The Bone People by Keri Hulme

First published: 1983

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: The 1970’s

Locale: New Zealand

Principal Characters:

• Kerewin Holmes, the protagonist, a part-Maori woman and a painter
• Joseph (Joe) N. Gillayley, a part-Maori factory worker
• Simon P. Gillayley, a young boy, foster child of Joseph Gillayley
• James Piripi (Piri) Tainui, Joseph Gillayley’s cousin

The Novel

Although the action of The Bone People is roughly chronological, the fact that it is related through the thoughts, memories, dreams, and associations of the three central characters results in a dual progression. Each character is moving forward through the months of association with the others; at the same time, each character is recapitulating his earlier life and reinterpreting it while he interprets the responses and the revelations of the other two.

At the beginning of the story, Kerewin Holmes, the protagonist, is defiantly alone in the “Tower,” a home which she has built and where she lives and paints. She has cut herself off from her large, loving, bossy family, and she has resigned herself to a celibate life, recognizing her peculiar distaste for any physical contact.

Into her solitude comes Simon P. Gillayley, a mysterious young boy who was washed ashore, without identification and without the power of speech, several years before and who has been informally adopted by Joseph N. Gillayley, whose own wife and child died shortly after Simon’s appearance. Because he is mute and terrified, Simon, too, is alone. His thefts and acts of vandalism have made him an outcast in the community, and Joe Gillayley’s fits of drunken abuse keep Simon off balance, even though the boy refuses to admit that his beloved foster father has ever harmed him.

As the story proceeds, Kerewin Holmes comes to love both Simon and Joe. What begins as a casual contact, Simon’s invasion of the Tower and Joe’s subsequent call to apologize, continues as a series of visits and dinners at one home or the other. Yet the seeming intimacy masks a polite and guarded relationship, in which each character guards his own secrets. Even though his cousin James Piripi Tainui warns Joe that he must admit his flaws to Kerewin, Joe cannot bring himself to confess that he is periodically driven to beat the son whom he truly loves. Because Simon does not wish Kerewin to know that he is “bad,” he conceals from her the fact that he is being abused. Perhaps the greatest reticence, however, is Kerewin’s. Loving the things she owns, her jewelry, her knife, her Tower, she cannot love people, for fear that they will become a part of her. After she sees Simon’s scarred body, Kerewin is torn between her sense of duty and her fear of involvement in the lives of others. Her first real step out of solitude comes when she asks Joe and Simon to go on a beach vacation with her. Although she has convinced herself that she wishes to observe them, in order to be certain about the child abuse, actually Kerewin has permitted her life and her emotions to be affected by others.

During the remainder of the novel, the three characters come to understand one another and themselves. Discovering that Joe was himself abused and felt himself abandoned, Kerewin realizes that Joe is not a monster. When she beats Joe, she realizes that she herself is capable of violence, and when he forgives her, she sees his capacity for love. Finally, when Kerewin runs away rather than help Joe remove a fish hook from Simon’s thumb, she must admit her own weaknesses.

In the final section of the novel, Kerewin breaks off her relationship with the two Gillayleys because, as she says, they are “sucking me dry, it feels like. Emotional vampires, slurping all the juice from my home.” As a result, both Simon and Joe explode, and Kerewin is forced to admit that she can no longer sequester herself in her Tower. In the epilogue to the novel, Kerewin, Joe, and Simon form a family and celebrate the union at a great party in their new home, attended by their friends, Joe’s family, and even Kerewin’s family, to whom she is now reconciled.

The Characters

Because The Bone People is narrated through the consciousnesses of the three major characters, the reader comes to be far clearer about their motivations than he may be about the events which they recall in fragmentary fashion. The central character, Kerewin Holmes, perceives herself as someone who knows what she wants: solitude, independence, and celibacy. Her Tower is a fortress. The things she possesses are important; people are not. It is significant that she could cut off relations with her family but had to bear away an ancestral coffee mill, to which she now talks. Her first response to Simon is distaste; her first impulse, to send him back into the rain from which he came. Clearly, however, she does not know herself as well as she thought. When she discovers that he has a splinter in his foot, she must help him, and from that time onward, first Simon’s helplessness and insistent love and then Joe’s hurt make it impossible for her to be the person she had thought herself to be.

Simon’s own fearful nature and delinquent reactions are related not only to his terrifying, drugged infancy but also to Joe’s present alternation of affection and abuse, which have convinced Simon that he himself is evil. When he attacks Joe during the final beating, which almost costs Simon his life, the boy is asserting his own refusal to accept the responsibility for Joe’s actions and thus stating a new independence.

The most complex character in The Bone People is probably Joe, the child abuser, who reveals himself to Kerewin much more fully than she ever reveals herself to him. Although the revolting nature of his actions would seem to make him a totally unsympathetic character, whatever his own abused and abandoned childhood may have been and however deeply the loss of his wife and child may have hurt him, it is clear that Joe does give Simon love. Unfortunately, Simon’s own behavior gives Joe an excuse to beat him, in the guise of disciplining him. Fearful of his own sexual feelings, Joe is more likely to strike the child than to stroke him. Yet like the most sympathetic parent, Joe worries about Simon’s nightmares, devotes sleepless nights to comforting him, and responds with sensitivity to the unexpected terrors which evidently arise from Simon’s unknown past experience. Joe’s mistreatment of Simon is not the sadistic display of power which is so often the motivation of a child abuser. Joe castigates himself both for his actions and for his whole failed life; what, he asks, can he give either Kerewin or Simon? Out of his own dislike of himself comes his violence toward Simon, his other self. It is ironic that only when Kerewin, the confident, finds that she, too, can err cruelly, only when Joe, the self-despising, finds that he can give something to others are the two brought together with Simon, who can forgive them both.

Critical Context

The Bone People is significant as a first novel by a part-Maori writer, who utilizes Maori phrases, as well as Maori tribal memories and attitudes, to point out the spiritual deficiencies in the culture that has supplanted the ancient Polynesian traditions. The emphasis on commitment to community is a reflection of the Maori viewpoint. The sicknesses of Simon, deprived of his family, of Joe, rejecting the wisdom of his family, and of Kerewin, altogether repudiating her family, can be cured only by a restoration of community and an establishment of a new family unit.

The publication history of The Bone People reflects the vigor of the Maori tradition. Rejected by numerous publishers, it was finally brought out by a feminist cooperative and later republished in Great Britain by Hodder and Stoughton, winning the Booker Prize in 1985. The novel also received Mobil’s Pegasus Prize and was published in the United States by the Louisiana State University Press. Keri Hulme’s determination to speak for New Zealand’s Polynesians, to voice the wisdom of an ancient culture, to warn arrogant civilization of its loss of the sense of community has thus been justified.

Bibliography

Benediktsson, Thomas E. “The Reawakening of the Gods: Realism and the Supernatural in Silko and Hulme.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 33 (Winter, 1992): 121-131. Suggests that the novel’s mix of supernatural and realistic elements undermines and transforms empirical literary ideologies, this being the goal of much postcolonial fiction. Provides an informed interpretation of Hulme’s use of Maori myth and the text’s three main characters.

Booklist. LXXXII, October 15, 1985, p. 312.

Fee, Margery. “Keri Hulme.” In International Literature in English: Essays on the Major Writers, edited by Robert L. Ross. New York: Garland, 1991. Calls The Bone People part of a postcolonial discourse that challenges values established by imperialist powers. Discusses Hulme’s use of traditional narrative frames, which tease the reader into expectations that Hulme then ignores or reshapes.

Huggan, Graham. “Philomela’s Retold Story: Silence, Music, and the Post-colonial Text.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 25, no. 1 (1990): 12-13. Suggests that Simon’s silence parallels the Greek myth of Philomela, whose tongue was cut out so she could not report being raped. Argues that colonized subjects, both transplanted Europeans and indigenous populations, have been dominated by Eurocentric powers rather than encouraged to transform into something new.

Kirkus Reviews. LIII, September 15, 1985, p. 967.

Library Journal. Review. CX (November 1, 1985), p. 110.

May, Hal, and Susan M. Trosky, eds. “Hulme, Keri.” In Contemporary Authors Vol. 125. Detroit: Gale Research, 1989. Contains an excellent interview with the author which took place in 1987. Hulme discusses her life as a reclusive New Zealander, the importance of family, how the Spiral Collective published her novel, and critics’ responses. Her wit and unique turn of phrase mirror that of Kerewin in The Bone People.

Ms. Review. XIV (December, 1985), p. 14.

The New York Review of Books. XXXIII, February 27, 1986, p. 16.

The New York Times Book Review. Review. November 17, 1985, p. 11.

The New Yorker. LXI, February 3, 1986, p. 105.

The Observer. July 21, 1985, p. 22.

Publishers Weekly. Review. CC (September 13, 1985), p. 124.

Ramsey, Nancy. “A Prizewinner Explains Why Eight Walls Are Better than Four,” in The New York Times Book Review. XC (December 1, 1985), p. 37.

Stead, C. K. “Keri Hulme’s The Bone People and the Pegasus Award for Maori Literature.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 16 (October, 1985): 101-108. Argues that though hauntingly complex, Hulme’s novel received attention beyond its literary merit for fitting into a fashionably feminist, pro-Maori market. Celebrates the work’s airing of dark truths and its ability to convey sexual union without sex, parental love without biological parents, and a sense of family out of fragmented souls.