Keri Hulme
The Bone People by Keri Hulme, winner of the 1986 Booker Prize, is situated in New Zealand and focuses on three individuals: Kerewin Holmes, a solitary artist who lives in an isolated tower; Simon, a young boy with a mysterious background who doesn’t speak, is prone to fits of violence, and has no sense of personal property; and Joe, Simon’s surrogate father who took Simon in when he washed up on the coast after a shipwreck.
When Simon breaks into Kerewin’s tower in the pouring rain, Kerewin takes him in until a family member picks him up. Through Simon, she meets Joe and the three become intertwined into a slapdash unit. Kerewin values her freedom and refuses Joe’s attempts to draw her into a romantic relationship. Their friendship becomes temporarily strained when Kerewin discovers that Joe’s fierce, protective love for Simon can translate into brutal violence towards the young child. When Joe’s beatings cause severe damage to Simon, social services step in and take the child away. Joe is temporarily incarcerated, and Kerewin destroys her tower and moves away. But the three are reunited at the end of the novel in Kerewin’s remodeled tower.
The narrative is complicated, confusing, and difficult to follow, at times. Hulme peppers her prose with a character’s stream of consciousness and interiority; unannounced jarring shifts in perspective; jagged, half-articulated thoughts; bouts of a drunken slurring of words; and leaps in time and location. Scattered throughout the complex, challenging language are references to Māori myths and legends. The tensions between the colonialists and the struggle of the indigenous people to retain their culture and language is sensitively handled. Characters frequently dot their language with Māori phrases and words. Fortunately, Hulme provides a translation of these in the back pages of the novel.
The novel’s conclusion is somewhat unsatisfactory. The ending reads like a hurried tying of loose ends. Joe experiences some sort of mystical epiphany; Kerewin recovers from a near death experience; and Simon is reunited with the two people he loves. The cause of Simon’s mysterious background and strange behaviors is alluded to but never adequately explained. The mystical elements are confusing and come across as a perfunctory deus ex machina inserted to bring the novel to closure.
The novel grapples with issues of cultural identity and erasure; with trauma and domestic violence; with isolation and abandonment; with the importance of familial bonds and community; and with the search for healing and forgiveness. Some of the thematic impact was diluted because of the nature of the narrative and complexity of its language.