It was a gloomy and stormy night, a mute 7 year old boy, Simon shows at the hermit Kerewin’s tower. The next morning his adoptive father, Joe came to pick him up. Because Simon couldn’t explain his motives, Kerewin has to rely on Joe to tell their curious story. A storm earlier that year sees Simon wash up on a beach with no memory or clue of his identity. Joe and his now deceased wife took the troubled boy in, but the traumatised boy is just too hard to cope with.The Maori people use bones as tools and for art; they believe the notion of a person’s core is found within their skeleton. The bones are a common theme throughout the novel; each character is emotionally stripped to the bone. It is then we truly see what type of person these characters are. This novel is full of violence and twisted emotions, making this a tense and draining book to read.Something I really liked about this novel was Keri Hulme’s use of silence as tool that drives the plot. Simon is unable to speak, but we find out this is more of a psychological rather than a physical restriction, as he can sing. I think he is afraid to say the wrong thing, a defensive strategy. He uses notes as a primary form of communication, this way there are no expressions of his emotion and he can protect himself. The book goes a little further, Simon is also silent about the pain, when he is beaten he doesn’t make a sound. Kerewin also uses silence in a similar way, she built her tower to hide away and be a recluse; no one can hurt her if she is in solitude. She is always an artist suffering from a creative silence; not being able to let her creative side flow through her art. You can read this book and find many examples of silences within it; very effective and I spent a lot of time trying to work out the meaning behind it.Each character has been damaged that their defensive mechanisms make it hard to open up to others. Yet the three main characters spend the entire novel trying to work out what love is and how to find it. They are all isolated themselves from the world; Kerewin in her tower, Simon with his inability to steak and Joe with his grief. There is just so many themes you could look at in The Bone People, the idea of a utopian society uniting Maori and Western culture, Post-colonial discourse, cultural illness, violence as a way to communicate and you can just go on and on.This is not the easiest book to read, it is confronting and tense. The Bone People left me with mixed emotions; on one hand the writing was wonderful and left me thinking about so many issues but on the other hand the violence just left me with a sick feeling. I often try to leave my emotional opinion of the subject matter out of analysing a book but I just can’t help it with this one. In the end, I think the book has something important to say and worth reading.This review originally appeared on my blog; http://literary-exploration.com/2013/...
You know those books that you finish thinking that it was alright, but as time goes on and your mind mulls it over you begin to like it more and more? The Bone People is the opposite kind of book, to the extent that coming back to write this review I was surprised to find I had given it two stars instead of one.Where to begin with this terrible attempt at a novel? Well, the opening of poems and snippets of disjointed text without context served as a confusing start to the book, and even once you return to it after finishing the book and knowing what is going on it's needlessly opaque. In general the structure of the book is a mess, with the first two-thirds of the book being an almost completely realistic depiction of life before switching over in the final third to a story replete with the supernatural. Jarring, to say the least. Additionally, this book is far longer than it needed to be, and a properly aggressive editor would likely have shaved off at least a hundred pages.Beyond the structure the content is also painfully bad. The main character, Holmes, is a bizarre insert of the author that is a rich, brilliant artist who is also a martial arts master. Sure she laments at times about her lack of connection to other people, but the book paints this as Holmes being too cool for everyone else more than an actual inability to be social with other people. She feels like a edgier attempt at a Mary-Sue, and at times I cringed while reading the parts of the book focusing on her.She's not the main problem, however, as the character of Joe and the book's attitude toward his actions fills that role. It is revealed somewhere at around the halfway mark that Joe is being abusive toward his adopted son Simon, the third main character. We're talking beatings that put Simon's life in danger. The book still treats Joe as a sympathetic character despite this, even when Joe's beatings put Simon in the hospital and bring him within a hair's breadth of death. Hulme is on record as saying she wanted to write about the issue of child abuse when she wrote The Bone People. Someone needs to tell her that writing about an issue is more than just including an instance of that issue happening in your book, you also have to explore the effect of that message or take a stand on that issue. I'm assuming she didn't intend to do either, because the end of the novel appears to preach that child abuse isn't that bad and that being around an abusive adult is a good option so long as he claims to care. At the end of the story Simon is desperate to return to Joe, his abuser, and in general the novel takes the approach that by removing the child from his care the government was making a mistake, as they just "didn't understand the relationship the two had."Such a message is disgusting. I'm going to give Hulme the benefit of the doubt and assume she's merely an incompetent writer, instead of evil.
What do You think about The Bone People (1986)?
Read this for Intro English my freshman year and recently re-read it. The book centers around three main characters, but their relationship with one another is best left up to the reader to determine as the story unfolds.Hulme is a self-identified bicultural writer, which makes The Bone People a bicultural text, incorporating both Maori and Pakeha influences within the New Zealand setting. According to my professor: "One of Hulme's high school teachers, responding to her writing, told her her writing was 'far to rich,' that she used 'far too many adjectives,' which the teacher claimed was Hulme's 'Maori side...coming out.'" It is because of her bicultural identiy that the conventions of the archetypal genre are transformed. The writing is enhanced by Hulme's abundant descriptions. This poetic quality is unusual, but represents a cultural quality of Maori language. Though this makes the book dense and often confusing, it creates a pleasing effect overall. Hulme is not just challenging the traditional form of the novel. Rather, she is helping to modify the way in which her culture approaches literature in general.
—Charmayne
I can't really say that I liked this book. I read it, and didn't get bored or dislike reading it. I did not however learn much from the book or feel a whole lot after reading it. I liked the earlier parts of the book when Kerewin's narration was more dominant. Toward the end, after Joe beat up Simon I stopped liking the book at all. Joe's encounter with the wise man kind of left me scratching my head, and from then on the book went down hill. Kerewin's redemption in the end bothered me because i
—Thomas Warf
I’ve just finished reading The Bone People. I chose it because I am travelling to New Zealand in a few weeks and I find it enriching to read books by authors of the country I am going to. When I researched NZ books, this one was mentioned as a classic NZ book. When I saw that it was Booker Prize winner, I was prepared for a challenging read with complex emotions and relationships. And so it is. A very powerful story, and written beautifully and creatively – I enjoyed the use of words and imagery, and the use of indented sections for the characters’ self-talk. It didn’t take me long to become absorbed in the story and characters but it was a gruelling sort of absorption. The detailed description of NZ plants and coastal environments was very interesting, and provided some emotional relief from the story. I did feel that the latter part of the book had a slightly different tone and was a bit surprised at the quick, most-ends-tied up ending. But it has given me a wonderful feel for NZ Maori/Pakeha culture, including both the good and bad features, and the natural environment. It is a book that will stay in my mind for some time and will certainly enrich my trip to NZ.
—Jane
