Keri Hulme (1947–2021)

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

Book content warnings:
abuse
child abuse
homophobic slurs
alcoholism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This was my second time of reading The Bone People. I remember loving it the first time around, but I also remember thinking that it was flawed in many little ways (the very beginning, the sketchy end, the way the story's strands seem to escape Keri Hulme in the last third) yet whenever I've stumbled upon it on GR I kept being surprised at my 4*rating, since there's many five* reads that I remember much less and that had less of an emotional impact on me. I think this time I've surrendered show more to my gut which told me that this book might be like my bookshelf. I love it dearly, self-built as it is, but it isn't really what anyone would call a neatly build shelf. Yet I would sing it's praise (the book's and the shelf's) at every chance that I get.

Hulme is a wonderful storyteller and her language - though odd at times - is very powerful.
One of the things that most impressed me about this book is the warmth Keri Hulme has for her deeply damaged characters, without ever using the soft-focus-lens on their actions. It left me in an interesting grey area as a reader quite often, being repulsed by / in love with these people in equal measures.

I'd recommend it highly to anyone who's interested in literature from and about New Zealand and in following the journey of three emotional shipwrecks (often odd and beautiful, sometimes odd and hard to stomache) in a story that has one foot in New Zealand-Realism and the other deep in Maori-Symbolism. show less

Kerewin and Joe are an unlikely couple. They come together because of a mysterious mute boy of four or five named Simon. Confessional: I was not sure I was supposed to like Kerewin. She likes to drink herself into a stupor and, as a self-exiled recluse, she has the time and inclination to take to the bottle often. She also spends her time making art, having won her independent wealth from a lottery ticket. She is estranged from her family, considers herself unlovable, and doesn't like show more companionship so when she comes across mute Simon, she cannot explain why she takes him in. Second confessional: I wasn't sure I was supposed to like Joe. Hard working and rugged, Joe has been a self-imposed foster father to Simon. When provoked he likes to beat the tar out of someone, but he gives just as many kisses as he does kicks. His passions are confused. Third confessional: I wasn't sure I was supposed to like Simon. He's a devilish imp. He has a way of stealing things and acting out when he doesn't get his way. He can be just as violent as Kerewin and Joe in action and emotion. Yet...Kerewin, Joe, and Simon somehow belong together and I found myself rooting for them.
The Bone People is like a slow moving train. At first you are not sure if you are on the right ride, but once it gets going it's a runaway success. I couldn't put it down after the first hundred pages. Maybe it took me that long to get used to Hulme's style?
You know a book is going to be good when it is endorsed by Alice Walker. show less

In a tower on the New Zealand sea lives Kerewin Holmes, part Maori, part European, an artist estranged from her art, a woman in exile from her family. One night her solitude is disrupted by a visitor—a speechless, mercurial boy named Simon, who tries to steal from her and then repays her with his most precious possession. As Kerewin succumbs to Simon's feral charm, she also falls under the spell of his Maori foster father Joe, who rescued the boy from a shipwreck and now treats him with an show more unsettling mixture of tenderness and brutality. Out of this unorthodox trinity Keri Hulme has created what is at once a mystery, a love story, and an ambitious exploration of the zone where Maori and European New Zealand meet, clash, and sometimes merge. Winner of both a Booker Prize and Pegasus Prize for Literature, The Bone People is a work of unfettered wordplay and mesmerizing emotional complexity. show less