He is a Presbyterian clergyman with an unyielding and stern personality and a strong belief in his own principles, who becomes a pacifist and rationalist, and he and his late wife Edie had twelve children.

[11] Nina Bawden for the Daily Telegraph observed that, while "the history of the moral struggles of a Presbyterian Minister in New Zealand does not sound very enticing", it made for "unexpectedly riveting reading".

[12] Despite selling well by the standards of New Zealand fiction,[13] sales figures from Plumb were not enough for Gee to live off, so he branched out into children's books and television writing.

[14] He subsequently reviewed Sole Survivor as well, highlighting the many strengths of the three novels and in particular their examination "of the fortitude, the brevity, and much of the destruction in well-meaning lives".

[18] It said of Sole Survivor that "Gee comes across as a gently unsentimental, especially economical observer of lives ... with a clear-headed realism about human motive that's steadily appealing and frequently even moving".

[19] Michael Leapman in the New York Times was less impressed, saying that to appreciate Sole Survivor a reader would have to have "a familiarity with New Zealand politics since 1950 and a taste for the sordid".

In 2006, the trilogy came second in a poll run by The Dominion Post of readers' favourite New Zealand books of the past 30 years, second only to the collected autobiography of Janet Frame.