The Bone People

by Keri Hulme

Integrating both Maori myth and New Zealand reality, The Bone People became the most successful novel in New Zealand publishing history when it appeared in 1984. Set on the South Island beaches of New Zealand, a harsh environment, the novel chronicles the complicated relationships between three emotional outcasts of mixed European and Maori heritage. Kerewin Holmes is a painter and a loner, convinced that "to care for anything is to invite disaster." Her isolation is disrupted one day when a six-year-old mute boy, Simon, breaks into her house. The sole survivor of a mysterious shipwreck, Simon has been adopted by a widower Maori factory worker, Joe Gillayley, who is both tender and horribly brutal toward the boy. Through shifting points of view, the novel reveals each character's thoughts and feelings as they struggle with the desire to connect and the fear of attachment. Compared to the works of James Joyce in its use of indigenous language and portrayal of consciousness, The Bone People captures the soul of New Zealand. After twenty years, it continues to astonish and enrich readers around the world.

• ISBN10: 0807112844
• ISBN13: 9780807112847
• Publish Date: 1 October 1985 (first published 1 July 1985)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 2 June 2021
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Louisiana State University Press
• Edition: Us ed.
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 450
• Language: English

Reviews

[nannah]

Okay, so this is a review by someone who was (and still is, to a lesser extent) abused by her father.
And yeah, that's important, if you've read this book.

Book content warnings:
abuse
child abuse
homophobic slurs
alcoholism

So if you look at the book's page, The Bone People has a rating of over four stars, which is pretty darn good on goodreads. Reviews sing its praises, etc. etc., and I just . . . can't relate.

My problem with this beautifully-written book? You guessed it! The abuse!!
I just can't get past it.

I don't know a thing about Keri Hulme's background, but unless she's faced a similar issue, her coverage of child abuse is so damn distasteful. It's like a slap in the face to all abused people who read this. Let me tell you why:

The book centers around three well-written, completely-rounded out and fully-fleshed beautiful characters: Kerewin, a rich ex-artist who's holed herself up in a self-built tower and prefers to be alone and lonely; Joe, a Maori man with a drinking problem and an equal spread of temper and charm; and his foster child Haimona (Simon), who's mute and probably one of the best characters I've read in a long time (also the reason this is 2 stars instead of 1).

So, mostly when he drinks, Joe beats Haimona, or finds a reason to beat him. And Haimona is repeatedly labeled as a "difficult" and "troubled" child. He runs away from school, steals things, sometimes breaks property, etc. And even when it's brought to Joe's attention that he does these things because he wants attention (even if it's the wrong kind of attention!), Joe continues to tell Haimona that he's a bad, BAD kid.

It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy: the kid is told so often he's BAD, that he'd begin to believe it and continue to act out. Is it not obvious to any of the characters?? (or to the writer?)

But anyway, Haimona continues to do things in his own way to communicate with the adults, and they continue to lash out at him in the worst way, and the worst thing is the book continues to say it's O K ?? Because they still somehow love him?

In one part, Joe tells Kerewin that it's okay, because "it's not like I'm beating Haimona, I'm beating the 'badness' out of him!" like W T F!? It's the most abusive thing I've ever heard in my life. And stuff I've heard personally. You are still literally beating your child. The things you tell yourself while you're doing it to reassure yourself literally doesn't matter at all, okay? It's not about how you feel while you're doing it. Literally. It's about your child.

And then in the middle-ish part of the book, Joe beats Haimona viciously enough that Haimona is hospitalized and almost dies. His head is bashed in on a door frame, and he risks permanent head trauma. Like what the fuck, I'm sorry, but really.

You know what the book does afterward? The book goes on to talk about how baaaaad the poor abuser feels, oh waah. I couldn't care less about how Joe feels after hurting his foster son, I honestly couldn't. At this point, it honestly feels like this book was written to make people feel sorry for child abusers. Like the author said "how NOVEL would it be if I wrote a book from a child abuses point of view and made people sympathetic to their pain?" HA HA. Listen, if you beat your child up, it's never, ever, EVER the child's fault.

It took me 26 years to learn this. And I'm finally standing up for myself. I'm finally distancing myself from my abuser and learning to say no and cutting him out of my life. And for this book to be sympathetic for the abuser and say the child is better off with the abuser after all is just disgusting. I'm sorry.

I love Kerewin and Haimona as characters, but the book is nasty.
Nasty.

[adastra]

The Bone People is a challenging book to read due to it's eclectic writing style. It breaks a lot of conventions and utilizes a variety of ways to let us see into the characters—though it's not always quite clear which character, or what is really happening, and certainly not why. The book probably needs re-reading a few times to truly be appreciated/analyzed.

At the core of it, however, is the strange relationship between a hermit painter who lives in her self-built tower, a very clever though mute child, and the child's foster father who can be very affectionate, but also very violent. The book has a few parts that are a bit tedious, but also quite a lot that are moving, shocking and suspenseful. It's certainly unlike anything I've ever read before.

[Michael @ Knowledge Lost]

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/2013/11/29/book-of-the-month-the-bone-people/