The Bone People

When I started the Australian Readers’ Challenge, I think I had the vague idea that I would review each of the ten books I read. Well, to date I have read four out of ten books for the challenge, but I have only reviewed one of them. Got too busy with other writing I guess. So now I have three books I could review. I really wish I’d made notes while I was reading them, though, because it’s a bit hard to remember everything I might have wanted to say, or all my responses to the books now. It doesn’t help that lately I have been doing a lot of reading at night, in bed, for about half an hour before going to sleep. (It’s a bit of a pity I don’t take public transport to work anymore. Trains are good places to catch up on reading.)

Here’s my thoughts and impressions of The Bone People by Keri Hulme. It took me almost three weeks to read. I kept getting sidetracked with other books, like Naked Conversations, also Bone People was not the simplest of reads. It was one of those books that had been sitting on the shelf for years, unread. I’d pick it up and read the first few lines, and put it back:

He walks down the street. The asphalt reels by him.
It is all silence.
The silence is music.
He is the singer.
The people passing smile and shake their heads.
He holds a hand out to them.
They open their hands like flowers, shyly.
He smiles with them.
The light is blinding: he loves the light.
They are the light.

It just wasn’t compelling enough. Also I must confess I tend to prefer reads that are fast-paced, with a very clear and obvious plot, and nothing too difficult. Whodunnits match this set of criteria very well. Science fiction for when I want to imagine the distant future, and even better yet, aliens. Not very cerebral of me, I know.

I’m glad I persevered this time, though. Once I got through the first few pages and stopped worrying that I didn’t understand what was happening, I got into the rhythms of the book and started to enjoy it. The Bone People is the story of three people – a woman, a man, and a boy. The boy, Simon, is the adopted son of the man, Joe (or Hohepa in Maori, but more on that later). Many reviews of the book describe Simon as being autistic. Simon is the sole survivor of a shipwreck, which left him unable to speak (although it seems to be a psychological inability rather than a physical one) and his identity unknown – Simon is the name Joe gives him. Joe is a widower who struggles with Simon, who has all sorts of difficult behaviours – he steals, truants, vandalises property and ignores others on a whim.

Simon and Joe enter Kerewin’s life after Simon breaks into the tower that Kerewin lives in. She is an artist and a loner, estranged from her family. There are references throughout the book to the big fight Kerewin had with her family, but you never learn what actually happened for her to sever ties with them.

Simon takes to Kerewin because she treats him like a human being, doesn’t patronise him. Father and son start seeing more and more of her because she is good for Simon, and despite herself, she finds herself becoming more and more involved in their lives as well. Lest you think it just ended happily ever after – I found it quite a distressing read. From time to time, whenever Simon misbehaves, Joe loses his temper and thrashes him. He ends up going to jail after he beats the boy so badly he leaves him in a coma.

There are many elements to this book. I now realise how little I know about New Zealand and Maori culture. The book is suffused with Maori culture and language – there is even a glossary of Maori words at the back of the book – and the section where Joe, out of prison, meets and cares for the dying elder, kaumatua, and caretaker and inherits the custodianship of some land where a great ship (the mythical ship the Maori journeyed across the Pacific to reach New Zealand in?) is submerged, the ‘heart of Aotearoa’ (Aotearoa – according to the book, ‘the shining bright land, an old name for New Zealand‘) … only to have the pool in which the ship lies completely buried by a rockfall after an earthquake. I’m not sure what the author was trying to say by that.

The sequence in which Kerewin seemingly goes to the brink of death is awful and moving. She has stomach cancer but refuses treatment of any sort, objecting to hospitalisation on the grounds that it would cause her to ‘forgo control over myself and my destiny.’ (p.416) She goes off by herself and spends time in a beachside hut, and just when you think she’s dying, a goner, ‘a thin wiry person of indeterminate age. Of Indeterminate sex. Of indeterminate race’ comes to her, gives her something to drink: ‘A sour brew. Red currant juice? Here?’ and she recovers.

I really enjoyed the glimpses into Maori culture and language. At first I was annoyed at having to consult the glossary so much, but after a while I started to really relish the words, which really added to the sense of place:

E tama, i whanake
i te ata o pipiri
Piki nau ake, e tama
ki tou tini i te rangi

‘an old lullaby and translates roughly as “O child, winterborn, ascend/rise up and join your forebears in the heavens” ‘ (p.252)

(Song a ghost sings to Simon as he falls asleep, despairing at his inability to make himself understood.)

The book ends with the three of them returning to Joe’s family. Kerewin begins to make amends with hers.

It is beautiful and terrible. It is tender and cruel. It is dream and reality. It is poetry and crudity. It is infinitely simple and infinitely complex.

Part of review from the New Zealand Herald, on the book’s back cover.

I enjoyed The Bone People. I might have to reread it again, soon.

Categories: AustralianReadersChallenge, review, KeriHulme