The white New Zealand reading public responded keenly to a novel dealing with the then unfamiliar topic of Maori culture, and it swiftly became a bestseller. She was on the point of encasing the manuscript in resin and using it as a doorstop, when she chanced to meet a Maori student, Marian Evans, who liked it so much that she formed a collective to publish it. Initially Keri Hulme could not get The Bone People published – it was repeatedly rejected as “too large, too unwieldy, too different”, she recalled. “And I wanted to make clear why, when people are alienated from that, they do terrible things to themselves and to others.” “What I wanted very much to do, was to be a bridge between my Maori relations and my Pakeha relations, and I wanted very much to make explicit, explicable, the spiritual world,” she said in 1994. But the characters are given a happy ending after learning to reconnect with Maori lore and mythology.

There was darkness at the heart of the book: Joe, deeply loving his foster son but unable to cope with his precocious character, subjects the boy to brutal discipline. Long, impressionistic and knotty with symbolism, The Bone People focuses on the relationship between three characters: Kerewin Holmes, a reclusive artist who lives in a tower by the sea and was judged by critics to be an avatar of the author Simon, a mute seven-year-old who befriends her and Joe, a Maori widower who has been caring for Simon since he washed up on the beach after a shipwreck. Keri Hulme, the writer, who has died aged 74, won the Booker Prize in 1985 for her first and, as it transpired, only novel.Ī weatherbeaten, pipe-smoking New Zealander of part-Maori descent, Keri Hulme worked on the book for 12 years, writing at night while by day fishing for whitebait near her home in Okarito, a West Coast former gold-mining village.

The bone people review