Being reviewed:
Going West
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Maurice Gee won over young New Zealand readers 40 years ago with his Halfmen of O trilogy (1982–85)—a Kiwi Narnia where the magical world lies on the other side of an abandoned gold mine. He had equal success with adult fiction: his 1978 Plumb denounced a strand of puritanism that had tainted the national culture. The prolific author of novels combining ambition with popular appeal, Gee was a staple of school reading lists and a perennial prizewinner. Yet when he died in June 2025, aged 93, he remained virtually unknown beyond his homeland.
Going West, a triumphant summation of his aesthetic and themes, ought to have changed that. The story of a friendship between two poets—one an aging failure, the other dead but renowned—this 1992 novel revels in the irony of writing from a position of self-conscious provincialism. Like many literary men of the mid-20th century, its heroes are motivated by the dream of inventing an aesthetic for a still-new country. Gee’s title highlights the tension between an imported tradition of peripatetic nation-making and the realities of life in a Pacific archipelago. New Zealand’s islands are narrow and oriented north-south. If American or Australian writers (Jack Kerouac or Patrick White, say) could send their characters on cross-continental voyages of poetic enlightenment—journeys in which “west” becomes the direction of authenticity, freedom, and self-discovery—Gee’s have nowhere to go. His protagonist, Jack Skeat, is left chasing the virile, creative, and elusive Rex Petley across a landscape more conceptual than geographic.
What might Going West mean in a country where that direction barely exists? Like many New Zealanders, Jack and Rex grow up conscious of foreign role models. Jack seems to have the potential, but despite a name that evokes John Keats, his poems are clunky and overwritten. “‘Good stuff, Jack,’” Rex humors him. “I like the way you colour it all up. And then, bang, the big generalization.’” Rex is instinctively the better writer, inventing a localized modernism rooted in material specificity. “Stone was stone for Rex and clay was clay.”
The friends’ poetry mirrors their attitudes to life. A university dropout who prefers fishing to fame and leaves his first wife for a younger woman and a career making wine, Rex embraces experience in ways that make Jack both envious and anxious. Like Kerouac’s On the Road, Going West is shaped by its protagonist’s frustrated admiration for a man who embodies a seemingly more authentic way of life. Jack, a library archivist in staid Wellington, spends his life hoping for something from Rex. There is no beckoning west, though, where their relationship can unspool into an epic of revelatory wandering.
In the absence of horizons to cross, Gee implies, adventure becomes a matter of imposing meanings on places that are never quite the epic landscapes they are supposed to be. One of Jack’s great memories is Rex buying a motorbike and giving him rides across the island, Jack “on the pillion like a girlfriend but […] my hands behind me like a man”:
We drove thirty miles up Muriwai beach, with the dunes on one side and slow green rollers, half a mile apart, on the other. Rex wound the Beezer up and we seemed to run on a mat of air. […] If we’d hit a patch of soft sand the bike would have stood on its nose and somersaulted and we’d have bounced along the beach and crackled with the breaking of our bones. “You’ve been a hundred miles an hour,” Rex told me when we stopped.
It’s a great memory and Muriwai is sublime. But Jack can’t shake the idea that New Zealand needs a moral geography, one where “naked beaches” oppose the “opulence and commerce, bright lights” and “sin” of a city. Rex has no such preconceptions, which is why his poetry is better. “When we started writing verse I dealt with what I saw and how I felt about it, and what my feelings meant; Rex with what he saw and what he saw next. If he played a part it was usually to go away and leave things as they were.” That attitude makes Rex the embodiment of cultural nationalism, his “images of small town, country school, kitchen, workshop, creek” expressing belonging in a place that warrants no comparisons. For a generation of mid-20th century commentators, such disengagement from foreign norms promised a national awakening. Yet if Rex is the Kiwi hero, it is Jack’s anxious vision that Gee centers. What kind of world can you make out of obsessive rumination on what it should be?
Rex himself is the biggest missing piece. Jack’s narrative is haunted by the mystery of his friend’s death at 58. Rex drowned trying to swim ashore from a swamped dinghy, “out past Tiri in the Hauraki Gulf.” The location of the accident—suspiciously unlikely for a fisherman like Rex—means his route to safety would have led due west, a formidable distance for even the strongest of swimmers. Jack wonders if Rex killed himself, and “going west” becomes a euphemism for suicide. Gee wants to ask—without saying it outright—if there is a dark side to the values Rex represents. What if the ethos that made his poetry great has something life-negating at its core?
The key to this question is Tod, Rex’s unsettling younger relative, a double in whom Jack sees “a bit of young Rex.” Where the latter’s amorality is tempered by concern for others (he kills a pedophile to protect a child he barely knows), in Tod it becomes narcissism and greed. Tod craves Rex’s attention but the older man reacts with hostility. In one of Gee’s most resonant scenes, the friends, with Tod tagging along, take Rex’s daughter canoeing. Jack is nervous about drowning, but Rex seizes the moment for fun. He and Fiona dig chutes in the creek bank and “climb and slide,” getting “drunk with sun and mud and being submerged.” When they turn for home, Tod “travelled back in the mangroves, keeping pace with us as we paddled against the tide. He slid and wriggled, flashing brown, he splashed in the leaves and angled his body through the branches, keeping up a Tarzan yell, until Rex shouted, ‘Shut that bloody racket.’”
By the novel’s end, “going west” has acquired all the connotations of the absent referent. Jack’s story reveals the pitfalls of trying to reenact an Anglophone tradition of nation-making that does not account for its South Pacific placement…
That image—the hero’s animalistic, degenerate shadow—hints at political allegory. If Rex, living “in a capsule labelled ‘here and now,’” embodies cultural independence, Tod (who grows up to be a banker) thrives in the neoliberal 1980s, with its “adjustment to the instinct of greed.” Rex’s dislike suggests he recognizes their affinity. Jennifer Lawn argues that 20th-century cultural nationalism, in representing “the settler provincial condition as derivative, stagnant, horizonless, torpid, complacent, adolescent and maladaptive,” helped facilitate “the transition from provincialism to cosmopolitan modernity and from a protectionist economy to neoliberalism.”1 From that point of view, Rex’s death is revealed to have been an act of resistance. Jack discovers that when Rex learned of a heinous crime committed by Tod on the Hauraki Gulf, he “took responsibility” for the perversion of the values he represented. His fatal swim was an attempt at symbolic reclamation, a declaration that his way of life need not culminate in libertarian brutalities. “He was swimming westwards in the end,” Jack concludes. “The whole thing has the arrogance of his best poems, which never fail.”
By the novel’s end, “going west” has acquired all the connotations of the absent referent. Jack’s story reveals the pitfalls of trying to reenact an Anglophone tradition of nation-making that does not account for its South Pacific placement (let alone the cultural resources of a Polynesian poetics of which Jack and Rex are unaware). “Westwards became our direction,” Jack recalls of his days on the motorbike with Rex. “The coast out there crushes language flat.”
Perhaps that was where they went wrong: in imagining a world in which the ocean is nothing but a boundary—signifier of absent opportunities, a space beyond the possibility of adventure. What could life on an island ever mean but constraint and disappointment? Jack feels “there’s a cure” in writing about Rex. He ends his narrative watching the “liners and container ships going in and out,” admiring “the little yachts” that “stand upright on the sea.” In this passage, he is looking east for the first time: perhaps toward a vision of oceanic inhabitation yet to be imagined. 
This article was commissioned by John Plotz.
- Jennifer Lawn, Neoliberalism and Cultural Transition in New Zealand Literature, 1984-2008, Market Fictions (Lexington Books, 2016). ↩︎
