The Bone People
by Keri Hulme
Summary
Kerewin Holmes lives alone in a stone tower she built with lottery money on the coast of the South Island. She is part Maori, a painter who can no longer paint, and she has cut off her family and wants nobody. A small boy breaks into the tower. He is about six, mute, foreign looking, and was washed up from a wreck years earlier. His foster father Joe Gillayley comes to collect him.
What develops between the three is the novel: a bond that is genuinely loving and genuinely dangerous. Joe beats Simon, badly and repeatedly, and Kerewin knows, and the book refuses to let the reader settle into a simple position about any of it.
Hulme writes in a mixture of English and Maori, with poetry, dream sequences and shifts of typography, and it is uneven in the way books written over twelve years are.
This one needs a plain warning. The violence against the child is extensive and described, and the ending, which moves toward Maori spiritual restoration rather than the resolution a European novel would reach for, has always divided readers sharply. Some find it a masterpiece unlike anything else. Others find the reconciliation unearned. Both readings are serious.
The untranslated Maori is not an obstacle, since context carries almost all of it and there is a glossary. Best for readers willing to meet a book on terms other than the ones they arrived with. Not a book to hand to someone casually. It is around four hundred and fifty pages and the middle section is the hardest going, both in subject and in structure.
Historical Context & Significance
The Bone People won the Booker Prize in 1985. Keri Hulme was the first New Zealander to win it and the first writer to win with a debut novel.
The book almost did not exist. Hulme worked on it for twelve years and was turned down by every publisher she approached, several of whom wanted substantial changes. It was finally published by the Spiral Collective, a small feminist arts collective, in an edition assembled largely by volunteers.
The win was among the most contested in the prize's history. Objections were made to the violence, but also, more revealingly, to the book's Maori material, its untranslated te reo and its refusal of European narrative expectations, and Hulme was publicly questioned about her own Maori ancestry in ways no Pakeha writer would have faced. She died in 2021.