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A review by elerireads
The Bone People by Keri Hulme
challenging
emotional
hopeful
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Gosh this was an incredibly thought-provoking book but it boy was it difficult to read. The way it was written is disjointed in every sense - moving between different characters' points of view, between first and third person, between describing inner thoughts and narrative description, with some of the thoughts indented on the page and others not, and also between languages. The passage of time also felt very uneven, with some shorter periods such as their holiday together given a lot of extremely detailed description whilst in other places large chunks of time seemed to go by without a clear indication that that was happening. The prose itself was not the most readable either - there was a lot of esoteric, bordering on bizarre vocabulary and references, and sentences in the same paragraph often either had no clear thread joining them or connected to one another but only insofar as following a train of thought off on an eccentric tangent. There's also a lot of Maori for which you have to keep flipping to the back of the book to find the translation (would have been really helpful if these translations had been in footnotes on the page instead). So to say this book is not easy to dip in and out of would be an understatement - it's definitely one that needs you to set aside a chunk of time to immerse yourself fully in the rich and strange narrative voice or you won't have a hope in hell of understanding what's going on.
In a strange way though, I found the alien language and structuring sort of helped to make it feel like you were thrown into a whole different world. And whilst there's never a doubt that the main characters are weird, it feels like a very natural kind of weirdness in the context of the otherworldly atmosphere of the whole book. Or maybe it's just that the love between them is so vivid and rings so true that all their personal eccentricities fade to insignificance. That said, Kerewin is bizarre and I did find her more than a bit pretentious, although there is quite a lot of self-awareness too when she reads back some of her diary entries etc.
The way the abuse was handled was very uncomfortable and I don't really know how to feel about it. At no point does anyone actually condone it, although Kerewin does seem to be allowing some kind of 'measured, reasonable' (not a quote) beating. However, it's very clear that the perspective the reader is supposed to take is that Simon is better off going back to live with his horrendously abusive father than being placed in any kind of foster care / alternative care. And the love between them all is so strong that it's very convincingly done. Uncomfortable.
There are many, many more things that could be said about this book but I've already written loads and have now lost all motivation to write the rest down. Anyway, difficult to get into but very vivid and interesting characters whose lives eventually do pull you in.
Also - asexual main character!
In a strange way though, I found the alien language and structuring sort of helped to make it feel like you were thrown into a whole different world. And whilst there's never a doubt that the main characters are weird, it feels like a very natural kind of weirdness in the context of the otherworldly atmosphere of the whole book. Or maybe it's just that the love between them is so vivid and rings so true that all their personal eccentricities fade to insignificance. That said, Kerewin is bizarre and I did find her more than a bit pretentious, although there is quite a lot of self-awareness too when she reads back some of her diary entries etc.
The way the abuse was handled was very uncomfortable and I don't really know how to feel about it. At no point does anyone actually condone it, although Kerewin does seem to be allowing some kind of 'measured, reasonable' (not a quote) beating. However, it's very clear that the perspective the reader is supposed to take is that Simon is better off going back to live with his horrendously abusive father than being placed in any kind of foster care / alternative care. And the love between them all is so strong that it's very convincingly done. Uncomfortable.
There are many, many more things that could be said about this book but I've already written loads and have now lost all motivation to write the rest down. Anyway, difficult to get into but very vivid and interesting characters whose lives eventually do pull you in.
Also - asexual main character!
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal death and Child abuse