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Maurice Gee is one of New Zealand’s most celebrated writers — winner of the Montana New Zealand Book Award multiple times, considered a national literary figure in a country that takes its literature seriously. Outside New Zealand and Australia, almost nobody has heard of him. The O trilogy, his fantasy series aimed at younger readers but entirely readable by adults, is the most glaring example of this gap.
The Halfmen of O was published in 1982 and it’s as good today as it was then.
What’s It About?
Susan Ferris is a thirteen-year-old New Zealand girl who is pulled — along with her cousin Nick — into a parallel world called O, a place of two halves: Wildland and Stonehaven. O is in crisis. The Halfmen, led by a monstrous figure called Otis Claw, are consolidating power and enslaving the Freemen who once lived in balance with the natural world. Susan and Nick are not there by accident. They have a role to play.
The premise sounds familiar — portal fantasy, chosen children, dark lord — because it draws on the same mythological well that Tolkien and Lewis drew from. What Gee does differently is in the execution: the violence is real, the stakes are personal, and Susan is a protagonist who earns her agency rather than having it conferred.
What Gee Does Well
The writing is consistently excellent. Gee is a serious literary novelist who happened to write children’s fantasy, and the prose is more precise and more demanding than most books in this category. O is rendered with real environmental specificity — the Wildland feels like somewhere with a climate and an ecology, not a backdrop.
The Halfmen themselves are genuinely disturbing. They are what they sound like: beings split in half, whose incomplete nature makes them cruel in ways that are psychologically persuasive. The imagery throughout the trilogy is dark in ways that trust younger readers to handle it.
Susan is a strong protagonist. She’s stubborn, frightened, frequently out of her depth, and capable of growth that feels earned rather than granted. Her relationship with the creatures of O — particularly the Freeman Breeze — develops with care.
The Trilogy
The O trilogy continues with The Priests of Ferris and Motherstone. All three books are slim — each around 200 pages — and work best read consecutively. The story completes properly in the third volume and the ending is satisfying.
Finding the Books
The O trilogy has been in print in New Zealand and Australia continuously but can be harder to source elsewhere. Online retailers and second-hand bookshops are your best options outside the Southern Hemisphere. It’s worth the hunt.
Who Should Read It?
Adults who loved Narnia and Tolkien as children and want something with the same mythological foundations but more psychological complexity. Readers interested in non-British portal fantasy. Anyone who wants to understand what serious New Zealand literary fiction looks like when it takes fantasy seriously.
Rating: 4.5/5
Buy The Halfmen of O on Amazon.
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Check out Sunset In the East — a mind-bending short story collection from Ben Luxon.
