Winner of the Booker Prize in 1985, and of the Mobil Pegasus Prize and the New Zealand Book Award in 1984, this novel is the first work by a part-Māori New Zealand author to receive international attention and awards. It is an experimental novel, constructed with three main narrative threads that relate the thoughts, feelings, and interactions of the three main characters: Kerewin Holmes, a painter who lives as a hermit in a tower; Joe Gillayley, a Māori factory worker; and Simon Gillayley, Joe’s mute white foster son who washed up on the beach shortly before Joe’s wife and infant died of influenza.

Their story unfolds in four sections, each divided into three chapters, with a prologue that reveals the family the three of them form in the end and an epilogue that celebrates their union with each other and with their community. The prose style is poetic and fragmented, following the stream-of-consciousness thoughts of the three characters in short turns.

Each of these characters is wounded and hiding something from the larger world, and yet unwilling or unable to become healed separately. Kerewin has broken with her family and prefers an isolated, independent, celibate life; Joe is emotionally ravaged by the loss of his family and his own brutalized childhood, and he beats Simon even though he loves the boy; and Simon had already been traumatized before Joe found him and believes that the beatings he receives are the treatment he deserves—and he commits acts that repeatedly elicit more beatings.

When Simon shows up in Kerewin’s house one day, he begins the process of bringing the three of them together; however, each will have to suffer and recover from his or her wounds before they can form a meaningful attachment. Each of them, in fact, sinks very nearly to death before a spiritual reconnection with “the bone people,” a nonviolent pre-Māori tribe, helps them to reach out to each other and establish emotionally healthy bonds.

Keri Hulme’s novel is, at times, a challenging reading experience requiring patience, frequent reference to the translations of Māori words and phrases in the back of the book, and imaginative sympathy with three difficult characters. But her plot sheds light not just on a little-known culture in a remote corner of the world, but also on the tension between self-absorption and community involvement that anyone anywhere might experience, and on the recursive tragedies of child abuse and alcoholism. As the characters approach their respective dark nights of the soul (and body), their sufferings become painful to read; this depth of suffering, however, helps elevate the joy of their recovery of interconnectedness with each other and with the larger community.

Bibliography

Buckman, Jacqueline. “Challenging the Conventions of the Künstlerroman: Keri Hulme’s The Bone People.” World Literature Written in English 35, no. 2 (1996): 49–63.

Hulme, Keri. “Reconsidering The Bone People.” Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada 12 (1994): 135–154.

Wilentz, Gay. “Instruments of Change: Healing Cultural Dis-Ease in Keri Hulme’s The Bone People.” Literature and Medicine 14, no. 1 (1995): 127–145.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

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