basically I can't write. Maurice Gee's chosen me to narrate his new novel.

Impersonating a bad writer has got to be one of the most difficult challenges a novelist can take on. The result ought to be either a quiet cop-out, or a disaster. Unless it should transpire that Sam Holloway, retired political journalist and Gee's would-be novelist, is not such a bad wordsmith after all, he ought to sink this book.

Instead Gee manages to have it both ways. Sam writes just like an ex-journalist, combining the short, punchy sentences of the newsroom with the over-ambitious imagery and self-conscious wordplay of someone who's spent decades resenting the subeditor's blue pencil.

His story, which he presents as a spare, disciplined telling of things that need to be told, keeps lurching into fascinating side alleys, at which point Sam pulls himself up short and refuses to tell you what happened next. "It isn't in my story, so I'll leave it."

The abilities Gee allows Sam don't at all match his literary ambitions, but they do let him emerge as a powerful character. High-minded, prudish, shying away from self-revelation in ways that reveal far more than he realises or desires, he ends up carrying this book on his shoulders despite himself. He's a masterful creation.

Sam, though, is only a minor character in the story he eventually manages to tell. The main figures are his two brothers-in-law, one an astronomer, the other a retired politician. "We're equal in ambition, unequal in the clamour we make and the light we shine" - a comment which tells you a great deal about Sam, and also gives you a hint as to the meaning of the book's title. Sam is one of a number of candidates for the role of the Scornful Moon, reflecting other people's light and resenting it.

We're in Wellington, it's 1935, and James, the politician, a severe, patrician type, has decided to throw his hat back into the ring for the upcoming general election. The general consensus among the family is that he doesn't have a prayer. His opponent for his party's nomination is younger, more energetic, almost certain to win, and even if James does win the nomination, he's sure to lose the election.

James' wife is visibly wilting at the prospect of the upcoming battle, and his daughter is being denied the chance of any life of her own. Can't Sam and Eric, the astronomer, talk James out of it?

Meanwhile Sam has gathered a group of aspiring writers to work on a collaborative novel, among them a pushy young man who possesses, Sam gloomily suspects, more talent than the rest of them together.

Murky events seem to link this young Turk with James' strange new employee ... and with Sam's nephew ... and with a shocking event that suddenly disqualifies James' rival for the nomination, leaving James as his party's only choice. Sam would much, much rather not know what's going on behind the scenes.

Mystery stories break down into three broad categories. Some give you the mystery up-front - who killed the archdeacon? - and let you try to solve it. Others hide the fact that there's a mystery at all, and then spring the fact of it on you at the same time as giving you the solution, so that you suddenly have to re-evaluate everything that's gone before.

Sam's story is the third kind, in which it's clear that there's a mystery at the heart of things, and that everything turns on it, but not at all clear what the mystery is. Keeping readers interested in a story which, as presented, doesn't quite make sense is a major challenge.

Gee meets this challenge in a number of ways, quietly burying puzzles in the narrative for us to worry at as we go along - such as the various possible meanings of the title and making sure that each scene is interesting in its own right, whatever its relevance to the slowly progressing mystery plot, and despite Sam's insistence on killing off promising subplots as they emerge. But the most audacious of the techniques holding this book together is Sam himself.

In other words, Gee's response to the difficulty of telling a story which doesn't make sense until its final pages is to hold our attention with a narrator who doesn't know how to tell a story. This is like crossing Niagara Falls on a tightrope on a windy day, and deciding to give yourself additional stability by balancing a car on your head. It shouldn't work. But as Gee hops down on the far side, there's no hint that he's even breathing hard.

Penguin, $34.95