Novel
Plumb
Maurice Gee · 1978
Synopsis
George Plumb, eighty years old, a severe Presbyterian minister sure of his principles, tells his life without following the order of time, from the 1890s to the 1940s. Having become a rationalist, he is tried for heresy by his Church; a pacifist, he is convicted during the Great War for seditious remarks. With his wife Edie, now dead, he had twelve children, and his convictions cost his family as dearly as himself: of his sons and daughters, several have drifted away.
Context
George Plumb is modelled on the author's maternal grandfather, James Chapple, a Presbyterian and later Unitarian minister, tried for heresy and then sentenced in 1918 to eleven months in prison for sedition; the novelist gave his character fourteen months and drew on the grandfather's newspapers and writings, but a note states that the domestic life and the children are largely imaginary. Faber published it in London in 1978, Oxford University Press in Auckland the following year. Two sequels appeared, Meg in 1981 and Sole Survivor in 1983.
Who it is for
Never translated into French. A single narrator, moving back and forth over half a century: it should be read with some distrust of what he says about himself.
Prizes and reception
James Tait Black 1978, fiction prize of the New Zealand Book Awards 1979; in 2018, fifty specialists voted it the country's best novel of the half-century.
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