The Bone People
Keri Hulme
1984

Introduction

The Bone People, published in 1984, is an unusual story of love. It is unusual in the telling, the subject matter, and the form of love that the story depicts. This is in no way a romance; it is 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.

Hulme won New Zealand's Pegasus Prize for Literature (1984) for The Bone People. Then the book went on to win the prestigious Booker Prize (1985), a coveted literary award. The Bone People, which began as a short story, took Hulme twelve years to write. As of 2006, it was the only novel that she has published.

The Bone People has been praised for its story and for the way it is written, which is said to reflect the intonation and style of the Maori language. The story is, in fact, filled with allusions to the Maori culture and many of the challenges that the Maori people face, those common struggles caused by the colonization of an indigenous people. At the same time, however, the problems that are presented in this story have universal relevance. The story attempts to answer questions about how one heals deep-seated, emotional pain, how one becomes true to oneself, and how one finds love.

Author Biography

Keri Hulme was born on March 9, 1947 in Christchurch, New Zealand, to a mother of mixed Maori and Scots heritage and an English father. Her father died when Hulme was eleven. By that time, she had already demonstrated her potential as a writer, creating poems and short stories and rewriting published stories that she thought she could improve. To encourage her daughter (the eldest of six siblings), Hulme's mother converted a sun porch into a writing studio. When Hulme was eighteen, she had a dream about a mute, mysterious boy with long hair and green eyes. From this dream, she modeled the character of Simon in her first novel. Like her protagonist, Kerewin Holmes, Keri Hulme identifies most with her Maori heritage. Also like her protagonist, Hulme left home early and worked odd jobs, one in a tobacco field, another for the New Zealand post office system. She spent one year at the University of Canterbury.

In 1972, at the age of twenty-five, Hulme decided to write full time. She had several short stories and poems published. In 1975, she won the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Prize for her short story "Hooks and Feelers." A few years later, she accepted the position of resident writer at Otago University, and later she also worked at the University of Canterbury.

Silences Between, published in 1982, was Hulme's first collection of poetry. The Bone People appeared in 1984. This novel first began as a short story, but it kept growing. Hulme received many rejections from publishers before a small collective of women decided to publish the book. They ran four thousand copies on the first printing, and the books sold out quickly.

Hulme's other works include a collection of short stories, The Windeater (1982), Homeplaces (1989), a collection of essays and photographs retaining to New Zealand, and a second collection of poems called Strand (1992).

Plot Summary

Prologue The End At The Beginning

I Season Of The Day Moon

Keri Hulme's The Bone People is written in a nontraditional style. It begins with a prologue, which includes a poem and three short sections that serve as oblique introductions to the three main characters, although readers will only recognize this fact after they have completed the novel and then look back at the prologue again.

1 Portrait Of A Sandal

Kerewin Holmes, the protagonist of this story, falls asleep outside. When she awakens, she notices a sandal that lies at her feet. She curses the intruder who must have left it, a small shoe with a hole through the heel. Kerewin suspects it belongs to a child who must have stepped on something sharp and, from the footprints she finds, must have then limped away.

Kerewin lives on an isolated parcel of land in a house she has built in the shape of a tower. She has never invited anyone to visit her home.

Kerewin enters her house and spots a young boy sitting high in the midst of some bookshelves. Kerewin yells at him and soon discovers that the child cannot talk. The young boy wears a pendant that bears his name, phone number, and address. His name is Simon P. Gillayley.

Kerewin notices the boy has a piece of sharp wood stuck in his foot. She pulls it out and bandages his foot then tells him to go home. The boy communicates through hand gestures and short notes he writes on a pad. Kerewin feels something for the boy and invites him to stay for lunch. Afterward, she calls the boy's telephone number. She uses a radiophone, which has to go through an operator who says he will call Kerewin back when he reaches someone at the other end. The operator calls back later and says that the father is working late and he has not been able to reach the Tainuis, a couple that sometimes takes care of Simon while his father is away.

Kerewin tells Simon that he can stay until someone comes to pick him up. No one shows up until the next morning. Piri Tainui, a cousin of the boy's father, finally comes. Piri says that Joe, Simon's father, is still sleeping. Piri takes Simon home.

2 Feelers

The next day, Joe comes by to thank Kerewin and brings the boy with him. He also brings back the black chess queen that Simon has stolen from Kerewin's house. Joe explains how Simon constantly gets into trouble and also has a hard time at school. Joe is impressed that Kerewin was so good with Simon and is surprised that Simon asked to see her again.

Joe then tells Kerewin the story of how he found Simon, the victim of a shipwreck. Joe is not certain of Simon's age. He has had Simon for three years. Simon is probably between seven and nine years of age. Kerewin invites Joe and Simon to stay for tea (dinner).

Simon falls asleep. Joe and Kerewin play chess. A few days later, Simon turns up at Kerewin's home. Simon has brought Kerewin a gift, a string of semi-precious stones, which she refuses because she recognizes that the stones are an heirloom, an old rosary, possibly. Simon insists that the stones are his to give; Kerewin accepts graciously but also reluctantly, feeling unworthy of them.

Kerewin is an artist. In the past few years, she has been unable to paint. She tries to work out an image, while Simon is still there. Then she thinks about him and realizes that Simon has touched her, both physically and emotionally, something that she is unused to. She recoils from his touch, but at the same time, she also starts opening up to him.

Joe shows up and invites Kerewin to join him and Simon for tea at his house. They go to Joe's house. In the midst of the meal, Joe gets angry at Simon for sneaking a glass of wine. He threatens to beat the boy. Kerewin senses the tension and breaks it by complimenting Joe for the meal.

When Simon is ready for bed, he kisses Kerewin. She says it has been a long time since she has been kissed. The last was from her brother before the big family break up. She does not explain what happened then.

After Simon goes to bed, Joe tells Kerewin how he found the boy three years earlier. There had been a storm. A boat had crashed against the rocks. Two bodies were found. Then Joe found Simon and performed artificial respiration. Several of Simon's bones were cracked, and the boy was in shock and also had pneumonia. Simon would not let go of Joe's hand all the while he was in the hospital. Joe and his wife, Hana, decided to keep Simon.

Police never determine who the other two people were. The necklace of semi-precious stones that Simon had given to Kerewin used to belong to one the people who died. The necklace was found around the woman's neck. Simon clung to the necklace, not allowing anyone to take it from him during his first year with Joe.

Later, Kerewin asks Joe if he has ever taken a vacation. Joe tells her how he has tried, but nothing seemed to work out right with Simon. Kerewin tells Joe about a little beach shack that her family owns and suggests they all go there sometime.

3 Leaps In The Dark

Kerewin writes in her journal. She refers to herself as a "neuter human." She tells the journal she cannot paint. She refers to Simon as "a very unlikely but strangely likable brat." She admits that she wants to uncover Simon's history. She has done some research. The string of semi-precious stones is a rosary, and she has traced it to an Irish earl. Kerewin tells her journal that she witnessed Joe beating Simon.

Kerewin receives a letter from the earl in Ireland. He recognizes the rosary. It once belonged to his grandson, who has since been disinherited. This grandson once lived in New Zealand, but the earl wants nothing to do with him and asks that Kerewin not write again.

Later, Kerewin watches Simon build small structures on the beach made of bits of driftwood, shells, and grass. When finished, Simon leans his ear down on them and listens. He tells Kerewin that he hears music. Simon tells Kerewin to do the same. Kerewin is fascinated and wonders how Simon came to know how to do this. When Joe sneaks out one night to listen, he hears music, too. But the music scares Joe. He steps on the structure and smashes it. Joe never tells anyone that he has heard the music.

Joe calls Kerewin from the bar one night. Joe is drunk. He tells Kerewin there has been an incident. Joe does not know where Simon is. Kerewin looks around the town but cannot find Simon. She then goes to the bar and for the first time does not feel comfortable around Joe. Kerewin feels that Joe is lying about something or hiding something from her.

Kerewin goes home and finds Simon there. He is shivering. Kerewin sees that his eyes are swollen, and his lip is split. When Kerewin calls Joe, he denies hitting Simon.

Joe is afraid to tell Kerewin about how he beats Simon. He is concerned that if he does, it will ruin everything between him and Kerewin. Joe hopes that maybe the three of them may become a family. Shortly afterward, Simon gets into trouble again, and Joe beats him severely.

A few days later, Simon goes to Kerewin's place, but she is not there. Simon starts drinking from different bottles in Kerewin's kitchen. Kerewin finds him later slumped on the floor, totally drunk. She places him under a cold shower. Simon is revived, but he is totally disoriented and starts screaming. Kerewin realizes that she might have triggered feelings he had when he was shipwrecked. She sees the terror on Simon's face. When she takes off Simon's wet clothes, she also sees that he has been repeatedly beaten with a belt. Kerewin does not know what to do. She had not realized that the beatings Joe was giving Simon were so harsh. She does not want the responsibility of knowing. So she decides to say nothing to Joe or to anyone else about it. She resolves to keep Simon out of harm's way as best she can.

II The Sea Round

4 A Place To Sleep By Day

Kerewin, Joe, and Simon go to the beach hut belonging to Kerewin's family. Simon feels the tension between Joe and Kerewin and tries to break it by annoying Joe. Joe becomes angry and lunges for the boy, but now Kerewin sees a chance to protect Simon and gives Joe a fight she believes he deserves. Kerewin, a master at Aikido, takes on Joe and beats him.

Immediately after the fight, though, Kerewin feels sick, a sudden pain in her stomach. She sleeps all day but wakes up at sundown feeling better. Kerewin thinks it might be an ulcer. Later, Kerewin and Joe talk about how Joe beats Simon. Kerewin admits that she already knew about it. Joe promises never to hit Simon again unless Kerewin agrees that Simon needs it.

5 Spring Tide, Neap Tide, Ebb Tide, Flood

The next day, Kerewin talks Joe and Simon into going fishing on an old family boat. As they are getting onboard, the adults realize that this might be a traumatic experience for Simon. Once they get out on the water, Simon looks terrified and eventually vomits. The adults want to turn back for his sake, but Simon says that he feels better and insists that they continue on. Simon catches a huge groper but in the process gets the large fishhook stuck deep in his thumb. Kerewin wants to take Simon to a doctor, but Simon refuses to go, so Joe takes the hook out.

The next day, Joe talks about his childhood. He was given to his grandmother when he was three. Joe's grandfather used to beat him. Joe suspects he was beaten because he was dark-skinned like his grandmother, whom his grandfather did not like for her Maori ways.

Simon finds a badly hurt bird on the beach. He digs a hole then puts it out of its misery by hitting it with a stone. Then Simon sings to the bird. Kerewin witnesses the scene from a distance. Simon freezes in terror when he realizes that Kerewin has heard him singing. Simon is also surprised by his ability. When Kerewin hugs him, he realizes it is all right to sing and continues doing so all through the day. He sings melodies with no words.

6 Ka Tata Te Po

Kerewin is upset by a surprise visit from her brother. It is brief, but it stirs memories. Joe decides they may all need a change of scenery, so they go to a local bar. Kerewin eventually becomes bored with the place and starts to leave. As they are leaving, a local man insults Kerewin, Joe, and Simon. Kerewin goes into a fighting position. The bartender steps between Kerewin and the man. Just then, a fly buzzes between them. Without moving, Kerewin catches the fly, smashes it, and flings the dead insect in the direction of the man. The people in the bar are amazed by her quick reflexes. A couple days later, the trio pack up and leave for home.

Part III The Lightning Struck Tower

7 Mirrortalk

Joe comes around to Kerewin's house after a brief separation. Joe is happy. The Tainuis have welcomed him home. Joe tells Kerewin that he and Simon hope Kerewin will join their family. Kerewin takes Joe to her studio and shows him some of her old paintings. This is all she wants, she tells him. No people. No family. She just wants to paint again. She gives one of the paintings to Joe and tells him to remain her friend but not to come any closer. There is nothing wrong with her, she tells Joe. She has never felt good in relationships since she was a child. Joe is undaunted. He believes he will eventually win her over.

One night when he is drunk, Joe asks Kerewin to come to the bar. Kerewin is depressed and gets drunk and sick. Joe and Kerewin do not get along well, and they leave in foul moods.

8 Nightfall

Simon goes to Binny Daniels to get money but finds the man dead. Joe had told Simon not to go to Kerewin's, but he goes there anyway. Simon has stolen a special knife from Kerewin. She knows he has it, but Simon continues to deny it. Simon, upset about seeing Binny, punches out toward Kerewin. She hits him back. Simon punches at her twice more but misses, then he sees her favorite guitar and kicks it, smashing it. Kerewin yells at Simon to get out, and he leaves.

Simon walks along the shops in the little town, smashing every window. A policeman brings Simon home to Joe. Joe calls Kerewin before he lays a hand on Simon. Kerewin is still angry and tells Joe and Simon how she feels. Joe hangs up and beats Simon. Joe tells Simon that he has ruined everything.

9 Candles In The Wind

Simon had taken a piece of glass from one of the broken windows and, when Joe was beating him, had stabbed Joe in the stomach. Kerewin is at Joe's house, cleaning up the blood, wishing she had not reacted the way she had. Maybe she could have prevented all the misery. Three weeks pass, and Kerewin is packing. She cannot erase the images in her head, seeing Simon, his jaw and nose broken, a hole in his crushed skull. Simon is in the hospital. Joe is about to be sent to jail. Joe sells his house, and Kerewin plans to burn hers down.

IV Feldapart Sinews, Breaken Bones

10 The Kaumatua and the Broken Man

Months have passed, and Joe is out of jail. He gets off a bus in the middle of nowhere. Joe camps out on some open land above a beach. The next day, Joe walks until he comes to the edge of cliff. He can go no further unless he jumps down. He finally decides that if he survives it will be a sign that he should go on. He survives the jump but breaks his arm. He is found by a man called Tiaki Mira, who calls himself The Keeper.

The old man helps Joe to heal. He tells Joe that he has been waiting for him. Tiaki Mira has been told a secret by his grandmother, who raised him in the old Maori way. Tiaki cannot die until he has passed this secret on to another person. Tiaki has been waiting a long time, but now he knows he is near death. He passes the secret to Joe and then dies. Before dying, Tiaki signs over all his property to Joe.

Joe must protect the secret, which is the existence of an old ship that the ancient ones used to come to New Zealand. It is hidden in a pool of water on Tiaki's land. One night, there is an awful noise, and the land shakes. When Joe makes it over to the pool, he sees huge boulders have filled in the hole. The ancient ship is buried. There is no more reason for Joe to stay on this piece of land. He packs his things and leaves.

11 The Boy By His Own

The scene changes to the hospital. Simon is recovering slowly. He has had amnesia, but his memory is slowly returning. His crushed skull has cost him his hearing. Simon wants to go home. He does not understand why Joe and Kerewin do not come to see him.

Doctors try to get Simon to communicate. He only asks when he is going home. Tainui comes to visit, but he feels he cannot help the boy, who still needs a lot of therapy and rehabilitation. Simon is sent to a special hospital. People there try to find him a home, but Simon escapes.

12 The Woman At The Wellspring Of Death

Kerewin is sick, and she fears she is dying. She has that same ache in her stomach that she had at the beach with Joe and Simon. It will not go away. She tries to get medication, but doctors will not give her anything unless she allows them to examine her, which she will not permit. She is determined to heal herself or die. She camps out at the beach and suffers through her illness until close to death; the illness subsides, and she begins to heal. Then, as she recuperates, she decides it is finally time to go home.

Epilogue Moonwater Picking

The final scene of the novel depicts a family reunion, both Kerewin's and Joe's. Simon is in the midst. Nothing is really explained, and sentences are only barely connected. Bits of conversation, sometimes without indicating who is saying what, complete the passage. There are hints of happiness in some corners, suspicion and anger in others. All the reader knows for sure is that Kerewin has survived her ordeal, Joe is back in the fold, and Simon has somehow managed to escape the authorities. They are all celebrating some unnamed occasion in an unidentified location. It is not certain that Joe, Kerewin, and Simon will remain together, but they are together in the final scene.

Characters

Binny Daniels

Binny Daniels is a misfit who remains on the periphery of the action. He is an old man who lures young boys to his rundown shack and takes advantage of them sexually. Simon goes to Binny when he needs money. Simon swears that Binny does not do anything to him in exchange for the money, but there are hints that this may not be true. Simon is the one who finds Binny dead toward the end of the story. Seeing the dead body triggers Simon, prompting Simon to break Kerewin's guitar and smash the shop windows.

Hana Gillayley

Hana, the deceased wife of Joe Gillayley, was a nurse and had mothered one child, who died from influenza. Hana was pregnant with a second child when she too contracted influenza and died. It was Hana who encouraged Joe to bring Simon into the family.

Joe Gillayley

Joe Gillayley takes the shipwrecked and nearly drowned Simon into his home. Joe is a sad character who is unable to express his emotions appropriately. He has lost so much, his mother, father, pregnant wife, and son. All he has left is the unusual boy who cannot speak and continually gets into trouble. Joe feels that Simon's inability to function socially is partly caused by his own inability to raise a child. Joe feels like a failure, and these feelings drive him to beat Simon whenever he loses his patience with the boy.

Joe says that he would love to have Kerewin join his family, but it is not clear that he loves her. It seems more likely that Joe needs Kerewin. She is stronger than Joe in many ways, mentally, physically, and emotionally. Although Kerewin has her limitations, Joe's weaknesses are more incapacitating. Like Kerewin, Joe uses alcohol to numb his pain, and so he does not have to think about his problems. He encourages Kerewin to get drunk with him, as if this will bring them together.

Joe has more Maori blood in him than Kerewin has. It is through Joe's character that the author introduces some Maori myths and spiritual beliefs. Joe's transformation occurs in the midst of a myth: he meets an old, traditional Maori man, who has been waiting for Joe to appear. Joe is jailed for beating Simon. However, through the old Maori man, Joe is given the responsibility of living in an isolated place and protecting a sacred relic. This new role gives Joe the chance to think about his life and where he is headed.

Simon Gillayley

Simon uses the family name of Gillayley, but it is not clear if he is legally adopted by Joe Gillayley, the man who finds Simon on the beach after the young boy is shipwrecked.

Simon is badly hurt, both physically and emotionally. Although Simon is capable of talking, he remains mute throughout the story, except for a brief period when Simon realizes that he can sing. Simon has a lot of trouble dealing with others. He cannot find a place where he feels like he belongs. Kerewin appears to be the one who most understands Simon. The boy is amazed that she pays attention to him and seems to know what Simon means behind his words. She does not judge him and she does not punish or shun him, at least not until he pushes her beyond her limits.

Simon tests people to get their attention. He also acts out to release emotional tension. He often makes Joe angry, apparently in hopes that after Joe beats him, Joe will love him again.

Simon is frustrated by his inability to communicate. He stoically endures a lot of pain, both selfinflicted and imposed. The only time he really cries out is in his sleep.

Kerewin Holmes

Kerewin, the protagonist, lives in a tower on an isolated piece of land and does not encourage people to visit her. She is an artist who can no longer paint, and she sometimes drinks quite heavily in an attempt to forget her inability to create.

Something happened that caused her to leave her family and have no contact with them. She is closed emotionally and does not like being touched. At one time, she studied Aikido and is adept at the martial art. She uses this skill to get back at Joe after she discovers that Joe has beaten Simon.

Like the other two main characters, Kerewin is emotionally confused. She says she does not like company, yet she enjoys the company of Joe and Simon. She says she does not like to be kissed, and yet she is touched by Simon's affection for her. Her emotional conflict may be expressed by the pain that she endures during the second part of the novel. The independent Kerewin insists that she can heal herself, despite the doctor's suggestions that she may need surgery. She somehow pulls herself through the physical crisis, as well as the emotional challenges she faces. By the end of the novel, she appears to be the happiest character of the three. She has her health, family, and even her guitar restored to her.

Kerewin refers to herself as a "neuter," neither male nor female. Her neutrality expresses itself also in her not being committed to Simon and Joe. She wants to live alone but also greatly misses her family. She is an artist, but she cannot paint. She is not a mother, yet her motherly instincts drive her to embrace Simon.

Ben Tainui

Not much is said of Ben Tainui, the oldest son of Wherahiko and Marama, except that he has taken over the maintenance and day-to-day running of the family farm because his parents are no longer able to do so.

Luce Tainui

Luce, the youngest son of the Tainuis, makes a brief appearance in the story. He is the least liked by Joe, as Luce seems to enjoy spreading bad news. It is Luce who tells Joe that Simon has been over to see Binny Daniels. Then Luce taunts Joe with this information, stating that Simon is going to grow up to be just like Joe.

Marama Tainui

Marama, Wherahiko's wife, often acts as Simon's grandmother, taking care of him and even spoiling him, as Joe tells it. Marama loves intensely but is not physically strong. She has suffered a stroke and is in the hospital when Simon is sent there after the final beating that Joe gives him. Marama is viewed as the ideal wife and mother.

Piri Tainui

Piri, the second son of Wherahiko and Marama Tainui, is the most visible of the couple's three sons. He often takes charge of Simon when Joe is too drunk or too tired at the end of the day. Piri is also the most vocal of the Tainuis in telling Joe to stop hurting Simon and then threatening to take Simon away from him. Piri's wife has left him, which leads Piri to drink in excess.

Wherahiko Tainui

Wherahiko is Joe's uncle. He and his wife, Marama, are surrogate parents for Joe. They often take care of Simon when Joe is working. Wherahiko tries to counsel Joe on how to raise Simon. He also tries to tell Kerewin about Joe's beating of Simon, but at the last minute, Wherahiko decides to give Joe one more chance to tell Kerewin himself. Wherahiko has suffered a heart attack. Though he is old, he has a happy life with his wife.

Themes

Child Abuse

Hulme's The Bone People gives graphic descriptions of child abuse. The young boy, Simon, receives this abuse. He is abused by his peers because they do not understand his inability to speak and his frustration in not being able to communicate. In some ways, he is abused by the people who are responsible for his education because they quickly dismiss him, unwilling to penetrate Simon's self-protective façade. These educators see only a troubled little boy who does not fit their idea of a typical school child. They do not take the time to see his intelligence. They want to get Simon out of their sight; they do not want to be responsible for him or troubled by him.

The harshest abuse, however, comes from the hands of the one person who claims to love Simon. Joe, who has accepted the responsibility of raising the abandoned boy, beats Simon, almost to the point of death. Joe excuses the harsh punishment by claiming that it is the only way to communicate to the child. Simon makes trouble, or at least this is what almost everyone claims. The only way to curb that behavior, Joe insists, is to give Simon trouble in return.

Joe is not totally convincing in this assertion, however, not even to himself. He knows if Kerewin discovers that he beats Simon, the relationship he hopes to build with Kerewin will be destroyed. On some level, Joe seems to know that what he is doing to Simon is wrong.

The child abuse is presented in an unusual manner. In part, the abuse is looked upon in a negative light. Joe's family, as represented by the Tainuis, knows that Joe has often abused Simon. They threaten to take the boy away from him and to tell Kerewin about it if Joe does not curb his brutality. But the reader might wonder why the Tainuis have allowed this behavior to continue for so long. If they know about it, how many times are they going to allow it to happen before they actually intervene?

When Kerewin realizes that Simon is being beaten, she suspects that Joe is the one who is doing it. Though Joe denies it, it is fairly easy to figure out that Joe is the perpetrator. Who else would beat Simon with a belt? But Kerewin decides not to do anything about the abuse. She does not want the responsibility. Then, as the story develops, Kerewin promotes the abuse. She loses her patience with the boy. She once understood that Simon's behavior was an attempt to get attention (and thus love); however, when Simon acts out against her, Kerewin loses her temper. She hits Simon, and then she tells Joe that he has her permission to hit Simon some more.

Simon is a defenseless little boy, yet the adults use corporeal punishment as the sole means of controlling him. Joe was beaten as a child, and this fact is used, in some ways, to explain his abuse of Simon. Kerewin, however, states that she was never abused. She was hurt emotionally in some way that is never revealed, and she confesses that she is emotionally unavailable to others and avoids intimacy. Despite her awareness, when sufficiently provoked, she resorts to committing and condoning child abuse. The story ends on a seemingly happy though inconclusive note, but the road that takes the characters to the final scene is full of pain, anger, and abuse.

Relationships

Characters attempt to create relationships, but these relationships are based on shaky terms, to say the least. Simon needs to be nurtured by a maternal figure, someone who will care for him and protect him. Joe needs help in handling the troubled boy and in compensating for the loss through death of his own son and pregnant wife. Kerewin denies that she needs others; however, by the end of the story, the reader realizes that family relationship is what she craves most.

The story explores the difficulties of building relationships. Simon is severely hampered in expressing his needs because he cannot speak. Kerewin resists being touched by other people, preferring to remain aloof. Joe wants to express himself and make connection, but when he expresses himself, he often does so violently, creating counterproductive effects. The three characters must undergo a change before they can enjoy the benefits of sharing and exploring personal relationships.

Topics For Further Study

• Watch the DVD Whale Rider (2003) and mark the places where Maori traditions are portrayed. Look for an example of hongi, or traditional Maori greeting. Also mark the places where Maori war arts are shown. Pay attention to Maori arts, language, and traditional dress, too. Then take the DVD to your class and skim through the movie to give your classmates a quick overview of how Maori culture is portrayed in this movie.
• At least two of the art pieces that Kerewin works on in this story are described in detail. One is a drawing of spider-like webbing, and the other is a sculpture of Kerewin, Simon, and Joe all interconnected. Create your own interpretation of what you think one of these works might look like. Use any medium you choose. Present your work to the class and discuss it.
• Compile statistics about the Maori people over the past half century. How has their standard of living changed? Consider statistics about their health, education, and economic status. Also include statistics on the population of Maori people in New Zealand. Look for statistics on alcoholism, marriage and divorce, and child abuse. Where do most Maori people live? In an urban settings? Or is that changing? Present your findings to your class.
• Both the author and her protagonist are interested in fishing. Research the sport of fishing in New Zealand. What are some of the favorite fish people like to catch? What kind of fish is New Zealand noted for? Find a map of New Zealand and plot the more popular places to go fishing. Note the seasons for each type of fish as well as what kind of bait is most successful. Present your findings to the class.

A Sense of Going Home as Cure

The three main characters spend most of their time trying to return home, which they finally appear to accomplish at the end of the novel. Kerewin, who has built a tower in which she hides and curses intruders who attempt to befriend her, has left her family behind. The home she has built serves as a barrier to the world. She hopes it will become her home, but even at the beginning of the story, she refers to her tower as a prison. At the beach hut, Kerewin feels happily connected to a place. At the beach, she welcomes Joe and Simon to what she refers to as her real home. When she returns to the tower, she becomes depressed and ill. When she goes back to the beach again and nearly dies from some illness (both physical and psychological), she is able to finally go home. She finds her cure with her family.

Joe has a parallel experience. Joe's rage over his wife's death, and his inability to make sense of Simon explodes in a bloody scene in which he almost loses his life (when Simon responds to Joe's brutality and stabs Joe). Joe is sent to prison, where he confronts his emotions and reflects upon his life. Upon release, Joe encounters an old man who figuratively takes Joe back to his Maori roots. This is Joe's return home. Through the old Maori mystic, Joe grounds himself. The Maori culture is Joe's home, in other words. After this experience, Joe is determined to find Kerewin and to create a family with her and Simon. He knows that this is his destiny.

Simon, who is beaten severely, is also driven by a sense of home. It is all that he asks about once he regains consciousness toward the end of the book. He wants to know when he can go home. At this point, Simon does not know where Joe and Kerewin are, but he is determined to find them. It may be that his urge to go home keeps Simon alive. He does what he must to get released from the public authorities who attempt to keep him under their care. He runs away and finds Joe and Kerewin. At the end of the book, the three characters are reunited with the circle of family and home. The novel ends with a sense of happiness, fulfillment, and cure.

Style

Shifts in Setting and Voice

In The Bone People, Hulme employs sudden shifts in setting without explanation and subtle movements from inner dialogue to dreams to narration; moreover, the story is told in a variety of different voices. This unusual style creates a dream reality, a mystical atmosphere. Hulme combines poems, short essay-like reflections, and journal entries in order to narrate the story in a non-traditional way.

For example, Hulme begins her story with three poems, each focusing on one of the three main characters: Kerewin, Joe, and Simon. Next comes three short introductions (each less than a page long), one each for the three characters. The introductions are not connected to one another. At the end of the novel, readers understand what these poems and passages mean. These parts comprise the prologue of the novel.

In the first chapter, readers note that the dialogue is not attributed to specific speakers. Readers do not know who speaks the lines. Before the end of the page, the protagonist, Kerewin, is described in third-person point of view, but the text simultaneously provides Kerewin's inner thoughts, conveyed in first-person point of view. Sometimes when the protagonist is speaking through interior dialogue, the text is completely indented, signaling that the passage is indeed interior dialogue. However, other passages written in first person are not indented. Rather, they are set the same as the narration, which is most often rendered in third person. Readers adjust to this fluctuation, and soon the flow of the narration from one point of view to another begins to matter less than the content that is being delivered. Thus, typical patterns of narration are broken. The form of the novel fits its characters and their stories.

For example, in the first chapter, Kerewin discusses fishing for flounder. This part of the story is told in third-person point of view then switches to non-attributed dialogue, then back to third-person narration that reflects on what was just spoken in the dialogue, then on to interior dialogue, which is then interrupted by third-person narration that is subsequently interrupted by interior dialogue.

When the smoke is finished, she unscrews the top of the stick and draws out seven inches of barbed steel. It fits neatly into slots in the stick top.

"Now, flounders are easy to spear, providing one minds the toes."

Whose, hers or the fishes,' she has never bothered finding out. She rolls her jeans legs up as far as they'll go, and slips down into the cold water. She steps ankle deep, then knee deep, and stands, feeling for the moving of the tide. Then slowly, keeping the early morning sun in front of her, she begins to stalk, mind in her hands and eyes looking only for the puff of mud and swift silted skid of a disturbed flounder.

All this attention for sneaking up on a fish? And they say we humans are intelligent? Sheeit …

and with a darting levering jab, stabbed, and a flounder flaps bloodyholed at the end of the stick.

Kerewin looks at it with slow smiled satisfaction.

Goodbye soulwringing night. Good morning sin-shine, and a fat happy day.

By switching between the various voices, whether it is the narrator observing the character's actions or the character herself revealing her thoughts, the reader gains multiple viewpoints regarding what is going on in the scene. This multiplicity provides more insight into the character and another dimension for viewing the action.

As the novel continues, readers are also privy to the inner thoughts of Joe and Simon. The information that is provided through inner dialogue explains, for example, why Joe acts the way he does toward Simon, how he feels about the abuse he perpetrates, and what contradictions exist in his emotions. Regarding Simon, inner dialogue conveys his fears, which he cannot articulate through hand signals and written notes. In these stylistic ways, Hulme distinguishes between what is known about external reality and what is the inner reality of a given character.

Ethnic References

Hulme's novel is filled with references to the Maori culture. To make the setting of the novel even more authentic, the author makes extensive use of the Maori language and customs. Hulme does so without providing references or explanations in the text. Translations are provided at the back of the book of Maori phrases, sentences, and dialogues. However, the text itself offers no support or explanation. The text has a jarring or disjointed quality. The author may have included the Maori language without explanation to give the reader the sense of being an outsider; the reader is a witness yet remains a cultural outsider.

Historical Context

New Zealand Maori History and Culture

New Zealand was inhabited by Polynesian people, who arrived by boat probably from southeastern Asian islands (referred to in mythology as Hawaiki), possibly as early as 800 A.D. What is referred to as the Great Fleet (arrival of masses of Polynesians on the islands of New Zealand) may have begun as late as 1350. However, this approximate date is questioned by some modern anthropologists and historians. Much of the early history of the Maori was transmitted through oral tradition, or story telling, rather than by written records.

The Maori first settled along the coastlines of the two major islands that make up New Zealand. Tribal ancestors are designated by the name of the large canoe that each group used to come to the island. Each tribe has its own special (and original) canoe that is honored in stories. The name Tainui (which is used by Hulme in her novel) designates one of the major, original canoes. Many early tribes settled on South Island, where a large, turkey-like flightless bird, called the moa, was plentiful and a good source of food. As the population increased with the arrival of more people and diverse tribes, wars broke out between groups that vied for power and control of land. One tactic of warfare was cannibalism, the victor of the battle consuming the vanquished. By the time Europeans arrived, all the land had been explored and claimed by the Maori people.

New Zealand, or Aotearoa as it was called in the Maori language, was a difficult place in which to live for many among the migrating people. They had come from more tropical climates and were not used to the cold weather or local crops. Their traditional foods, for example coconut and taro, did not adapt to New Zealand. The newcomers hunted many birds and seals to the point of extinction and were forced to turn to farming.

The Dutch man Abel Tasman, in 1642, became perhaps the first European to circumnavigate (but not set foot upon) what was later called New Zealand. James Cook, in 1769, went ashore, but little is known about his experience. Cook's explorations, however, led to the arrival of European immigrants, which began about 1800. Europeans added muskets to warfare between the various Maori tribes. In 1840, a controversial treaty, written in both English and Maori, was signed between the Europeans and several hundred Maori chieftains. Into the early 2000s, the interpretation of the Waitangi Treaty remained in dispute. The translations, reportedly, often do not match. The so-called Pakeha (descendants of European settlers) claimed British authority over the lands, while the Maori claimed authority for the tribal chiefs. Through conflicts with Europeans, the Maori lost large tracts of land.

During the twentieth century, the Maori population declined dramatically due to diseases introduced by Europeans. The Maori population fell from 800,000 to 50,000. This decrease cost the native people political influence in the developing nation. However, out of this loss rose several important individuals. One of them was Apirana Ngata, who formed a political party that eventually placed Maori members in the parliament, introduced widespread health reforms, and changed the land tenure arrangements. Ngata also promoted Maori culture by collecting and publishing traditional songs and creating traditional carved meeting houses for many of the tribes. In the 1960s and 1970s, urban Maori youths protested the loss of tribal land and breaches in the Waitangi Treaty. Long protest marches and other political activity brought attention to the protest movement, and in some cases, land was given back to tribes. In the early 2000s, a Waitangi Tribunal hears cases and presides over land disputes. The Maori language is also taught. Maori radio and television stations have been established. Problems remain, however. Cases of diabetes and cancer are more frequent among Maori than among Pakeha populations. Unemployment is also higher. The Maori are known for being able to adapt, however, an ability that continues to serve them as they enter the twenty-first century.

Maori Language

Maori is a Polynesian language spoken by indigenous population in New Zealand. In 1800, the Maori language was a unifying factor among indigenous people. Though the language has dialects, it had one single source. As late as 1840, as Europeans were arriving in large numbers, the Maori language dominated. European scholars worked with the Maori to help them devise an alphabet and, therefore, a written language. Into the 1870s, missionaries and European settlers and their children learned to speak Maori, with the children becoming more fluent than the adults. This all began to change, however, as the twentieth century approached. Maori quickly became less used, and indigenous people were taught English. By the early twentieth century, speaking Maori was a punishable offense. Maori parents encouraged their children to learn English, as it was fast becoming the language of New Zealand industry. In order to succeed in an increasingly Euro-centric society, Maori children needed to be fluent in English. However, at home, the people continued to speak their native tongue. Maori remained the first language of Maori children, and the language was used exclusively in religious ceremonies.

As urbanization increasingly affected Maori people after World War II, the number of speakers of Maori fell, reaching a low point in the 1980s of an estimated 20 percent of the Maori population. Urban youths lost contact with their language and, as a consequence, often with their cultural heritage as well. A twentieth-century movement attempted to immerse preschool children in the Maori language. This effort halted the decline but did not significantly increase the numbers of Maori-speaking individuals.

Compare & Contrast

• 1980s: Research conducted at the University of Otago, New Zealand, suggests that four out of five children receive corporal punishment, with 6 percent of that group receiving what is considered extreme punishment, such as being hit with a belt or being repeatedly kicked.
  
  2000s: According to a report by the Family Help Trust, New Zealand has one of the worst child mortality rates worldwide due to child abuse. In New Zealand, twelve Maori children in every 1000 suffer abuse.
• 1980s: According to New Zealand government statistics, the Maori population stands at approximately 400,000, almost 10 percent of the total population of New Zealand.
  
  2000s: The Maori population continues to increase and is anticipated to reach one million by the middle of the twenty-first century, which would make it almost 20 percent of the total population of New Zealand.
• 1980s: According to the New Zealand Ministry of Health, alcohol consumption rises sharply in the 1980s to just under twelve liters per person annually.
  
  2000s: According to the Alcohol Advisory Council of New Zealand, over 1.2 million New Zealanders believe that regular bingeing of alcohol is an acceptable practice.

Critical Overview

The Bone People received both positive and negative reviews. Neil Hanson, writing for the Los Angeles Times, reports on the opposing verdicts: "The unknown Hulme had been the rank outsider in an international field of literary heavyweights, and while those who loved her book did so with a passion, there was no middle ground; the rest absolutely hated it. She became one of the most controversial winners in the history of the Booker [Prize]." One of the critics who enjoyed Hulme's novel was Ursula Hegi, also writing for the Los Angeles Times. Hegi calls the novel "powerful and courageous." Hegi also stresses: "Hulme is a writer who trusts her voice and accepts her inner reality as valid. The result is a novel that is mysterious and violent, gentle and unsettling, compassionate and honest."

In his article for the Seattle Times called "Years of Rejection Didn't Stop Author's Quest to Publish," Andrew Moncur refers to Hulme's book as "the novel that nobody wanted." Moncur calls the novel "a prose-poem," a work remarkable "for the absence of anything resembling a sex scene." Moncur suggests that some people speculated that "the missing ingredient" contributed to the book's being turned down by commercial publishers.

Rebecca Brown, writing for the Seattle Times, praises Hulme's style: "Her prose, which sometimes reads like poetry, is gently self-mocking and full of puns and buoyant bawdy oaths." Brown adds: "Clearly, Hulme risks falling into bathos. Nonetheless, her scampering language and ironic wit ensure that the book never lapses into sentimentality. Indeed, the almost ridiculous action of the story renders the lessons the characters learn almost sublime."

Susan P. Willens, writing for Belles Lettres, is one of those critics who attacked the book, but with a qualifying note: "At its marrow," Willens writes, "this is a simple and compelling story—but it tries to do too much. With admirable ambition Hulme wants to blend together autobiography, sociology, anthropology, and Maori and Western literary styles. The mix becomes lumpy. Still, while the novel galumphs self-consciously along, it fascinates."

Writing for the New York Times, Claudia Tate labels Hulme's first novel "unforgettably rich and pungent." Tate explains further: "Miss Hulme's provocative novel summons power with words, as in a conjurer's spell." Offering a more negative view, critic Michiko Kakutani, also for the New York Times, writes that the "huge, ambitious work that aspires to portray the clash between Maori and European cultures … never quite lives up to its billing." Kakutani cites the continual inclusion of bits and pieces of dreams as well as the length of the story as detracting features. "The language employed by Miss Hulme's characters tends to range, back and forth, from the lyrical to the crude," Kakutani adds. However, Kakutani finds the ending of the story promising. In the final chapters, in which Hulme details the "spiritual rebirth" of each character, Kakutani locates the best of Hulme's writing. "Miss Hulme finally succeeds in finding a voice capable of welding together her inclinations toward the mythic and the naturalistic." These chapters demonstrate, according to Kakutani, Hulme's "considerable, if unfulfilled, gifts as a writer."

Criticism

Joyce Hart

Hart is a published writer and former teacher. In the following essay, she examines the silences in Hulme's novel The Bone People and how the author uses them.

There are many different kinds of silences in Hulme's The Bone People. There are the obvious silences of the characters as well as those that are embedded in the story. As many teachers, poets, mentors, and public speakers (just to name a few) know, silence can be a powerful tool. So-called pregnant pauses in a speech can subdue an audience as it awaits the next words to be spoken. Hulme, who has a collection of poems called The Silence Between (1982) evidently understands the capacity of silence and has used it throughout her novel.

Hulme's use of silence in her story and her characters is sometimes obvious, such as in Simon, a child who cannot speak. Simon's silence is not total, however, for he can sing. So his vocal chords clearly work. Simon's silence is more than physiological. He has been pushed into a world without audible words because he is so afraid of saying the wrong thing. He makes hand motions instead, signals that can be read by some people but not by all. He also writes notes, which express details but not necessarily his emotions, unless someone is paying particular attention. Kerewin suggests that Simon is silent in order to gain attention. "Is his face really that easy to read, or am I just looking harder because he can't talk?" Kerewin wonders. Getting people to notice him is both positive and negative; his silence works both for and against him. At one point in the story, Kerewin remains silent for part of a day while she wanders through the small town where she lives. After this little experiment, she comes home feeling strange. People stared at her, talked louder to her, and talked behind her back. Living in that kind of silence was not appealing to Kerewin, although she has silences of her own.

Simon is also silent about his pain. He barely whimpers when he is beaten. He does not tell anyone that he has been beaten, and when anyone discovers his sores or scars, he does not tell them who injured him. This silence of fear is tinged with other emotions as well. Simon's fear might be that he could lose Joe if he reports him as the perpetrator. Joe even tells Simon that if Simon tells Kerewin, they both will lose the chance of having Kerewin join them in a family. However, Simon may also be ashamed, believing that he has done wrong and deserves to be beaten. He learns that after the beatings, his relationship with Joe improves. Tensions are released, and Joe expresses some love for the boy. Simon is likely lost in a maze of confusion, too. He remembers things about his past, such as the name Clare, that he sometimes calls himself by. He does not share this detail with anyone. Simon's past is dark and terrifying. His silence then becomes a shield or protective armor that he wraps around himself, disallowing anyone to penetrate his thoughts. However, as Kerewin discovers, sometimes a protective shield can turn into a prison.

Kerewin's silence is in many ways similar to Simon's, although hers is more subtle. She has built a tower in which to hide from the world. She has created a silence through solitude. She refers to anyone who breaks this silence as an intruder. Although the tower is material and, therefore, protects her physically, it is symbolic of the tower she has built around her emotions. She does not want to be touched, physically or emotionally. Another kind of silence surrounds Kerewin's need to be protected. Neither the narrator nor the character Kerewin ever fully explains why Kerewin insists on her silence. She was not abused as a child, she tells Joe when he asks. All she knows (or all she says) is that she has never, even when she was very young, liked being touched. She describes herself as a neuter, neither female nor male; but neuter could also refer to being neutral emotionally. She has no feelings, she implies. However, if she truly had no feelings, it would not matter if she were touched, so one might deduce that Kerewin is hiding something. Indeed, she withholds information by using silence. She does not want to talk about why she acts the way she does; why she does not want to become involved with Joe; why she does not even want to take responsibility for Joe's senseless beatings of Simon.

Kerewin's silence about her own emotions is one thing. However, Kerewin's silence about Joe's beating Simon is a different matter completely. This silence facilitates the child abuse. The illness that Kerewin suffers toward the end of the story, whether one thinks of it as a physical cancer or a psychological one, may result from all the silences that are built up inside her. The illness begins, or at least becomes most noticeable, when she finally stands up to Joe and uses her physical and mental skills to defeat him at his own game—that of picking on (or beating up) someone much smaller than he is. Kerewin uses the skills that she has learned in Aikido to outsmart and outmaneuver Joe. She defeats him. But shortly afterward, she is in serious pain. This moment signals the beginning of her disintegration, which eventually leads her to the point of death and finally a rebirth. Kerewin's pain mounts as she returns to her usual life after a vacation with Joe and Simon at the beach. Coincidentally, Kerewin's pain also mounts as Joe's beatings of Simon increase in frequency and severity. This all culminates in an important upheaval when Joe almost kills Simon and Simon almost kills Joe. Kerewin, of course, is the catalyst for this eruption, and her guilt in playing that role creates a similar upsurge inside her. The silence Kerewin has kept concerning Joe's behavior toward Simon may cause Kerewin's pain to erupt.

Joe has silences, also. Unlike Simon or Kerewin, Joe loves to talk and to be sociable. He is quite gregarious. He shares stories with anyone around him who wants to listen. When the three of them, Joe, Kerewin, and Simon, go to the little village near the beach where they spend a vacation, Joe soon has a crowd of people around him, much like he does in his own home town, despite the fact that at the beach village Joe is a complete stranger. Joe has the gift of gab. However, Joe tells Kerewin that he has often wanted to cry but could not. This is Joe's emotional silence. Joe has suffered great losses. He lost his mother when she gave him to his grandmother. Shortly afterward, Joe's father died, and Joe felt his father's death was his fault. Joe studied to be a priest then lost his desire to be religious. When he met Hana, his first wife, Joe dropped out of the teacher's college he was attending and, therefore, lost a profession. Moreover, he also lost his son and his pregnant wife to the flu. Despite all these losses, Joe never expressed his emotions freely. He kept them locked inside of him, surrounded by silence. In this case, however, the pent up emotions came out in bursts of physical violence against Simon.

Another type of silence portrayed in the novel has to do with creativity. Kerewin's creative silence is the most obvious. She is a blocked artist. Where she could once paint with confidence and express her inner thoughts or feelings by depicting them on canvas, she can no longer do so. She makes attempts at it, but the images she has, at least in her mind, are all wrong. They no longer give her pleasure or satisfaction. The creative energy is misguided or stifled and does not translate adequately. So what she might have expressed in her paintings remains unarticulated.

What Do I Read Next?

• Once Were Warriors, published in 1990, is Alan Duff's reflections, in fictionalized form, on urbanized Maori people and the problems they have faced. One of the solutions that Duff provides is a return to the traditional Maori culture.
• Hulme's Homeplaces: Three Coasts of the South Island of New Zealand (1989) is a book of essays and photographs that vividly and beautifully capture some of Hulme's favorite places.
• Besides writing fiction, Hulme is a poet. Bait is her 1992 collection of poems, which covers topics of fishing, beaches, chants, and memories of her Maori culture.
• Carson McCullers, a twentieth-century American author, is most famous for her novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), which is about the residents of a small Southern town. One of the characters in the book is a deaf mute in whom many of the townspeople confide their problems.
• Describing another culture, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1996) is also a Booker Prize winner. The story follows the lives of twins as they grow up in India under the oppression of the caste system and the political system that supports it.

Joe is an artist, too, a wood carver. But Joe keeps himself either too busy or too numb with alcohol to allow his creative energy to be expressed. He spends long hours on the job then slips on over to the local bar when he has time off and gets drunk. In this way, he can tell himself that he does not have time to be creative. So his intuitive (or creative) energies are muted.

In some ways, Simon is the most creatively expressive of the trio. He builds formations in the sand then listens to the music that comes from them. Kerewin appreciates and encourages these constructions, but Joe silences them. The forms that Simon creates scare Joe. Joe does not want anyone to know that he has heard the music (which might also be called the muse). So he goes out at night to listen in secret. Then, after hearing the sounds, Joe squashes the creations, or to put it another way, Joe silences Simon's creative expressions.

However, the three characters have one creative expression in common: music. Joe sings. Kerewin plays the guitar and sings, and Simon sings wordless melodies. But toward the end of the story, Simon destroys Kerewin's guitar. This destructive act triggers Kerewin's rage and retaliation. Kerewin punches Simon and then condemns him to Joe's brutal beating.

Kerewin, Joe, and Simon are ambivalent about having a relationship with one another. The silence in this case is like the two sides of a magnet, pulling together or pushing apart. The three characters all take steps forward and almost break through their own and each other's silences, but then one or the other takes a step back. To share love is to speak loudly to one another, both figuratively and physically. Although a lot can be said in silence, love needs expression and response.

At the end of the story, all three characters deepen the silence around them. Simon is beaten so badly, he loses his ability to hear. Simon's whole world thus grows silent. Meanwhile, Joe ends up taking care of an old Maori mystic's isolated land claim, living by himself at the edge of the sea, the only guardian of an ancient and sacred Maori secret. Kerewin also retreats from the world. She isolates herself in order to go into herself and find the source of her ailment and dissolve it. These characters find a way to heal themselves through the silence. They enter it as deeply as they can and emerge into new lives. This final silence for them might be likened to the silence of the womb. It is as if they have returned to the fetal stage, where they rebuild themselves and finally are reborn. This silence has been a potion for them, a potentially poisonous one, but they choose to use it to purge themselves of their impurities and resurface with new determination.

Silence can draw an audience in, as Hulme must realize. She does not offer many answers to the questions that her story poses. Readers are strung along the path of this story as they try to find the answers and finally realize that they must interpret the story's silences for themselves. However, Hulme might present these silences not as a technique but rather as an allegory of life itself, which is filled with different types of silences.

Source: Joyce Hart, Critical Essay on The Bone People, in Novels for Students, Thomson Gale, 2007.

Stephen D. Fox

In the following essay, Fox comments on the authors' "untraditional" treatment of disabled individuals in postcolonial New Zealand and Africa and how they "define the relationships of disability to each of the two cultures."

Two recent popular novels, Barbara King-solver's The Poisonwood Bible and Keri Hulme's The Bone People, explore postcolonial situations—in Africa and in New Zealand—and present pivotal characters with disabilities who eventually define the relationships of disability to each of the two cultures. Although the two novels have different perspectives, each appears to depart from traditional literary representations of disability that have been exploitative and highly limiting. But do they really break new ground?

Disability studies is an emerging field, still defining its theories and parameters and borrowing much of its methodology from gender, racial, post-colonial, and queer studies, which often derive from theorists such as Foucault and Derrida, but with an important difference. Whereas the other studies may overlap—lesbian writing in India could conceivably be studied by all four of the above methodologies—only disability studies is universal in its application. Disability is one of the most pervasive markers ("Body Criticism," Thomson 284-86). Anyone in any group could be, could have been, or could become a person with a disability, and everyone will experience some form of disability if he or she lives long enough. Yet critics in this new field find that authors have traditionally used, and abused, the concept of disability merely as a literary convenience, a handy metaphor for Otherness or for alternative social disturbance. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder argue that alternatives in gender, race, and sexual orientation have often been demonized by marking those groups with physical or intellectual abnormalities. Martha Stoddard Holmes sees nondisabled individuals historically defining themselves as normal by using disability as a universal metaphor for abnormality. That is, if people with disabilities did not exist, non-disabled people would have to invent them. However, the situation for characters with disability differs from other frequently marginalized groups in that they have "a plethora of representation in visual and discursive works. Consequently, disabled people's marginalization has occurred in the midst of a perpetual circulation of their images" (Mitchell and Snyder 6). Although other groups may suffer a lack of literary exposure, people with disabilities get plenty of fictional press, usually of a negative kind.

Not surprisingly, characters in fiction with disabilities almost always are flat and static. Because they most often function as symbols, their perspectives are not developed and are unimportant to the development of the plot. Physical aberration in a literary character is indicative of mental, emotional, social, or spiritual aberration or any combination of those states. Physical difference marks the outsider or the monster, who rages or is isolated and dying inside unseen, for example, Ahab in Moby-Dick or the deaf narrator in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Dracula and his heirs, including the latest Anne Rice creation, are pigment deficient, dentally freakish, and daylight-challenged—in the best nineteenth-century tradition of the "freak" sideshow. These figures, in literature as in real life, allow nondisabled people to shiver with horror as they congratulate themselves on their own normality. Because of his or her convenient symbolism, a disabled character is given a foil voice and complex personality and subjective perspective is difficult to find.

Barbara Kingsolver and Keri Hulme, appearing to split from this exploitative tradition, offer realistic, complex disabled characters, not simply metaphors. Kingsolver has a highly politicized agenda in The Poisonwood Bible: She critiques European and American imperialist policies toward Africa, oppressive patriarchal attitudes toward women, racial oppression in the American South, and alienating cultural assumptions about disabled people. Nonetheless, she gives us full characterizations and complete subjective experiences. Her characters, including Adah, who is disabled, are not symbolic pawns. They live on their own.

In The Poisonwood Bible, Nathan Price, a Southern preacher, drags his wife and four daughters to the Congo to fulfill his messianic visions. He is the only one in the novel not granted a subjective voice. The result is that he appears to be a stock character, a wild-eyed religious fanatic. Eventually his motivation is revealed to be a hellish World War II experience that left him with an overwhelming sense of evil and guilt that now compel him to confront the world and remold it, a prime situation for displaying a series of major and minor oppressions and alienations, through complex flesh-and-blood people.

The overriding theme of alienated "Otherness" and the cultural rejection of it manifests in the issue of disability. Kingsolver is aware of recent scholarship in disability studies, and in The Poisonwood Bible, she dramatically uses disability to depict cultural fear of the Other and the necessity of having the Other to define normality. The twin sisters Leah and Adah Price are the novel's examples of physical otherness. Leah's fetus is supposed to have consumed half of the brain of Adah's fetus while the two were still in the womb, thus marking both as abnormal almost from conception. The two children are assumed to be retarded and are treated as such until a sympathetic educator discovers that, on the contrary, both are geniuses. Adah with her half-brain has an extraordinary talent for languages, one quirk of which is a preference for creating, thinking, and writing in palindromes. Suspension of disbelief is strained here because medical opinion finds the coupling of hemiplegia with high-end intelligence to be extremely unlikely. Kingsolver may be stretching probability, but she has a point to make. The pendulum in the story swings the other way, and the two are still seen as freaks, now for being too smart. The irony of their situation foregrounds the fact that retardation and genius are not simply facts of nature or of medical opinion, but are culturally defined. Society uses the extremes, the nonaverages, to define what is to be called normal. Suspicion of the disabled and the superabled provides an opposing cohesion that unifies the majority as standard. Unity comes from exclusion so society must mark some individuals for exclusion. Alienation by definition is a requirement for maintaining the social fabric.

Adah is also electively mute. She chooses not to speak because she accepts her role as outsider. That is, she will not communicate with a society that does not see her as a person. Later, when she chooses her own path in life (college and medical school), instead of acquiescing to social definition, she achieves selfhood and begins to talk. She discovers that her extreme lameness had been only a cultural marking, an unconscious manifestation of her acceptance of her social monstrosity. She begins to walk almost normally.

Her family also marks her. Like all the female Prices, her wishes count as nothing against the monomania of her father, who is so obsessive and unrelenting that, against the advice of the villagers, he refuses to stop pulling up poisonwood shrubs even when their sap causes his skin to erupt painfully. He must impose his will on nature and on humankind, no matter what the consequences. In fact, his insistent imposition of his will puts both the villagers and the women in his family in the position of the colonially oppressed. In the terms of postcolonial scholarship, Nathan Price is the "dominant discourse":

The dominant discourse constructs Otherness in such way that it always contains a trace of ambivalence or anxiety about its own authority. In order to maintain authority over the Other in a colonial situation, imperial discourse strives to delineate the other as radically different from the self […]. The other can, of course, only be constructed out of the archive of "the self," yet the self must also articulate the other as inescapably different. […] Of course, what such authority least likes, and what presents it with its greatest threat, is any reminder of such ambivalence (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Empire 103)

Even Adah's mother Orleanna, faced with having to decide which child to save during a devastating invasion of army ants, hesitates, then chooses the nondisabled child, Ruth May, leaving slow-moving Adah to probable death. Adah's family marginalizes her; she is doubly oppressed, as a woman and as a disabled person.

Some feminist critics recommend considering Adah's situation from the perspectives of class and race. Nathan Price comes originally from the lowest level of Southern white society but gains some limited status through becoming a religious figure. He transports his Southern racism to the Congo and, at least in his own mind, translates the African villagers into another social stratum below himself. His attempts to impose his will on the villagers can be seen as efforts to manufacture and sustain his own classist and racial superiority, and from the angles of post-colonial studies and disability studies, he puts his daughters on the same inferior level as the Africans. In Price's hierarchy, African males, American females, and the disabled all occupy a lower social rung. His refusal to have any dealings with village women puts them on an even lower rung. The villagers, however, politely but firmly reject Nathan Price's constant assertions, seeing them as weirdly inappropriate. By their rejections they script their own selfhood and their equality to him. In the face of their assertions, he must continue to demand acquiescence or lose all pretense of superiority. Cora Kaplan notes the coordination in fiction and politics of feminine degradation with the oppression also of working classes and colonized cultures:

The unfavourable symbiosis of reason and passion ascribed to women is also used to characterize both men and women in the labouring classes and in other races and cultures. […] Through that chain of colonial associations, whole cultures became "feminized," "blackened" and "impoverished" each denigrating construction implying and invoking the others. (602)

Price's extreme obsession, which leads eventually to his abandoning his family, to insanity or at least insane behavior, and death, is the outcome of his desperate need to maintain his social, gendered, and nationalistic supremacy.

Fortunately, Adah slowly becomes aware that the African society would, on the contrary, not close the option of family to her: "I did know that many women in Kilanga were more seriously disfigured and had husbands notwithstanding" (Poisonwood 72). African culture, specifically the Congo's, liberates Adah and most of the Price women. The name "Price" is itself tempting: is it the price they pay as women, or the price—the death of youngest daughter Ruth May by snake bite, the self-destruction of their father—that African demands for freeing the others from their cultural chains? Rural Georgians see Adah, whether retarded or genius, as an atypical horror and reject her, and her physical difference identifies her alien nature. But in the Congo Adah finds that disability, in a sense, does not exist; it is so prevalent that it is seen as a normal, integrated part of life. Because disability is inevitable, people accept it and get on with their lives, like Mama Mwanza in the hut next door continues as an enthusiastic wife and mother despite a lack of legs. It is assumed that given the harshness of this life, everyone will be disabled in some way, sooner or later. Thus, disability is accented here as alternate ability. Adah is not marked as different, and her inclusion allows her to pursue selfhood when she returns home. This is a refreshing break with the long literary tradition in which the disabled individual remains pitiable because he or she functions as a symbol, not a person and either self-destructs as the abnormal should, or is destroyed by representatives of an enraged normality. True, Kingsolver plays with another stereotypical trap, the rescue by a nondisabled mentor. An older doctor persuades Adah that her lame leg is a psychosomatic reaction to social expectation. This mentor even becomes her lover, summoning up ghosts of other rescuers from Johnny Belinda to Dark Victory to The Miracle Worker. In all of those the caretaker receives most of the credit. However, King-solver is aware and astute. She has Adah recognize that no matter how many good intentions both parties have a relationship can never escape the trap of a patronizing pity. Adah drops her doctor-mentor and goes off to live life on her own terms.

We can, of course, regard this plot solution in two ways. The first, implied above, is to see King-solver's critique of attitudes toward disability. It is clear that Adah's dysfunctions are completely socially marked. When she redefines herself as unique and worthy, the stigma of her disability vanish. Just as European and American business and religious interests "colonized" (in the pejorative sense used in postcolonial critical methodology) the Congo—exploiting the country with the justification that its people were Other and inferior—so the cultural perceptions of the nondisabled people of Georgia colonized Adah. They expected a monster; so they created one. Their labels became part of her manifest flesh. In an ironic reversal, it is possible to say that the Congolese culture, by allowing Adah to reinvent herself, recolonizes her by its more appropriate physical expectations. The colonized become the colonizers, to the benefit of all.

It is wise to remember that "for Kingsolver, writing is a form of political activism." As Kingsolver's themes reject traditional cultural attitudes toward the disabled, so her literary structures deconstruct traditional exploitations of disabled characters.

Or do they? It would be possible to argue alternatively that this plot twist is a sellout that allows a relatively happy ending. Worse, we find that the disability never really existed except as a figment. Leslie Fiedler warned that certain kinds of fiction indicate a desire to erase disabled people—either "by kill or by cure"; that stories evoking pity for the handicapped also express "a wish that there were no handicapped, that they would all finally go away" (46, emphasis in original). Perhaps King-solver has had it both ways. Initially Adah is the weapon for ironizing American cultural attitudes—a useful metaphor once again. Then, after suffering Adah's disability with her for more than four hundred pages, we find our empathy and our growing critique of culture both unceremoniously dumped. We might say that this twist of events is only fair, for now we, as readers, can feel exploited by our own assumptions, just as Adah has always been. I doubt Kingsolver intends anything that devious. What saves the story from betrayal (of its themes or its characters or its readers) is the fully subjective perspective given to Adah throughout. She is a total personality and she evolves. As a person, she evades the role of metaphor because she does not simply erase her disability. Rather, she continues to acknowledge that, although she is no longer silent and limping, her past is still her: "Tall and straight I may appear, but I will always be Ada [the palindromic name that she used to identify her disabled self] inside. A crooked little person trying to tell truth. The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes" (Poisonwood 496). Here she offers a poignant recognition that we are all the totality of ourselves, present and past, and in so doing she transcends any suspicious machinations of plot.

That full characterization may help compensate for another regrettable aspect of the story as well. In her portrayal of happy, integrated, fully functioning disabled people in the Congolese village, Kingsolver is debunking one metaphor (the Otherness of disabled people) while promoting another one (the colonial romanticizing of Africa). As James Charlton's study of disability in developing countries indicates, whatever problems that Americans with disabilities may have, the situation is worse elsewhere. A real Mama Mwanza would be treated simultaneously as both pitiful and a pariah, forbidden to marry or work because she would bring bad luck and is an offense to gods and ancestors, economically oppressed and shunned, probably bereft of support services (Charlton 25, 59-60). One African word for "cripple" has even worse connotations than its English equivalent: chirema means someone, not only with mobility issues but also utterly useless, a complete failure in life (66). The rural nature of the village would make the circumstances not more bucolic as in the novel, but worse in all regards. The sense of oddity as ritual pollution and affront to the gods of natural forces would be even stronger, the shunning by family and tribe more certain and rigid, and practical assistance almost unknown (108).

We must ask if Charlton's sources can reliably speak for all African people with disabilities, and because, as postcolonial studies point out, the African continent is by no means homogeneous, we must also ask if Charlton's sources can be applied specifically to Kingsolver's Congolese culture. Charlton notes that data about the numbers and situations of individuals with disabilities in the various sectors of the planet Earth are not a problem; reliable sources such as the United Nations and independent agencies have had accurate numbers "for twenty years." On the other hand, he acknowledges that his study is limited in that it does not describe living conditions of all sectors or all disabilities. Specifically, he chooses to set AIDS aside: politics and difficulties with access have hampered his work. In fact, his African information depends on thorough interviews with numbers of people with disabilities who are also disability rights advocates, specifically in South Africa and Zimbabwe (xv). Clearly such people will emphasize problems, but Charlton's study has credibility nonetheless by constant reference to specific circumstances and facts, not just personal narratives.

The second question is trickier: can information from sources in formerly British South Africa and Zimbabwe be stretched to apply to the formerly Belgian Congo? Actually one of the consulted organizations, the Southern Africa Federation of the Disabled (SAFOD), is transnational and works in many other areas of Africa, including Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland, Zambia, and others, albeit apparently not in the Congo. At a conference organized by SAFOD in 1991 in Harare, Zimbabwe, "forty delegates came from all over Africa to discuss disability issues" (Charlton 146-47, emphasis added). That fact suggests that individuals with disabilities share a similar fate in various African cultures. Current African thinking in most regions supports a general emphasis on political and social commitment and a common aesthetic despite local "ideological differences" (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Empire 132).

Given the Africawide applicability of Charlton's information, it probably is fair to say that King-solver's liberal intentions have created an African Utopia for disability similar to how Europeans in earlier centuries fancied a New World El Dorado inhabited by Noble Savages. As a writer in the New World giving readers a romantic Africa where people are naturally compassionate and tolerant, King-solver has now partially reversed the earlier process. Kingsolver claims not to draw her characters from real life and has said that she does not remember her experience of Africa as a child seven, in 1963. The villagers she describes in her novel seem quite generalized, almost completely lacking in noteworthy or unique customs. For example, the issue of which Africa language they use never arises. Her credits at the end of the novel (perhaps intended to add political ballast to the story) include Nigerian fiction about the Ibo and Igbo people (Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart), Conrad's nineteenth-century Heart of Darkness (ostensibly about the Congo), other books on the Congo, as well as works on snakes in Southern Africa, ritual and magic from all over Africa, birds and east Africa, and folk tales from the entire continent. She also professes to have relied on friends' reports and on her own travel in other parts of Africa, but not in the Congo/Zaire (author's note ix-x). Clearly, although the history and politics in the story are Congolese, the indigenous people are (intentionally or by lack of information) generically sub-Saharan pan-Africa. Only the specifics about some rather vicious flora and fauna (crocodiles, poison-wood, army ants, asps) makes them African at all. Because of this fogging of ethnicity, applying Charl-ton's information about individuals with disabilities seems as reasonable for Kingsolver's villagers as for any real life African group.

In addition, unfortunately for Kingsolver, the task of portraying the feelings of real African village women may be, according to feminist critics such as Cora Kaplan, impossible from the beginning:

The subjectivity of women of other classes and races and with different sexual orientations can never be "objectively" or "authentically" represented in literary texts by the white, heterosexual, middle-class woman writer, however sympathetically she invents or describes such women in her narrative. (602)

This criticism seems all too applicable to The Poisonwood Bible, as Kingsolver has projected a fantasy of her own libertarian ideals onto Mama Mwanza. Indeed, it might be fair to say that Mama Mwanza (and the fingerless Tata Zinsana, the goitered Mama Nguza, and others) reveal more about Kingsolver's own liberal, middle-class desire for political intervention than about the true situation of rural, disabled Congolese.

The result in the novel is a mixed success. Kingsolver is able to humanize metaphors that elsewhere exploit people with disabilities, but she trades them for romantic (and romantic Marxian) metaphors about Africans. In the process she does a grave disservice to individuals with disability in developing countries by minimizing their actual plights. Is Kingsolver, in effect, establishing a Western humanistic ideal as a universal norm and then, after deriding its absence in the West, projecting it imperialistically onto African peoples? The entire process of colonial imposition required just such a sleight of hand as the one made by King-solver, involving a "naturalizing of constructed values" on "the unconscious level" that, instead of promoting the values of the colonized, actually makes them "peripheral" or "marginal" (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Empire 3). Ironically, by idealizing the Congolese in her pursuit of particular humanistic goals, Kingsolver erases those people's true natures and actual needs.

The Bone People also has family and cultural concerns, but Keri Hulme goes far beyond those concerns to an infusion of culturally appropriate mythic spirituality. For Maoris, family is culture is cosmic spirituality, in a series of widening vibrations (Te Awekatuku 49). The three areas are not distinguishable or separable, and the link is intergenerational as well. A Maori cut off from his family, as are all three main characters in the story, becomes ontologically isolated and a self-divided. So the three characters, before they find salvation by fusing into a spiritual and psychological triad, are initially self-destructive. Kerewin extrudes horrific art that ingests the light like her Suneater or pours forth as nightmare images on paper. Joe reels under the impact of incessant drinking, his sense of his lost wife, and a constant teetering on the edge of violence. Simon, orphaned by storm and shipwreck and adopted by Joe, insists on his elective muteness and rebelliousness. In addition to their individual angst, the three form a dysfunctional family that is physically abusive, a parody of father-mother-child relationship. Joe regularly beats Simon and tries to beat Kerewin, who, to her horror, is eventually provoked into beating Simon. On one occasion, she thoroughly beats Joe as well, and Simon deliberately provokes the beatings. As a negative triad, they are a study in self-hate and mutual flagellation.

As the two try unsuccessfully to merge, they also manifest the divided culture, the disturbed coexistence of colonial European (Pakeha) societies with Maori ones. Kerewin is genetically and culturally half and half, Joe is almost completely Maori, and Simon is European, perhaps even Scottish nobility. The violence and alcoholism are seen as outgrowths of their mutual loss of roots, of having lost a source that they have not replaced. All the major characters in the novel, not just Simon, find verbal communication unacceptable or insufficient, preferring instead visual art, drunkenness, silence, and extreme physical action. Reaching across the boundaries between people requires an effort too strenuous to be borne by mere words. Hulme's rhetoric is a fractured pastiche of half-thoughts and flash descriptions, which befits the splintered relationships." The characters' individual, familial, and cultural lives are negative because each of them lacks the spiritual infusion necessary for unity and growth, a unity that they eventually achieve after much suffering and mythic revelation. Hulme indicates that the violence, especially Joe's, represents misdirected energy and aggressiveness now split apart from the "strongly hierarchical, strongly spiritual system" of the traditional Maori family:

Once a rural and tribal people, Maoris have now become urban and divided into very small family groups. […] In the cities, you are cut off from the life of the land, the sea, your family marae, from your ancestral roots." (Hulme, "Mauri" 293)

Reestablished convergence with "'the spiritual world,' or numinous world, which all of us are part of whether we will or not" is what Hulme hopes will reconcile Maori and Pakeha societies and render the violence obsolete (Hulme and Turcotte 140, 153).

The three characters eventually solve their problem, and Simon, the child with a disability, is the pivot. Disability here is a spiritual as well as a cultural wound. Simon has a special secret ability to see human auras, those natural spiritual energies that emanate from each individual but which partake of the whole nature. At one point he tries to explain this talent to Kerewin:

ON PEOPLE? scratching his head with the pencil, frown still in place, writing again finally, ON PEOPLE.

"I don't see anything on people. Do you?"

He nods wearily. Then he keeps his head bent, apparently unwilling to look at her.

Kerewin's turn to frown.

What the hell would you see on people in the dark. Shadows in the daytime, yeah, but at night?

It's the word shadows that gives her the answer.

"Wait a minute … Sim, do you see lights on people?"

Head up fast, and his bright smile flowering. O Yes.

[…]

In the library, the books spread round them,

"Well, that's what they are. Soul-shadows. Coronas. Auras. Very few people can see them without using screens or Kirlian photography." […]

He touches by her eyes.

"No, I can't see them. I'll bet Joe can't either."

Right, says the boy, grinning wolfishly. He writes quickly, SCARED SAID NOT TO SAY.

Thus Simon is marked, not as a disabled mutant (although the local town folk see him as that), but as a young shaman, of European origin but in touch with the islands' energy and spirit. He does not communicate through speech because the situation is skewed and people are incapable of understanding each other. In such negative circumstances, violence is the only viable communication, people can only contact each other physically; and Simon is the self-appointed lightning rod for that violence. Forbidden to tell of his ability to see the souls of others, violence is his way of "speaking" and of allowing others also to "speak" through their violence toward him. His "disability" becomes a bridge between the two adults and between the two cultures. Simon is completely conscious of using violence for mediation. He chooses this role and becomes the agent that creates a new, united community to replace the fragmented old one:

All morning the feeling had grown, start a fight and stop the illwill between his father and Kerewin. Get rid of the anger round the woman, stop the rift with blows, with pain, then pity, then repair, then good humour again. It works that way … it always did. There isn't much time left for anything to grow anymore. It must be in this place, or the break will come, and nothing will grow anymore.

So start a fight.

Simon is sensitive to the precise status of the relationship, to its fractures and fault lines, and he knows just when to apply the ameliorating explosion.

Kerewin and Joe are first aware of each other in a bar. Joe is drunk and loud; Kerewin feels contempt for him, and they do not make contact. The two are brought together only when Simon invades Kerewin's isolated tower home, forcing Joe to come for him. Simon continues to be the agent that propels them out of their shells and into each other's lives. Like Kingsolver's Adah, Simon is supernormal and would generate fear in both cultural communities if knowledge of his talent were to be widespread. He must reach people, not through his divine gifts, which they would reject, but through physical action, the only means they are able to understand and to accept.

All the major characters in the novel are disabled in the sense that they are emotionally and psychologically crippled. Literally, the eponymous "bone people" are the displaced bones of the Maori ancestors, but more generally they signify all the displaced people "orphaned" by family schism (Tawake 330). Additionally the "bone people" can denote the totemic waima in the story: the mystical disfigured person Kerewin encounters; the old man, Tiaki Mira, who helps Joe; and Simon himself (Hulme and Turcotte 142). Because everyone has a wairua—"an unseen double, a soul-shadow, your own spirit"—these figures can be seen as extensions or doubles of Kerewin and Joe (Hulme, "Myth" 33). And everyone's invisible soul doubles, the auras, are seen as well, by Simon.

Thus Hulme seems to agree with the perspective of the African villagers in The Poisonwood Bible that sees disability, not as sinister Other, but as something positive. Both books direct attention to post-colonial situations and attitudes, and both seem to posit non-Western spiritualities, a cultural oneness with the land, as a rebuttal to Western fragmentation and compartmentalization. The village of Kilanga has a solid culture that both accepts and respects the laws of the surrounding jungle. The spiritual beliefs of the villagers accord with the natural forces around them. Nathan Price with his Christian fundamentalism is utterly at odds with those forces. His insistence, against local advice, on growing Western vegetables by Western farming methods leads only to humiliating failure. Perhaps the best example of his being at odds with African natural forces is his demand that all children be baptized in the local river, ignoring the very real problem of crocodiles. That idea is politely but firmly rebuffed, and the credibility of his Western god declines still further.

Adah's empathy for the truths of the village enables her to free herself of injurious Western definitions: "In the way of the body and other people's judgment I enjoy a benign approval in Kilanga that I have never, ever known in Bethlehem, Georgia" (Poisonwood 72). Later she adds, "In that other long-ago place, America, I was a failed combination of too-weak body and overstrong will. But in Congo I am those things perfectly united: Adah." Disability is natural—literally part of the spirit of nature. Adah is normal because her essence transcends her body:

The Bantu speak of "self as a vision residing inside, peering out through the eyeholes of the body, waiting for whatever happens next. Using the body as a mask, muntu [self] watches and waits without fear, because muntu itself cannot die. The transition from spirit to body and back to spirit again is merely a venture. (343)

These comments late in the book corroborate what her mother Orleanna had said to Nathan early after their arrival in Kilanga about the prevalence of disability among the villagers:

Father said, "They are living in darkness. Broken in body and soul, and don't even see how they could be healed."

Mama said, "Well, maybe they take a different view of their bodies."

Father says the body is the temple. […]

She took the pins out and said to him, "Well, here in Africa that temple has to do a hateful lot of work in a day." She said, "Why, Nathan, here they have to use their bodies like we use things at home—like your clothes or your garden tools or something. Where you'd be wearing out the knees of your trousers, sir, they just have to go ahead and wear out their knees!" (53, emphasis in original)

Georgia Christian wrote shame onto Adah's existence: "Recently it has been decided, grudgingly, that dark skin or lameness may not be entirely one's fault, but one still ought to show good manners to act ashamed" (493, emphasis in original). The alternative African mystic vision of the eternal self beyond temporary physical aberration "abled" Adah.

Similarly in The Bone People, Kerewin and Joe move out of isolation—and the self-destructive behavior that goes with it—only after near-death visions that are accepted by the text as mystic. Kerewin's cancer goes away when she sequesters herself in a natural retreat appropriately owned by her estranged family, and Joe's vision of the underground water prepare them to join the Triad with Simon. They become the triple-headed figurine, created in a fire by Kerewin, with their three faces and hair entwined. The three people are shriven in preparation for rebirth: Kerewin's cancer is a diseased, false pregnancy that will be replaced by a true son, Simon, who is also the "sun child" who replaces the destructive Suneater, her artistic monstrosity. Joe must survive a belly wound, making him a kind of Fisher King whose renewal will be tied to that of the land itself. And Simon must transcend a near-fatal beating.

The Maori see themselves as one with the land, and, until the British arrived, they had no concept of land as commodity, as something to be owned:

Papatuanuku is the Earth Mother, combining all elements of the planet; her immediate form is whenua, the land. Continuing the organic metaphor, whenua is also the Maori word for the placenta, which is promptly buried with simple ritual after birth. The practice is still observed today, even in cities; thus the word itself reflects the relationship between people and the land […]. (Te Awekotuku 33)

Each character must reunite with the land before he or she can merge again with family and society, for "the Maori relationship to the land is intense" and "everything growing or moving on the land […] has a relationship with humanity" (Hulme, "Mauri" 302-04).

It is appropriate that when she goes into retreat and cures herself Kerewin leaves the Triad sculpture buried in embers and takes a small bag of earth from near her tower. Her connection with the Earth Mother and with the concept of home will go with her, as the Triad is baked in what is both a funeral pyre and a phoenix's rebirth. Hulme's emphasis on place also suggests the general privileging of space over time noted by postcolonial scholars:

Post-colonial literary theory, then, has begun to deal with the problems of transmuting time into space, with the present struggling out of the past, as it attempts to construct a future. […] Place is extremely important in all models, and epistemologies have developed which privilege space over time as the most important ordering concept of reality. (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tilfin, Empire 36-37)

In the novel, Hulme's awareness of the Maori past evolves into the vision of a syncretic future that encompasses both Maori and European derivations. Because Kerewin considers entering the fire herself, it is both an image of death—the dissolution of self—and of necessary purgation. In fact, transformations occur for a number of properties connected with the three characters. All three have haircuts, and because hair is one of the oldest symbols of the life force, the loss of their hair suggests the shriving of their old lives. Meanwhile, the painful fishhook in Simon's thumb is supplanted by the jade hook Joe gives Kerewin, said by Kerewin to be set into her heart. A braid from Simon's hair is attached to the jade ("greenstone"), which is the color of his eyes and a substance the Maoris consider mystical (Hulme, "Mauri" 307). Clearly Simon is marked as transcendent.

After Kerewin returns, she destroys the tower in which she had lived in isolation and constructs instead a spiral house along the lines of the chambered nautilus. Here the shellfish theme that recurs in the novel is a superb symbol of inclusion. The concept of family in the larger Maori sense is thereby fulfilled: Kerewin is reconciled to her own family on all levels, from a nuclear family of parents and child to her whole tribe and to humanity and the entire Earth. Individual selves are preserved within the separate chambers, all within the unity of the society in accord with the natural, spiritual realm, the nautilus. Simon is the agent of this fruitful evolution, which unfortunately puts him squarely in the tradition that views people with disabilities in the other extreme, as links with the divine. Again, the norm is defined by contrast with the abnormal, only in The Bone People, it is the supernormal. Therefore, Hulme's treatment of disability is problematic as is Kingsolver's. Treating difference as heroic or mystical is in keeping with Maori beliefs as well as with those of many other peoples (for example, the Yoruba of Nigeria. But that treatment has the unfortunate side effect of placing people with disabilities above others and hence regarded as separate and abnormal. Hulme, like Kingsolver, allows her character with disability to emerge as a fully complex individual with a personal perspective on events and an evolution of self. These characters are saved from the traditional literary exploitation, but only by the implementation of yet another traditional metaphor, the disability as divinely linked. This problem with disability may be countered, however, by postcolonial benefits; Hulme is privileging precolonial beliefs and so subverting the European domination of her people.

In the process of this unification, Hulme also creates bridges across lines of class, race, and gender. The three main characters represent the three social strata: European aristocracy (Simon, probably of Scottish nobility), New Zealand middle class (Kerewin, who is educated, has traveled and has studied martial arts), and New Zealand working class (Joe). At the same time those three represent the two races, Pakeha and Maori (Simon and Joe) and the hybridization of the two (Kerewin, who at the close of the novel is also the fulcrum for the hybridization of all cultures and personalities in the new nautilus structure). Finally Kerewin completely subverts Joe's attempts at male domination, both physically and emotionally, attaining gender equality. The resulting synthesis is sweeping, encompassing all perspectives.

Hulme is in an excellent position to rescript the cultural concept of disability and other Western perspectives. As residents of a "settler colony," the Maori are "doubly marginalized," pushed to the psychic and political edge of societies [… they] have experienced the dilemma of colonial alienation. For this reason they demonstrate a capacity, far greater than that of white settler societies, to subvert received assumptions about literature […]. (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Empire 144)

We might add, "assumptions" about culture in general. Thus Hulme's hybridized, syncretic cultural solution is typical of the literature from her kind of postcolonial situation: "This is a strategy of subversion and appropriation" (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Empire 154). In this case, disability provides the means.

Thus, Barbara Kingsolver and Keri Hulme are proceeding toward inclusiveness. Their novels reject past Western concepts of disability as their writings move beyond the traditional literary use of disabled figures as metaphors by which to define normal society. Adah and Simon are representational—symbolic, if you like—but no more so than other major characters. Their human complexity is as deeply portrayed as that of the non-disabled characters; they are allowed their own subjective viewpoints and development. Regrettably, Kingsolver romanticizes African disability; and, much more understandably given Maori tradition, Hulme associates disability with mysticism. Both attitudes are distortions. In sum, the portrayal of disability in the two novels may not be entirely naturalistic, but it displays a fullness and respect for the characters with disability not traditionally found in literature.

Source: Stephen D. Fox, "Barbara Kingsolver and Keri Hulme: Disability, Family, and Culture," in Critique, Vol. 45, No. 4, Summer 2004, pp. 405-20.

Thomas E. Benediktsson

In the following essay, Benediktsson examines the "ruptures in realisms" in Hulme's novel that are attempts to find alternatives to the Western ideology that supports "unhealthy realism."

Realism in the contemporary novel depends on two contradictory claims. The first one is that the narrative is not literally true. The familiar statement in the frontispiece that "the characters and incidents portrayed herein are entirely imaginary and bear no resemblance to real persons, living or dead" is not only a protection against lawsuit but also a statement of the conscious fictionality of realistic narrative. Of course, that statement is duplicitous if viewed in the light of realism's second claim, that the work bears a resemblance to social and psychological reality, that in important ways it tells us the truth about "the effect of experience on individuals" if not about "the nature of experience itself." The distinction is Edward Eigner's, who argues that the attempt in the nineteenth-century novel to reconcile scientific truth with metaphysical truth was initiated to discredit the empirical, not to validate it. In this paper I am taking a similar position: attempts to reconcile realism with the supernatural in the contemporary postcolonial novel are undertaken in an effort to undermine the ideological base that supports realism.

The act of reading a realist text, then, is based on the reader's conscious or unconscious assimilations of the text's incorporated contradictions: fictionality and mimesis. Like Chief Broom in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, readers (I should say readers innocent of literary theory) say to themselves "It's the truth, even if it didn't happen."

Increasingly, however, theory has focused our attention on realism's first claim by attacking the second. Defining mimesis as a set of conventions, structuralism analyzed its arbitrary, elaborated codes. Terry Eagleton discusses S/Z, Roland Barthes's classic structuralist study of mimesis as the "work of the break," which points the way toward poststructuralism by emphasizing the "irreducibly plural" nature of texts (138). Poststructuralism, asserting that language does not so much reflect reality as create the reality we know, had led in the 1970s and early 1980s to many discussions of the way realistic texts construct and deconstruct their own claims to representations.

The poststructuralist "death of the author" (Barthes) has led us in two directions: on the one hand into an emphasis on textuality and intertextuality, on the other to an exploration of the social and material conditions that generate literary texts. In this latter respect the text is "always charged by ideology—those unspoken collective understandings, conventions, stories and cultural practices that uphold systems of social power" (Kaplan 6). For some, then, realism engages in an active dialogue with a changing culture, creating and critiquing its meanings. In that sense realism is "one of the crucial symbolic forms through which collective sense is forged" (Pendergast 217). For other poststructuralist critics, the realist novel, born in the late eighteenth century and persisting in a conservative literary tradition into the present, is part of the vast project of bourgeois capitalism; its emphases on totalization and closure, in fact on the mimetic correspondence between narrative form and social reality, are hegemonic, or as Derrida puts it, "a matter for the police" (102). Ruptures in realism—violations of its codes—can be construed as acts of rebellion against this tyranny.

In this essay I would like to examine some "ruptures" in the realism of two postcolonial novels, each of which attempts to find alternatives to the Western rationalism, pragmatism, and linearity that support realism's codes. In the first, Leslie Silko's Ceremony, Tayo, half white and half Pueblo Indian, is a young World War II veteran who, as a prisoner of war, cursed the jungle monsoon that he felt was causing his step-brother's death. Having returned to the reservation after a time in a veteran's hospital, Tayo is convinced that his curse caused the drought that is now afflicting his reservation. Suffering from his guilt and from other forms of distress, Tayo learns that his illness is part of a larger pattern of evil—the "witchery" brought about by those who seek the world's destruction. Tayo is healed by a series of Pueblo and Navaho purification ceremonies and by a personal ceremony he performs for himself. During his quest he has an encounter with a mysterious young woman named Ts'eh, later identified as Spider Woman, a supernatural figure from Pueblo legend.

The second work I will discuss is Keri Hulme's The Bone People, a novel first published in 1984, by the Spiral Collective, an independent press formed in New Zealand to bring out the book after it had been rejected by the major publishers in that country. Kerewin Holmes, part white and part Maori, is a failed artist who lives alone in a stone tower by the ocean. Her alcoholic solitude is broken by the wayward mute orphan child Simon and by his stepfather Joe, a nearly full-blooded Maori. Kerewin's growing love for Joe is blighted by her discovery that he brutally beats Simon, and she decides tragically to intervene. When she gives Joe permission to beat Simon, and he beats the child nearly to death, he is imprisoned and Simon institutionalized. Kerewin, afflicted by stomach cancer, withdraws to a distant place to die; she is cured by the miraculous intervention of a supernatural figure. Joe, released from prison, is cured of his violence and guilt by the discovery of a sacred place, the landing-site of one of the original Great Canoes. Simon, escaping from his foster home, is reunited with Kerewin and Joe at the end, as his character blends with Maui, the Trickster figure of Maori myth.

These two novels share a plot that has become common in the postcolonial novel. In labelling novels by an American Indian and a New Zealand Maori "postcolonial," I am using the term in a fairly broad sense. My point is that the plot pattern I have identified here, common in postcolonial novelists as diverse as Achebe, Narayan, and Ousmene, is a literary representation of a deep cultural conflict among formerly colonized people. A member of an oppressed and marginalized people is suffering from a grave illness, a malady that seems simultaneously to be psychological, physical, and spiritual. Eventually this character is healed through traditional ritual and through a literal encounter with the supernatural, whose reawakening accompanies the main character's rebirth. At the end of the novel this powerless person has appropriated a source of transcendent power, and there is hope for a new society based on the values of the reborn traditional culture: as Silko puts it at the end of Ceremony, the witchery "is dead for now" (261).

The form of both novels involves breaking the codes of realism, not only introducing romance elements and evoking the supernatural, but also disrupting the linearity of the narrative and altering its spatial and psychological geography. The stream-of-consciousness technique, used in both novels, alters rationalism through the nonrational flow of sensation, perception, and intuition. The introduction of myth layers the text further by juxtaposing the temporal with the timeless, the diachronic with the synchronic. These textual strategies not only force the Western reader to abandon empiricism, but they also create a fictive realm of possibility and power—the possibility of the awakening of the traditional gods, and the power of those reawakened gods to cure the postcolonial malaise …

Unlike Ceremony, The Bone People does not include traditional myths and stories that challenge realism's codes. Rich in physical and psychological detail, the novel's dialogue and indirect discourse employ a pungent New Zealand vernacular interspersed with Maori phrases, which are translated in an appendix. With considerable vividness and plenitude of detail, there is a strong impression of verisimilitude. The ruptures in realism occur in other ways.

The first is an issue that should in some ways reinforce rather than subvert the novel's claim of mimesis. The name "Kerewin Holmes" bears obvious similarity to that of the author Keri Hulme. We suspect that Joe, Simon, and other characters have living counterparts as well, and we are thus encouraged to read the text both as novel and as autobiography. Thus the novel may contain traces of an implied autobiographical text or texts. Tempted to deconstruct the text as we read it, we search for autobiographical clues that may or may not be present in a narrative that in other ways proclaims its fictionality. This double reading does subvert realism.

Traces of still other texts abound in The Bone People. The lonely woman living in a stone tower by the sea, visited by a mute child, a changeling who himself came from the sea—the plot is redolent of fairy tale, of Celtic romance. Further, since Kerewin is both eclectically well-read and verbally histrionic, her voice, which dominates the text, is filled with allusions and echoes. And finally, the technical influence of James Joyce is ubiquitous.

These intertextual elements, leading the reader to an encounter with the materiality of the text itself, comprise ruptures in realism. As in Ceremony, the linear flow of the narrative is altered through the introduction of a controlling metaphor or hermeneutic trope—not the spider web of Thought Woman's design, but the spiral, a design element in Maori art that has special meaning to Kerewin and ultimately to the narrative itself, which will move not only linearly but in a spiralling, concentric pattern, as Kerewin and Joe confront their innermost fears and desires. Like Ceremony, realism here is ruptured irrevocably by the introduction of the supernatural that accompanies the reawakening of the traditional gods.

Late in the novel, when Joe meets the kaumatua (old man) who has been guarding the sacred site of the landfall of one of the Great Canoes, he learns that he, Kerewin, and Simon are the foretold new guardians. He also learns that the spiritual power of the place emanates not from the site but from a stone that came on the canoe, a stone holding a mauriora (life-power) that has not yet departed from the world. After the kaumatua's death, when Joe takes the stone with him, there is hope that Kerewin, Joe, and Simon—reunited and cured of madness, illness, and violence—will create a new "marae" or site of community, inspired by the presence of the awakened mauriora. Like Tayo, they represent hope for a new world.

Both Ceremony and The Bone People portray characters who are at first trapped in narratives of victimization and oppression, narratives inscribed and supported by the codes of realism. It is the ideological task of realism to make its structures seem "natural" and "inevitable"—"natural" in the conviction that language offers a clear and undistorted view of social reality, and "inevitable" in the conviction that the social reality portrayed exercises a determining influence on the life of an individual. Tayo's plight is the necessary outcome of the oppression of the American Indian. Joe's abuse of Simon is the necessary behavior of a Maori who, brutally beaten himself as a child and deeply thwarted in his life, cannot cure himself of violence. For Tayo and Joe to evade their "fates" is for the novels in which those lives are inscribed to evade the structures of realism.

In that sense, we could argue that Silko and Hulme, in providing their characters with an escape from their narratives, may have devised sentimental evasions, fantasy solutions for problems that cannot be solved in "real life," but which can be solved literarily by disrupting mimesis, the correspondence of "fiction" to "life." Violating the reader's sense of verisimilitude and probability, attaching magical "happy endings" to otherwise tragically determined narratives, Silko and Hulme may be evading responsibility for their own plots; as one cynical student put it when my class finished The Bone People, "Well, roll the credits!"

The evasion might be not only sentimental but also political. Ceremony was written toward the end of a time of activism when American Indians, in an effort to call attention to their historic oppression, demonstrated at Wounded Knee Battlefield, occupied Alcatraz Island, and called for the restoration of traditional salmon fishing rights in the Columbia River. Hulme's novel, written a few years later, coincided with a Maori nationalist movement that led to some parliamentary reforms but has otherwise polarized New Zealand society. Both novels, by dramatizing the awakening of a traditional spirituality and by portraying characters who heal themselves by rejecting conflict, may be advocating quietism and avoiding the threatening but potentially more effective arena of political action, an arena avoided by both authors …

In The Bone People, as in Ceremony, the mixed ancestry of the protagonist is emphasized. Kerewin is only part Maori by blood, but like Tayo, the native part of her is the deepest:

"It's very strange, but whereas by blood, flesh and inheritance, I am but an eighth Maori, by heart, spirit, and inclination, I feel all Maori." She looked down into the drink, "I used to. Now it feels like the best part of me has got lost in the way I live."

Though many New Zealanders can claim mixed ancestry, Hulme stresses Kerewin's marginality in other ways—her solitude, the tragic break with her family that has led to the failure of her art. Kerewin's sexuality is also marginal:

"… I've never been attracted to men. Or women. Or anything else. It's difficult to explain, and nobody has ever believed it when I have tried to explain, but while I have an apparently normal female body, I don't have any sexual urge or appetite. I think I am a neuter."

Hulme stresses Kerewin's androgyny. Physically powerful, she smokes cigars, performs hard physical labor when the occasion warrants it, and dominates the few relationships she enters. Trained in the combat skills if not the spiritual discipline of aikido, she intervenes in Joe's violence toward Simon violently. She beats Joe to insensibility; and having thereby established her dominance over him, she makes him promise never to beat Simon again without her permission, a permission which, tragically, she gives.

At a public reading of her work at Montclair State College in May 1987, Hulme remarked that violence against children is a pervasive social problem in New Zealand, among Maoris and Pakeha (white New Zealanders) alike, and that she had written The Bone People in part to draw attention to it. In this culture of violence, the key to personal redemption for both Joe and Kerewin is the renunciation of violence. The Maori society discovered by the Europeans who colonized New Zealand was itself exceptionally violent, with ritual cannibalism and continual bloody warfare among rival clans and kingdoms. To heal her characters through a recovery of Maori spirituality, Hulme, like Silko, must create an alternative narrative of Maori culture.

The kaumatua, an old man with facial tattoos inscribed in a pattern not seen for hundreds of years, is, like Betonie in Ceremony, the key to Joe's healing and to the recovery of a lost spirituality. Known in his neighborhood as "the last of the cannibals," he tells Joe of his relationship with his grandmother, who urged him to eat of her flesh when she died. Unable to do that, he took over her life's work, the guardianship of the sacred stone. In describing to Joe the nature of the spirit he guards, he, like Betonie, is the spokesman for the author's revision of traditional history:

I was taught that it was the old people's belief that this country, and our people, are different and special. That something very great had allied itself with some of us, had given itself to us. But we changed. We ceased to nurture the land. We fought among ourselves. We were overcome by those white people in their hordes. We were broken and diminished. We forgot what we could have been, that Aotearoa was the shining land. Maybe it will be again … be that as it will, that thing that allied itself to us is still here. I take care of it, because it sleeps now. It retired into itself when the world changed, when the people changed.

The "sleeping god" to whom the kaumatua has dedicated his life is the spirit of a powerful, nonviolent spirituality that was debased, not only by the Europeans but also by the original Polynesian settlers who became the Maoris. If this "mauriora" were to awaken, an entirely new society, constructed on principles even more ancient than those of the Maoris, would be formed.

When, after the kaumatua's death, Joe brings the stone that holds the mauriora to Kerewin's property in Whangaroa, it sinks deep into the earth. The spiral house Kerewin builds there, and the family relationship that is established among the white child and the two Maoris, represent not only their triumph over their own personal demons but also the germ of a new society, neither Pakeha nor Maori, whose spirituality is based on the mauriora life-energy, now grounded in the land and in its people. The people has awakened:

They were nothing more than people, by themselves. Even paired, any pairing, they would have been nothing more than people by themselves. But all together, they have become the heart and muscles and mind of something perilous and new, something strange and growing and great.

Together, all together, they are the instruments of change.

In both novels the central characters will become leaders of a revitalized society, one that embraces traditional spirituality but that does not seek the counter-Manicheanism of nationalism. The ideological project of the novels is not to overturn the white culture but to transform it. In the process, realism as a literary mode of representation has been transformed.

These speculations have led us from a consideration of the technical disruptions of realism into a discussion of the political stance of the novels. Yet we have not really digressed; realism is intrinsically ideological. Barthes argues that realism is "unhealthy" because it denies that language is socially constructed (Eagleton 135). Its claim that it is natural and that it offers the only way to view the world is totalitarian and hegemonic, an esthetic equivalent of colonialism. The gods reawaken: Silko and Hulme disrupt "unhealthy" realism in order to heal their characters, just as they challenge the narrative of colonial oppression in order to offer an alternative narrative of entitlement.

Source: Thomas E. Benediktsson, "The Reawakening of the Gods: Realism and the Supernatural in Silko and Hulme," in Critique, Vol. 33, No. 2, Winter 1992, pp. 121-31.

Randall D'Arcy

In the following review, D'Arcy notes the question of "national and international cultural politics" involved in the critical reception of The Bone People.

In her preface to The Bone People, Keri Hulme describes the novel's development from a short story, and its publishing history:

"Simon Peter's Shell" began to warp into a novel. The characters wouldn't go away. They took 12 years to reach this shape. To me, it's a finished shape, so finished that I don't want to have anything to do with any alternation of it. Which is why I was to embalm the whole thing in a block of perspex when the first three publishers turned it down on the grounds, among others, that it was too large, too unwieldy, too different when compared with the normal shape of novel.

Enter, to sound of trumpets and cowrieshell rattles, the Spiral Collective.

Yet in this preface, ironically, Hulme has indeed altered the "finished shape" of her published text by providing a blueprint for the imaginative expansion of its many myths. Four years after it was first published, the text is a character in another, ongoing series of legends and stories, all interwoven with the reception and interpretations of an international crowd of critics and readers.

One popular legends is that The Bone People was summarily rejected outright by commercial publishers (dominated by white, middle-class males) and was rescued only through the efforts of Spiral. It went on to dramatic sales and critical success in New Zealand, won the coveted Booker McConnell Prize, vindicating Hulme's talent and determination, the faith and efforts of Spiral, and feminist endeavour. Many critics included this legend, or another version of it, almost as an incantation, using it to support their particular position. Australian and New Zealand publishers look very stupid not to have recognized the novel's potential, and Elizabeth Webby wrote ruefully in 1975 that readers in Australia would now have to wait for the copies from London and New York.

A year after The Bone People was first published, C. K. Stead, in response to the text which he described as "touch[ing] a number or currently, or fashionably, sensitive nerves", tried to defuse the legend by arguing that one of the three rejecting publishers was a feminist, who found it "insufficiently feminist for her list", and the two others did not so much "turn it down" as ask for more work to be done on it.

One could argue that, from the point of view of the author, rejection is rejection, but in Sandi Hall's interview in "Broadsheet," Keri Hulme herself tears away part of the towering legend by describing the early support of a male "commercial" publisher, David Elworthy at Collins (NZ), who tried to publish the novel but was prevented by Collin's London office. This makes sense in light of how critics and readers of both genders and different classes and cultures in New Zealand, from isolated Maori communities to post-modernist contributors to Landfall, embraced the novel in various ways, and to the difficulties in reception and understanding the novel encountered in the UK and, to a lesser degree, the USA.

The enthusiastic reception in New Zealand during 1984–85 was not, as far as I can tell, particularly "feminist" in its orientation; the relationship between Maori and Pakeha cultures appears to have been a more central focus. Miriama Evans preferred to discuss the novel in the context of politics and Maori literature rather than within "feminist perspectives". The Listener published two reviews, one Maori (Arapera Blank), one Pakeha (Joy Crowley), both profoundly supportive:

Keri Hulme, tena koe, whanaunga o roto o Ngai-Tahu o Ngati-Mamoe! You have the nerve to leave the reader with the heart-acne of responding to the crying of many aching bones!

and

We have known this book all our lives…. We are the bone people. Keri Hulme sat in our skulls while she wrote this work.

Peter Simpson, in a more conventionally "critical" review (published in 1984 in both New Zealand and Australia), like Crowley and others, claimed the work for Pakeha as well as Maori readers:

The Bone People might be seen not only as a cultural document of immense significance to New Zealanders of all races and as a major novel in its own right, but also as an important advance in the development of New Zealand fiction, effecting a new synthesis of the previously distinct Maori and Pakeha fictional traditions.

Then, in 1985, the joint Spiral/Hodder and Stoughton edition was published in the UK. One of the earliest reviews there was by the New Zealander Fleur Adcock who, like Stead, was not prepared to be swayed by the novel's legendary status:

Wary of hype, I approached it with caution. A few pages of arty prose at the beginning did nothing to reassure me; but once the narrative gets going the style settles down into something readable while still rich, varied and flexible, and the story becomes utterly compelling.

Adcock's review, taken in isolation, might be read as one of modified support, respectful of Hulme's achievement if not entirely won over by it. Unfortunately, this position was undercut at the start by her opening line: "It is hard to be sure whether this remarkable novel is a masterpiece or just a glorious mess." This phrase seems to have set the tone for what was to follow. In the following months, The Bone People was outspokenly "rejected" by most UK reviewers, and even the more balanced critics tended to use their most original lines for snide remarks.

This archipelago of hostility did not erupt until after the novel was short-listed for the Booker McConnell prize on 30 September, 1985. Most novels receive some unfavourable reviews, but an overwhelmingly 'negative' reception is usually a silent reception (at least in Australia) unless reviewers think a 'point' has to be made. It appears that if a prize as lucrative and prestigious as the Booker is at stake, the silent treatment cannot be considered. The power of the Booker shortlist alone in selling books and making author's reputations is enormous, and winning puts the author and title in a different category altogether.

In 1985, the members of the Booker judging panel were under some pressure. Claire Tomalin reported that the judges had been accused of selecting only "good reads for the public", but that "their spokesman … has just reaffirmed that the prize is meant to be for serious fiction, possibly risky or experimental fiction at that, fiction of lasting value—well, lasting enough to be 'still read in 20 years'." One judge, Norman St John Stevas, was reported as asserting that "he and his team [had] chosen their list not at all on the basis of the good read, but for being serious, major and well-written, even though they may be abnormal or upsetting books." The previous year's prize had gone to Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac, a polished novel but an un-upsetting choice; in 1985 Brookner's Family and Friends (and Thomas Keneally's A Family Madness) were significant by their absence on the shortlist.

When it was not accused of being "abnormal or upsetting," The Bone People was considered a "dark horse" from the start in a contest the London papers treated as a horse-race, giving 'tips' and betting odds. "Not Hulme," wrote Tomalin, "because her book is more a prodigious curiosity than an achieved novel."

By 12 October, the media seemed to be grooming Peter Carey as the winner, and in the week before the announcement, The Bone People was ranked fairly low:

No. No one could remember or even pronounce her name…. And moreover, the whole feel of her winning would be akin to J. M. Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael Kin 1983.

(Joseph Connolly, The Standard, 24 Oct. 1985.)

The language is rich and powerful…. The fly in the ointment is Kerewin, whose ability to fling a man over her shoulder while spouting tracts of poetry may do much for the spirit of New Zealand women but leaves the non-antipodean reader cold and not entirely convinced.

(The Economist, 26 Oct.)

The Bone People … is a very depressing book indeed … I was unable to finish, even in the course of duty.

(Angela Huth, Listener, 24 Oct.)

Only a few days later, the Mail on Sunday gave Hulme the second-highest "score", and by the eve of the announcement, 31 October, W. L. Webb had narrowed the choice to the "antipodean odd couple". However, most Booker-watchers saw Hulme's win as a big surprise, and reactions were suspicious (Carey would have won, it was suggested in the Standard, if all the judges had been present), hostile and disappointed.

The actual winner of the Booker McConnel Prize is a longer book, a longer yawn.

(London Review of Books, 21 Nov.)

The strangest novel ever to win the Booker…. That there is insight and some wild poetry in The Bone People … cannot be denied, but … Keri Hulme has hardly shaped it into a finished fiction in the way that … Peter Carey managed.

(W. L. Webb, The Guardian, 1 Nov.)

Three weeks after the prize was announced, Lorna Sage in the Times Literary Supplement admitted that The Bone People had survived the critical assault; "proving more readable than some people feared. Publishers Hodder and Stoughton … report sales of 17,500 since the prize was announced, which makes 27,500 to date in this country, not to mention an extraordinary 35,000 copies in New Zealand."Last but not least, Alastair Niven finally gave the novel a strong positive review in British Book News in February 1986.

The main reception in the USA began shortly after the Booker Prize was announced. Early reviews by Claudia Tate in the New York Times Book Review and the Australian Elizabeth Ward in the Washington Post acknowledged the Booker Prize but not the controversy, and were very positive. Ward's incorporated the "legend", borrowed from the Guardian. More reserved and mixed reviews plus brief positive acknowledgments appeared later in journals. Although most US reviewers acknowledged the novel's importance in the context of New Zealand culture, its originality in language and form, the reception was disparate compared to those of New Zealand (and Australia) and the UK. Susan Willens's review, published in the context of other Australian/New Zealand fiction praised the "rich and strange" world, but admitted to being overwhelmed by the effort of reading so much unfamiliar text: "The effect of all the cultural education on the reader is too much, like being locked in the Natural History Museum overnight."

It is tempting to construct schematic patterns of extreme affection and violence in the reception of The Bone People and to blame this on Hulme's infectious storytelling. It is possible to take the 'evidence' of hastily compiled journal reviews too seriously but, read together, the UK response does form a pattern, almost a negative image of the predominant New Zealand acclaim. The dramatic circumstances of the novel's own history I think contribute to this. The UK responses to the Booker shortlist and prize bring out not so much an antidote to New Zealand's accolades than a concentrated expression of a hegemonic attitude to what constitutes literary value in the UK publishing/reviewing establishment. The different hegemony in New Zealand has recently been analysed by Simon During, and expatriate New Zealander.

the book's rapturous reception owes more to the desire of New Zealand to see a reconciliation of its post-colonising and postcolonised discourses than it does to either close reading of the text itself, or an examination of the book's cultural political effects.

The reception of The Bone People raises a number of interesting questions of national and international cultural politics, and the production of literary value, that would merit a much lengthier investigation.

Source: Randall D'Arcy, "Keri Hulme's The Bone People and the Literary Lottery," in Hecate, Vol. 14, No. 1, May 31, 1988, p. 71.

Sources

Brown, Rebecca, "First-Rank Debut—Novel from New Zealand Masterfully Captures Spirit of Country's Native Culture," in Seattle Times, January 5, 1986, p. J10.

Hanson, Neil, "Bone People, Fishing and a Search for Bait," in Los Angeles Times, August 14, 2005, p. R12.

Hegi, Ursula, "Cracking Open the Shell of a Reclusive New Zealand Artist," in Los Angeles Times, November 18, 1985, p. 8.

Hulme, Keri, The Bone People, Penguin, 1984.

Kakutani, Michiko, Review of The Bone People, in New York Times, November 13, 1985, p. C23.

Moncur, Andrew, "Years of Rejection Didn't Stop Author's Quest to Publish," in Seattle Times, January 5, 1986, p. J10.

Tate, Claudia, "Triple-Forged Trinity," in New York Times, November 17, 1985, p. BR11.

Willens, Susan P., "At Home with the Maoris," in Belles Lettres, Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall 1986, p. 3.

Further Reading

Duffie, Mary Katharine, Through the Eye of the Needle: A Maori Elder Remembers, Wadsworth Publishing, 2000.

The history of the Maori people is told in this book through the voice of a Maori woman.

Harawira, K. T., Beginner's Maori, Hippocrene Books, 1997.

This book introduces readers to the basics of the Maori language.

Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff, Slipping into Paradise: Why I Live in New Zealand, Ballantine Books, 2004.

When Masson, an American psychologist and author, moved to New Zealand, he decided to explore the local landscape, culture, and people, to discover what New Zealand was. This book gives an intelligent and entertaining view of what Masson found to love about his adopted home.

Smith, Philippa Mein, A Concise History of New Zealand, Cambridge University Press, 2005.

As of 2005, Smith is an associate professor of history at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. In this extensive history of New Zealand, she covers the formation of the geography, the landing of the Maori people, and the relationships that have developed between the Maori and the European settlers up until the beginning of the twenty-first century.