Book Report: The Bone People

30. Keri Hulme, The Bone People (1985) (6/4/21)

The other week I met my friend Barbara for lunch in Moss Landing. (I had huitlacoche crab enchiladas—as usual at said restaurant, the Haute Enchilada. Where else can you get that, I ask you?) While we were waiting for the doors to open, I inspected the Little Library out front. I spotted The Bone People, which I'd read ages ago, probably just after it came out—it having been the recipient of the Booker Prize—and remembered being impressed by. So I took it. 

The next day, on a drive down the coast, my friend Lynn asked if I’d ever read . . . The Bone People! I was gobsmacked. A book I hadn’t thought about in decades, and here it comes up not once, but twice, in so many days?

Then, when I got home and checked Facebook, what should appear as the memory of the day? No, not The Bone People. But this quote:

In Repo Man, Miller [played by Tracy Walter] says, “A lot of people don’t realize what’s really going on. They view life as a bunch of unconnected incidents and things. They don’t realize that there’s this, like, lattice of coincidence that lays on top of everything. Give you an example, show you what I mean: suppose you’re thinkin’ about a plate of shrimp. Suddenly someone’ll say, like, ‘plate,’ or ‘shrimp,’ or ‘plate of shrimp’ out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin’ for one, either. It’s all part of a cosmic unconsciousness.”

I don’t especially look for such coincidences—like, if I were thinking about shrimp, and someone mentioned shrimp, I’d just laugh and say, “I was just thinking about shrimp myself!” But the two encounters with the long-forgotten Bone People plus that quote, all in a cluster? Too weirdly cool. It basically determined that that book would be the next one I picked up.

And now I've finished it. It is a beautiful, harsh story of three lonely, damaged people, physically, psychologically, spiritually, and how they come together and, perhaps, by the end begin to heal one another. They are Kerewin, a stuck artist estranged from her family and living alone in a stone tower; a mute seven-year-old boy, Simon, who appears one day in Kerewin's home; and Joe, Simon's guardian, having found the boy washed up on the beach several years earlier, and who subsequently lost his wife and son to flu. The story takes place in New Zealand: Joe is mostly Maori, Kerewin is one-eighth Maori and although she appears European she identifies with Maori ways, and Simon is a pale white boy with flaxen hair and startling green eyes. As they come together we learn—and arguably, they discover—what they really want and need in life. There is lots of drinking and some extreme violence, which drives them apart and into a sort of spiritual rebirth, each individually. 

Some of the writing gets a bit OTT (Hulme famously spent 12 years writing the 500-plus-page book, then had it rejected by every publisher she approached, who told her it needed serious editing, which she in turn rejected). But the bones of the story are solid, and you learn to care about these vulnerable souls. One can, too, find in the story—which toward the end invokes Maori spirituality—a sort of parable about colonialism and the balance of old ways and new, of give and take, and of respect. I'm very glad I read it again. 

Here's a randomly chosen section to illustrate the style, from the POV of Kerewin:

     That's an odd child. And an odd man.

          The coal sinks down in its red bed, and the little violet
          flames run flickering over it.

     She wanders across the room and lifts her golden guitar down from the wall. It is easy, leaning over the ambered belly, to put thought through a filter of slow-picked arpeggios.
     An odd child, with its silence, and canny receptiveness.

          Orange-red sparks climbing in skewed lines to die out in
          the glimmer dark pile of the soot.

     An odd man, looking so bitter until he smiles.
A harmonic bells out under her fingers.

          Why the wariness and drawn-eyed look of the child?
          Why the bitterness corrupting the man's face?
          And why, above all, the peculiar frisson of wrongness
          I keep getting from some of the conversation?
          O it's riddles, and no thing of mine

and she quickens her chording to a heavy downbeat strumming.