The Bone People

The Bone People
First edition cover
Author(s)	Keri Hulme
Cover artist	Cover design by Neil Stuart, cover illustration by Jack Freize
Country	New Zealand
Language	English
Genre(s)	Mystery novel
Publisher	Spiral Press
Publication date	February 1984
Media type	Print (Paperback & Hardback)
Pages	450 pp (paperback edition)
ISBN	ISBN 0-330-29387-7 (paperback edition)
OCLC Number	36312027

The Bone People (styled by the author and in some editions as the bone people[1]) is a Booker Prize-winning 1984 novel by New Zealand author Keri Hulme. Hulme was turned down by many publishing houses before she found a small publishing house in New Zealand called Spiral. In 1985 Spiral collaborated with English publishing house Hodder & Stoughton.

Title

The title The Bone People draws parallels between Māori, who use bone extensively in art and tools, and the notion of the core or skeleton of a person: in the novel the characters are figuratively stripped to the bone. Also, in the novel, "E nga iwi o nga iwi" p. 395, translates to "O the bones of the people" (where 'bones' stands for ancestors or relations), but it also translates to "O the people of the bones" (ie the beginning people, the people who make another people).

Plot summary

The Bone People, published in 1984, is an unusual story of love. The differences are in the way of telling, the subject matter, and the form of love that the story writes on. This is in no way a romance; it is rather filled with violence, fear, and twisted emotions. At the story's core, however, are three people who struggle very hard to figure out what love is and how to find it. The book is divided into two major sections, the first involving the characters interacting together, and the second half involving their individual travels.

In the first half, 8-year-old Simon shows up at the hermit Kerewin’s tower on a gloomy and stormy night. Simon is mute and thus is unable to explain his motives. When Simon’s adoptive father Joe arrives to pick him up in the morning, Kerewin get to know their curious story. Simon was found washed up on the beach years earlier with no memory and very few clues as to his identity. Joe and his wife Hana take in Simon, despite his mysterious background, and attempt to raise him. However, subsequently both Hana and their infant son die of flu, forcing Joe to bring the wild boy Simon up on his own.

At the same time Kerewin finds herself developing a relationship with the two the boy and the father, becoming more connected to their live circumstances and stories. Gradually it becomes clear that Simon is a severely traumatised orphan, whose strange behaviours Joe is unable to cope with. Kerewin eventually figures out that, in spite of a constant and intense love between them, Joe is physically abusing Simon.

Following a catalyst event, the three are driven violently apart. Simon witnesses a violent death and seeks Kerewin out, but she is angry with him for stealing some of her possessions and will not listen. Simon reacts by kicking in the side of her guitar, a much prized gift from her estranged family, whereupon she yells at him to disappear. After that he goes to the town and breaks a series of shop windows, and when he is returned home by the police, Joe beats him half to death. However, Simon has concealed a piece of glass and stabs his father with it. This results in hospitalisation for both.

In the second half of the novel, Joe is being sent to prison for child abuse, Simon is still in the hospital, and Kerewin is seriously and inexplicably ill. Consequently Simon's wardship is being taken from Joe. Simon is sent to a children's home, and Kerewin deconstructs her tower and leaves with the expectation to be dead within the year. All three have to overcome life-changing happenings, strongly interlaced with Maori mythology and legend.

Kerewin adopts Simon, to keep him close to her and Joe, who is out of prison again. Meanwhile Joe is able to contact Kerewin's family and bring them back for reconciliation. The final scene of the novel depicts the reunion of the three main characters Kerewin, Simon and Joe, who are all celebrating some unnamed occasion back at the beach where Kerewin has rebuilt her home, this time in the shape of a shell with many twists. This house makes Joe laugh as he finds all their family in various states of rest in the shell as he makes his way to the beach. It is not certain that Joe, Kerewin, and Simon will remain together, but they are together on the beach at the end of the book. Caveat: it is not certain that the end of the book is not just a fantasy.

Characters

• Kerewin Holmes - Kerewin is a reclusive artist who is running away from her past. She is a gifted painter who has suffered painter’s block since winning a lottery, building her tower and falling out with her family. At the beginning of the novel she has lost direction in her life and wants all other people to leave her alone. However, after becoming involved in Simon and Joe's lives she learns to heal her life.

• Joe Gillayley - Joe is the adoptive father of Simon. He is very intelligent and spiritual, but blinded in his judgement, particularly in relation to his raising of Simon, by his alcoholism. Joe seems to both love and respect Kerewin, but also compete with her. He is deeply scarred by his wife's death, contributing to his alcoholism.

• Simon P Gillayley - Simon is a mute, highly intelligent child with an immense interest in details of the world around him. Simon has a deep attachment to both Joe and Kerewin, but shows his love in odd ways because of his strange past. He exhibits a disregard for personal property. He is isolated from others by his inability to speak, as others mistake his muteness for stupidity. Simon refers to himself as Clare or Claro.

His life before meeting Joe is never satisfactorily explained. It is hinted that he was abused before meeting Joe - Joe refers to seeing strange marks on him when he met him for the first time. Simon is also upset by certain things, for example, needles, having his hair cut, or hearing the French language spoken. (It's likely that his birth father was a dissolute Irish heroin addict who was involved in drug smuggling.)

The influence for Simon's injuries may have come from the author's knowledge of the trauma of Indian Residential schools and Indian Boarding schools(prevalent, but not limited to Canada, Australia, and the US)where children often had needles driven through their tongues for speaking indigenous languages, and had their hair cut as a means of both shaming them and making them to feel weak. Those who were responsible were often French Catholics from Belgium, France or Quebec.

Themes

Isolation is one of the major themes of The Bone People. Kerewin isolates herself from the world in her tower; Simon is isolated from the world by his inability to speak; Joe is isolated by his grief. Characters' motivations are shown to the reader through paragraphs that detail their thoughts, which serve to illustrate how their isolation leads to misunderstanding.

A further important theme is Hulme's vision of a utopian unity between Maori and Western culture in New Zealand. She does not simply "write back" against Eurocentric hegemony but includes Western culture in her healing vision as well. This is a major difference to writers such as Chinua Achebe, who write almost exclusively from the viewpoint of the colonized and reject Western philosophy. Note how Kerewin, Joe and Simon also function as metaphors/allegories in the context of postcolonial discourse: Joe could be seen as resembling Maori culture, Simon represents European culture and Kerewin represents the culture clash between both (Kerewin is a "hybrid", half-Maori, half Pakeha). In this context, the novel's magical realism makes sense: the characters' illnesses (cancer, suicide attempt, etc.) can be regarded, in a figurative way, as "cultural illnesses" that are overcome in the end of the novel, when Kerewin, Joe and Simon form a sort of "patchwork family".

Awards and nominations

The Bone People won both the Booker Prize for Fiction and the Pegasus Prize for Literature in 1985.

Editions

• 1983, New Zealand, Spiral/Hodder & Stoughton ISBN 0-14-008922-5, first published in 1984, then in United States of America in 1985 by Louisiana State University Press, then in 1986 by Penguin Books, soft-cover.
• 2010, One of six novels comprising Penguin Books' Ink series, a subset of seventy-five titles re-released in celebration of the publishing house's 75th anniversary, each with jacket art "specially designed by some of the world's best artists working in the world of tattoos and illustration." The cover features art by New Zealand tattoo artist, Pepa Heller. ISBN 9780143116455

Sources, references, external links, quotations

• Keri Hulme's "The Bone People": An Overview
• Bibliofemme Reviews:The Bone People by Keri Hulme
• Maori Culture and Myths (The Bone People)
• Myth and Symbol in The Bone People Bone Symbolism By Clare Oataway see [2] at the Wayback Machine
• The Bone People, Penguin Ink
• Book footnote describing lowercase title

Awards
Preceded by Hotel du Lac	Man Booker Prize recipient 1985	Succeeded by The Old Devils