A stellar bunch of friends and colleagues of Greg McGee joined him at Unity Books last Wednesday evening to celebrate the launch of his novel Love & Money. Photo above shows Greg along with fellow Penguin author Nick Edlin enjoying the festivities.
Metro Editor and man about town Simon Wilson launched the book with an address that was both thoughtful and humorous which I felt was especially relevant as it reflected the book perfectly.Wilson said he first met McGee in 1980, in the premises of the drama school in Vivian St in Wellington. It was a big year for the Playwrights’ workshop, with McGee’s Foreskin’s Lament being the standout,“ bloody exciting theatre”.
He went on to suggest that while comic writing looks the easiest it’s actually the hardest.
Then he addressed McGee’s characters –
“Some of them are in the room.
Actually, that’s not true. They’re on the page. He made them up.
So if you did happen to write speeches for David Lange, or take your yoni off for weekend visits to Centrepoint, or let your monstrous ego loose on a theatre company, or give your children ridiculous names…. you’re not in this book.
Although some people a bit like you are in it.
Great types, great individuality in all of them: Greg is a democrat who doesn’t leave his minor characters with too little to do, and yet doesn’t let them obscure the focus either – that’s another valuable writer’s skill.
Mike McGuire: the great NZ archetype
Bashful and full of himself
Capable and useless. Reliably unreliable and a decent man
A loser who wins.
All these contradictions are true in real people, and it’s a fiendishly difficult thing to capture them on the page”.
“So, writing about what’s important, and using comedy.
Scene where Roland, the academic who decides for the sake of his career to become a feminist fellow traveller:
Lectures on the NZ woman alone, the lineage from KM to Keri Hulme, that wonderful writer who will undoubtedly bless us all with new books for years to come. Roland hated the bone people.
Gives the lecture, employs all his dramatic skills, has the students eating out of his hand, it’s all lies but he’s bloody good, finishes, turns, opens the door and leaves the room.
And finds himself in a broom cupboard, in the pitch black, with no internal handle.
Greg loves his metaphors, and he has the courage as a writer to raise them against himself as well as everyone else. He makes himself vulnerable, and that doesn’t even occur to most writers. Is he Roland? He knows he could be”.
I found Love & Money, (it could well have been called Lust & Money), a significant work, substantial,(350+ pages),in length and in content. At times it made me laugh out loud while at other times it provided serious commentary on the 1980’s. Set in Auckland in1987, with flashes back to earlier parts of that decade; these were the days of the demise of the Muldoon government, the arrival of the Lange government, the privatisation of state assets,the Rugby World Cup, the days of communes and lessened moral values, the sharemarket's crazy boom and spectacular bust.
Out of work actor Mike, a middle-aged romantic lead with a clapped out VW and three kids to different mothers is our protagonist. He is both likeable, hopeless and hapless and McGee uses him well to tell the story. In his introduction Simon Wilson suggested the book could well be made into a movie,I think he is right and in the right hands it could be a cracker, the book certainly is.
About the author:
Greg McGee is a free-lance writer living in Auckland, currently working on a telefeature of the Pitcairn Island sexual abuse trials (which is due to be shot later this year) and as Richie McCaw’s ghostwriter.
Greg is perhaps best known for the play Foreskins’ Lament (1980).
His television credits, for which he has won several awards, include Erebus: The Aftermath, Fallout, Street Legal, and Doves of War. Under the pseudonym Alix Bosco, he won the 2010 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Fiction Novel with Cut & Run (2009) and was a finalist in 2011 with Slaughter Falls.
