Summary
The powerful, visionary, Booker Award-winning novel about the complicated relationships between three outcasts of mixed European and Maori heritage
"This book is just amazingly, wondrously great." --Alice Walker
In a tower on the New Zealand sea lives Kerewin Holmes: part Maori, part European, asexual and aromantic, 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 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 indigenous 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.
Keri Hulme had been writing for several years, little known outside New Zealand feminist and Maori literary circles. Then, during the mid-1980s, she gained international attention for her novel The Bone People. In 1984 she received the Mobil Pegasus Award for Maori Writers and the New Zealand Book of the Year Award for fiction, and, in the following year, the distinguished Booker-McConnel Prize, Britain's highest literary honor.
Hulme, who was born in Christchurch, is of Maori descent on her mother's side; her father was an Englishman from Lancashire. Studying for a law degree but not completing it, she worked at various jobs before settling down to write full time.
The Bone People (1984) remains Hulme's major work. Almost impossible to describe in a coherent way, the novel is a sprawling and puzzling story about a relationship between a strange child, a powerful woman named Kerewin who reluctantly takes him in, and the child's father, who treats him brutally. According to the critic Margery Fee, the implausible yet metaphoric and sophisticated structure of the text sets out "to rework the old stories that govern the way New Zealanders---both Maori (indigenous New Zealanders) and Pakeha (New Zealanders of European origin)---think about their country."
Hulme has also published two books of short stories about Maori life, Lost Possessions (1985) and Te Kaihau: The Windeater (1986); the short fiction, too, incorporates the intentionally chaotic and often bombastic style that dominates The Bone People. She has written two volumes of free verse as well, The Silences Between (Moeraki Conversations) (1982) and Strands (1992).
Hulme has received extensive attention from international critics who see her, as Margery Fee says, in the forefront of the "postcolonial discursive formation evolving worldwide"---that is, writers who have set out to reinvent the history of imperialism.
(Bowker Author Biography)
