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rachelsilvy 's review for:
The Bone People
by Keri Hulme
I have struggled with this book since the early days of quarantine in March, in many ways because of a general unsettled feeling that accompanied my reading of it. The writing is beautiful, and I found poetry in the pages. Yet I continue to grapple with an uncertainty with the story: its content, and its supposed resolution.
I do not know if my deep discomfort with several key plot points point to a complex narrative that forces the reader to question deeply held beliefs, or if I simply find the portrayal of certain disturbing and heinous acts to be reprehensible and poorly resolved. I suspect it has more to do with the latter, for in the end, the reader's opinion of the text hinges upon one's own answers to the following questions: What must an individual learn/alter/do to earn forgiveness, and who decides if the forgiveness has indeed been earned? And when considering these questions, it becomes clear that none of the three central characters in the story are capable of making that decision. This is what gave me pause throughout the text until the very end, in spite of my deep desire to blithely accept the "happy ending" trope that nearly was supplied to the reader.
I do not know if my deep discomfort with several key plot points point to a complex narrative that forces the reader to question deeply held beliefs, or if I simply find the portrayal of certain disturbing and heinous acts to be reprehensible and poorly resolved. I suspect it has more to do with the latter, for in the end, the reader's opinion of the text hinges upon one's own answers to the following questions: What must an individual learn/alter/do to earn forgiveness, and who decides if the forgiveness has indeed been earned? And when considering these questions, it becomes clear that none of the three central characters in the story are capable of making that decision. This is what gave me pause throughout the text until the very end, in spite of my deep desire to blithely accept the "happy ending" trope that nearly was supplied to the reader.