Reader’s Corner

A book note by Erica Dorpalen, Orion magazine editorial intern emeritus.

How this novel came to be is a story in its own right. Author Keri Hulme, a Maori, wrote nightly after working days in tobacco fields. After twelve years, Hulme was ready to release her creation into the world, only to have several major New Zealand publishers reject the manuscript on the grounds that it was, as one critic said, “too large, too unwieldy, too different when compared with the normal shape of a novel.” That’s when Spiral, a New Zealand feminist collective, stepped in to bring the book to fruition.

That was over twenty-five years ago, and since its 1984 publication, The Bone People has won a Booker Prize and a Pegasus Prize for Literature, among other awards, and is likely one of the best-selling books in New Zealand.

I knew none of this when I first opened the pages to meet Kerewin Holmes, a hermit and artist who lives in a tower near the sea. An outwardly tough part-Maori, part-Pakeha (Western) woman, a picture of self-reliance with an encyclopedic knowledge of local edible plants and sealife, Kerewin does her best to keep to herself, until one day a scrawny, scraggly, towheaded youngster climbs through her window. The boy is mute, which makes finding the person to whom he belongs all the more difficult, and injured, which makes turning the “urchin” out impossible, even for the reclusive Kerewin.

When Kerewin tracks down the boy’s adoptive father, she unwittingly finds herself charmed by and increasingly attached to the pair of misfits: Joe Gillaley, a Maori widower whose unhappy childhood and losses in his adult life have made him both a tender and brutal parent, and young Simon P. Gillaley, whose arrival on the island as the lone survivor of a boat wreck is only the first clue to his mysterious past in a faraway (presumably European) country and the ghosts that haunt him at night.

The three form an unlikely family of sorts; mutual company becomes both an escape from private ruminations and a chance to share the burden of personal demons. What unravel are a mystery, an exploration of human emotion and the magic of kinship, and a sometimes untidy collision of Maori and European culture. The story is deeply felt, haunting, it is also often hilarious—take for example, Kerewin’s initial observations of poor Simon:

“It was like watching a snail. . . . One moment, all its horns are out and it’s positively sailing along its silken slime path, and the next moment . . . ooops, retreat into its shell.”

And:

“The guttersnipe still watches her, twisted and still like a small evil Buddha.”

Who wouldn’t be glued to the page, wondering what is to become of the riotous pair?

I will say that those Wellington publishers had a point when they called Hulme’s manuscript “unwieldy”—the haphazardly placed line breaks and punctuation take some getting used to, at which point they take on a sense and structure of their own. In her preface to the book’s first edition, Hulme concedes: “Maybe the editors were too gentle with my experiments and eccentricities. Great! The voice of the writer won through.”

Touché. Hulme’s playful syntax is such a delight, I daresay that I—normally a stickler for grammatical precision—wouldn’t have it any other way.

The Bone People
By Keri Hulme
Louisiana State University Press, 2005 edition