Plumb

Maurice Gee, Faber and Faber, Hardback: $13.35, Paperback: not available

Plumb is the story of a man deeply rooted in his faith in God. A man who strives, in gentleness and sternness, to do good by people, yet who arguably does them no good at all. A man who, above all, would know God, and whose final peace comes when he understands, far far too late, that he has done wrong.

Born an Anglican, George Plumb converts to Presbytenanism at the time of his marriage. It is his first step in a search for truth unbridled by doctrine and superfluity. He becomes a Minister, starting out on the rugged West Coast and later taking up residence in small towns in the Canterbury area.

Plumb finds he has a natural dislike of orthodoxy, and the Presbytery doesn't help. It may have been a sterner calling in 1893 than was Anglicanism but it suffered no lack of either dogma or deepset resistance to change. So Plumb develops a passion for Rationalism, leading his religious colleagues and members of the clergy to develop a passion of their own for running him out of the Church. Backed by the "Statement of Faith" they are full of righteous indignation while Plumb has for ethical support his own belief that rationalism was once the hallmark of Protestantism and that just men will listen to what is true. Both these views of his also lend themselves to righteousness. The Reverend is "tried" for heresy and becomes a Reverend no more.

With twelve children to support he turns to full-time lecturing and preaching on the "will of our Mother/Father God". The outbreak of the 1914-1918 war provides him with ample material for his subject "the anti-social spirit of Modern Capitalism, Militarism and Imperialism". A friend builds him a Uniterian Hall, he tours, and for two years when the war drive hounds him away, he seeks tolerance in California. Tolerance he finds (for a short while) and also richness, noisiness and ignorant bigotry. So home the family sails.

Back in New Zealand it is not long before his pacifist preachings lands him in Court for sedition, and from there he is removed to Lyttleton gaol. "Russia wanted war, England wanted war, the upper class in New Zealand wanted war. Never has there been such a wonderful five days as the five days of the Russian Revolution..." Preaching against war loans is bad enough, but Bolshevism the bourgeosie will not stand.

Yet Plumb was not a socialist. His faith in the ideal of the golden age and his ignorance of the working class are enough on their own to preclude this. (Ideals also lead him in an unspecified way towards eugenics: the selective breeding of the human race).

Plumb leaves prison with hearing and hair gone, a wasted body, an old man. The family shifts north to the sun, the warmth, the quiet country-town of Henderson, there to set up home under the name of "Peace haven". The remaining children grow up and leave and Plumb's wife Edie dies. Plumb writes books he must publish himself, muses on his family and his life, while his idealism develops into mysticism. He receives a few shocks, some small pleasures and a great number of small disappointments.

Maurice Gee has written this book in the first person, in the form of a chronological reminiscence of Plumb's life interwoven with chapters on a [unclear: equence] of events near the old man's [unclear: dean]. In this way he has managed to [unclear: weav] a complex and subtle fabric around his themes (love, God, justice, humanity, knowledge...), displaying in delicate intimacy the workings of a mind wedded to the truth yet unable to grasp the world before it.

For Plumb is ignorant. Certainly his life is an inspired search for knowledge, an endless series of questions and glimmering revelations that lead him on towards the great and glorious understanding of the meaning of God on earth. He never comes so close to his truth that he has to turn away from it (as both religion and mysticism suggest should be the case), but is nevertheless conscious of every step, of every set of scales that fall from his eyes.

The fly leaf of the book calls him a saint, while his neighbours provide a light satire on this idea by following "Plumbism" (the successor to Christian Science, anthropomorphism and a host of other cults). Yet however inspired, Plumb is a failure. Endless pronouncements on the failings and graces of his wife and family are undercut by the all too apparent fact that he doesn't know them and he doesn't give them a chance to know him. Twelve children in seventeen years and Plumb's spartan comment is: "After that there were no more babies. Edie was not strong enough... And if at the end of her child-bearing she was bone tired and aged beyond her years... she would have said it was no more than proper."

His fervent desire to serve God through service to humanity blinds him to his story's bitter irony: he cannot accept and therefore does not understand his fellow men and women. This mixing of concern for what could be and ignorance of what is can only have one result: he hurts those around him, frequently for life.

Gee's exposure of this is not direct, he never preaches as Plumb is want to do. However he does display one shortcoming typical of many of the characters in this and his other works. Plumb himself is aware of it and not slow to either criticise or seek it out in his companions. This failing is a kind of narrowness of mind, the propensity to fix one's vision on one thing and remain unaware of the nature and importance of its context. In Plumb it is most apparent in the book's sense of history. The First World War, the Russian Revolution, the depression and the Second World War all receive attention of an intimate kind. Politicians (Sample, Savage, even Holyoake) are observed by Plumb with deliberate disrespectful familiarity. In one episode he even demolishes Nash from the floor of a meeting hall and raises a cry of anger against the Labour Party from the depression hungry crowd. But this familiar tone is without real analysis. There is little sense of people as the force of history and being acted on by history. Plumb himself seems curiously to exist outside the course of events.

He admits that his idealism takes precedence over a rational view of things, and in part the fault is inherent in the first-person style of writing. Yet this isn't the whole answer. Gee deliberately speeds up the chronology during the times of historical importance, thus avoiding the opportunity to place his protagonist squarely in his social setting. Because of this the book lacks the epic quality quality some critics have claimed for it.

This limitation aside. Gee exhibits a fine sense of timing and ability to move his story along. The judicious command of language, a trait common to New Zealand writers, is raised to new standards of excellence.

To think about his protagonist, George Plumb, is to dislike him more and more. Yet the man is not evil and there is much in him one can feel compassion for. Gee's skill reveals itself again and again in the rhythm of the storytelling, but above all in his ability to write with a sympathy that does not blind one to his subject's faults, to write of a man ever moving towards his pinnacle in .a way that renders his life and work a quiet tragedy.

Simon Wilson