Reviews with content warning for Blood - The Bone People

This is the spiritual, brutal and poetic journey of three deeply traumatised humans.
Kere, a half Māori woman broken from her family, removed too from her art and her will to live, hides herself in her tower until one day having sneaked inside her abode she meets the mute and wild Simon, the long blond haired and sea foam eyed young kid the flotsam brought after a shipwreck, the only survivor of it, unable to speak for reasons unknown he can’t explain anything about who he was but there’re the strange markings on his body and something took his voice from him and made him fearful and wild. Unable to communicate his traumatised child thoughts and feelings and the reason he steals, breaks and enters peoples’ houses and acts so strangely he drives is “adoptive” father and rescuer, the Māori pakeha-life Joe completely crazy, especially since after he lost his wife and baby son. Unable to deal with Simon’s trauma and its consequences and his own loss and suffering violence seems Joe’s only option to deal with the havoc of it all. But, love is still very deep in them and it will bind these three characters unexpectedly, or maybe Simon wished it so.
There’s so much more to say about this book, this story, it moved me, it changed the way I see trauma and the violence of it on the mind and that is inflicted.
This is not an easy read, the writing is very introspective, very poetic, changes in narrative format all the time, plays with words, but you get to see the inner works of their traumas, and also their hopes, their love, another thing that makes it harder to follow is that the POV changes without warning, and there’s also a lot of Māori expressions (which I only found out in the end were most of them translated at the end of the book, still…), and, then, there’s the brutality, the unfiltered violence.
I fell in love with this tale very quickly although it took me longer than usual to get through it. I won’t recommend it to squeamish, easily disturbed people, everyone else yes, it’s such an ode to the Māori survival among the pakeha, the borderline between being one and the other, loving the roots and respecting them, while adapting to the pakeha world, it is also an ode to different people, mixed and broken, to love of all types even aromantic and asexual, which I found amazing in a book released in 1984. This was a novel debut by a Māori poet, immediately booker prize winner and a classic in the making. I definitely wish I can reread it soon. So, yeah, go read it.

Content Warnings

mscalls's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective tense 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

Content Warnings

ceallaighsbooks's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional hopeful inspiring reflective sad tense 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

5.0

“If I was an honest uncompromising soul, if I wasn’t riddled by this disease called hope, I’d climb into the middle of my pyre and light a phoenixfire from there… On the other hand, my cardinal virtue is hope. Forlorn hope, hope in extremity. Not Christian hope, but an innate rebellion against the inevitable dooms of suffering, death, and despair. A senseless hope… If I hadn’t my hope, I might have lasted ten seconds there… the air is all gone from round it… splendid dragon… the glory of the salamander…”

TITLE—The Bone People

AUTHOR—Keri Hulme

PUBLISHED—1984

GENRE—literary fiction

SETTING—Aotearoa

MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—spiritually, relationships, identity, abuse, love, modern Maori culture, identity, & society, aro/ace, justice, redemption

WRITING STYLE—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

CHARACTERS—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️—Kerewin is one of my alltime favorite characters. I resonated with her SO much.

PLOT—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️—<SPOILER>I almost didn’t believe that this story could possibly have a happy ending but 😭. This book is quite literally perfect.</SPOILER>

BONUS ELEMENT/S—the New Zealand setting is its own force and character in this novel’s story and it’s just phenomenally executed; also all the philosophical and spiritual discussions in this book are just so profound and insightful. ❤️

PHILOSOPHY—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

“To unearth anything, we begin by digging.”

I really loved this book but it was also very hard to read. I had this book on my tbr for three years, ever since my first trip to NZ in 2017, and on my shelf for a year, when I first started reading it last year, and even still, I struggled a lot with some of the content in the story—even had nightmares—and ended up needing to step away from the book after finishing part 3 and took another yearlong break before picking it up again this summer to finish reading. 😰

But in spite of all of that, I still loved this book SO much—I would even call it an alltime favorite because the suffering in the book really feels like something that is real and I don’t regret finding it in me to sit with it in order to experience everything the book and its author had to offer.

I think the only way to talk about this book is to acknowledge that every reader’s reading of and reaction to the themes and subject matter, their perception and opinion of the events, characters, and the characters’ actions, is going to be *very* personal and very visceral. The themes that stood out to my particular personal perspective were the themes of judgment, mental illness, community/family, personal identity, love, nature, natural & spiritual heritage, and justice/redemption.

Hulme’s writing style is incredibly beautiful, somehow elegant and irreverent, sacred and lighthearted all at once. She manages to represent just how fucking complicated people are / life is—how it’s exhausting and painful to the point of a kind of unhinged hilarity—in a way that you can’t help but relate to and respect. My list of favorite quotes from this book reads like a list of mantras and proverbs. I suppose it’s appropriate on some level that a book so beautiful, important, and impactful is also so difficult and painful to read—a true parallel to the actual experience of living in this world.

“I can’t see that,” nodding back towards the hidden well, “ever waking now. The whole order of the world would have to change, all of humanity, and I can’t see that happening, e pou, not ever.”
“Eternity is a long time,” says the kaumatua comfortably. “Everything changes, even that which supposes itself to be unalterable. All we can do is look after the precious matters which are our heritage, and wait, and hope.”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

“It’s past, but we live with it forever.”

[Alice Walker blurbed the copy I have and said: “This book is just amazingly, wondrously great.” And I 100% agree.]

TW // This is SO important. Like I said, I put off reading this book for a few years after I discovered it because of the content warnings I’d read about it, and even so I still had to step away from it for another year! after finishing part 3 because of how hard it was to read. I was literally having nightmares because of it. 😞 If you’re at an emotionally unstable place in your life right now I strongly recommend thinking carefully about reading this book and maybe putting it off until you feel more prepared to handle the content. Because whew. This is the roughest book I’ve ever read. Ok the TWs are: extremely graphic and violent depictions of child abuse, child autism, alcoholism, trauma, poverty, isolationism, suicidal thoughts, suicide attempt, cancer

Further Reading—

White Magic, by Elissa Washuta
The Night Between the Days, by Ailo Gaup
Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi
The Whale Rider, by Witi Ihimaera—TBR
Ace, by Angela Chen—TBR

Favorite Quotes...

“In the beginning, it was darkness, and more fear, and a howling wind across the sea.”

“She had debated, in the frivolity of the beginning, whether to build a hole or a tower; a hole, because she was fond of hobbits, or a tower—well, a tower for many reasons, but chiefly because she liked spiral stairways.”

“No need of people, because she was self-fulfilling, delighted with the pre-eminence of her art, and the future or her knowing hands.”

“This ship that sets its sails forever

rigid on my coin

is named Endeavour.

She buys a drink to bar the dreams

of the long nights lying.

The world is never what it seems

and the sun is dying…”

“Goodbye soulwringing night. Good morning sinshine, and a fat happy day.”

“I am in limbo, and in limbo there are no races, no prizes, no changes, no chances. There are merely degrees of endurance, and endurance never was my strong point.”

“It’s becoming too precious. Too important. To care for anything deeply is to invite disaster.”

“Frae ghosties an ghoulies

an longlegged beasties

an things that gae bump!

in the night,

guid God deliver us…”

“Between waking and being awake there is a moment full of doubt and dream, when you struggle to remember what the place and when the time and whether you really are. A peevish moment of wonderment as to where the real world lies.”

“To unearth anything, we begin by digging,” but she isn’t very keen on the idea.

“She is a slow and methodical eater, not from convictions regarding health but because she enjoys food of all kinds immensely.”

“I’m going to have wander round my garden. See how the weeds are doing.”

“It was reckoned that the old people found inspiration for the double spirals they carved so skilfully, in uncurling fernfronds: perhaps. But it was an old symbol of rebirth, and the outward-inward nature of things…”

“Spirals make more sense than crosses, joys more than sorrows…”

“…whereas by blood, flesh and inheritance, I am but an eighth Maori, by heart, spirit, and inclination, I feel all Maori.”

“Calm down, o soul. Be reasonable, a serene and rational being.”

“The horror was still at home in him.

It was almost always there.

The only defense he could raise against the dark and the horror and the laughing terrible voice were his golden singers, the sounds and patterns of words from the past that he had fitted to his own web of music. They often broke apart, but he could always make them new.”

“What sort of dreams does he have that are so terrible? Jetsam, she ponders. The old meaning was goods thrown overboard to lighten a ship… dreams of being left, bereaved, dreams of drowning while your people sink in the hungry waves?”

“O all the world is a little queer, except thee and me, and sometimes, I wonder about thee.”

“I know about me. I am the moon’s sister, a tidal child

stranded on land. The sea always in my ear, a surf of

eternal discontent in my blood.

You’re talking bullshit as usual.”

“She thought of the tools she had gathered together, and painstakingly learned to use. Futureprobes, Tarot and I Ching and the wide wispfingers from the stars… all these to scry and ferret and vex the smokethick future.”

“A broad general knowledge, encompassing bits of history, psychology, ethology, religious theory and practices of many kinds. Her charts of self-knowledge. Her library. The inner thirst for information about everything that had lived or lives on Earth that she’d kept alive long after childhood had ended. None of them helped make sense of living.”

“I am worn, down to the raw nub of my soul.

Now is the time, o bitter beer, soothe my spirit;

smooth mouth of whisky, tell me lies of truth;

but better still, sweet wine, be harbinger of deep and dreamless sleep…”

“For what does five years of accumulating snippets of wisdom add up to? Knowledge that I’m a changeable sort of person…”

“Because all these were other people’s ideas… nothing wrong with them, but they didn’t really fit me.”

“She knew too much. The smarter you are, the more you know, the less reason you have to trust or love or confide.”

“The childhood years are the best years of your life…” Whoever coined that was an unmitigated fuckwit, a bullshit artist supreme. Life gets better the older you grow, until you grow too old of course.”

“Winning means winning over the mind of discord in yourself.”

“Love is the guardian deity of everything. Nothing can exist without it.”

“Heaven and hell, you never knew what people had in their past.”

“You just get someone neatly arranged in a slot that appears to fit them, and they wriggle on their pins and spoil it all.”

“The waves march in. Three herring gulls lift with each breaker, settle back on the sand again as the sea streams out. An old blackback carks and skrees, fossicking along the tideline. The shags sit by their hollow mud nests on Maukiekie. Nothing else is moving. Sometimes, the waves grow hushed, but the sea is always there, touching, caressing, eating the earth…”

“The clouds are long and black and ragged, like the wings of stormbattered dragons.”

“Betelgeuse, Achenar. Orion. Aquila. Centre the Cross

and you have a steady compass.

But there’s no compass for my disoriented soul, only

ever-beckoning ghostlights.

In the one sure direction, to the one sure end.”

“Maybe there are such things as second chances, even if dreams go unanswered…”

“I salute the breath of life in thee, the same life that is breathed by me, warm flesh to warm flesh, oily press of nose to nose, the hardness of foreheads meeting. I salute that which gives us life.”

“Normally, she dislikes killing mice. There is something about their beady-eyed furtivity, their wholesale preying on humans, that appeals to her outlaw instincts.”

“If only was the tapu phrase.

If only I had

If only I hadn’t”

“If I was an honest uncompromising soul, if I wasn’t riddled by this disease called hope, I’d climb into the middle of my pyre and light a phoenixfire from there… On the other hand, my cardinal virtue is hope. Forlorn hope, hope in extremity. Not Christian hope, but an innate rebellion against the inevitable dooms of suffering, death, and despair. A senseless hope… If I hadn’t my hope, I might have lasted ten seconds there… the air is all gone from round it… splendid dragon… the glory of the salamander…”

“Aue, the roots of the tree are long and descend into darkness. The show is wavebeaten, and there is nothing beyond but the unceasing immeasurable sea.”

“You want to know about anybody? See what books they read, and how they’ve been read…”

“O man, he thinks, you are still very young, and while your life has broken you, you can still heal yourself.”

“Remember, it was a time of flux and chaos when she sought her knowledge. No-one can be blamed for giving her information that she maybe should never have known. And she can be praised for having that staunch courage and intelligence to preserve something she believed, as I believe, to be of unusual value. Incalculable value. How do you weigh the value of this country’s soul?”

“I can’t see that,” nodding back towards the hidden well, “ever waking now. The whole order of the world would have to change, all of humanity, and I can’t see that happening, e pou, not ever.”

“Eternity is a long time,” says the kaumatua comfortably. “Everything changes, even that which supposes itself to be unalterable. All we can do is look after the precious matters which are our heritage, and wait, and hope.”

“She was very upset when she learned how you were hurt, but more upset that they’ve separated you. She kept saying, “But Joe loves his boy, this was just an accident.” It don’t look that way to other people though. Not to the police or the doctors… but they only get to hear the bad parts. I’ve been hearing all about the good parts. There were a lot of good parts, right?”

“One must name cats, people, whoever whatever comes close, even though they carry their real names hidden inside them.”

“It’s past, but we live with it forever.”

“TE MUTUNG—RANEI TE TAKE” (The end—or the beginning.)

Content Warnings

lilcoppertop's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring mysterious reflective sad tense 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

5.0

Content Warnings

wai's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

I knew nothing about this book going into it. I had never heard of it before, and had just found it in a 2nd and Charles for a good price and thought the cover was beautiful and intriguing. I've been trying to really expand my reading list and read books from different countries and cultures, as an American. I cracked open this book having no idea what to expect.

In ways, I think that was a good thing - I didn't have other people's perceptions of it biasing me as I read. And this is absolutely the kind of book that people either love or hate, and both positions are equally valid. I think if I had read this when I was younger I would have hated it and probably not even finished it. But as it stands now, I found it to be a very thought provoking and complex book. I feel like I need to re-read it at least two more times to even begin to digest it. I have so many questions!

As many others have mentioned, the book largely deals with the issue of child abuse and contains many graphic passages depicting the father figure, Joe, beating his adopted son, Simon, who is also mute and communicates largely through sign language and writing. Throughout the novel we learn about this, about how Joe's extended family have reacted (disapproving but trying to rectify it within the family) and how Joe's past abuse has shaped him to also rely on violence. We get to know Joe prior to learning the extent of his physical abuse against Simon, and thus end up with a conflict that exists in many families, my own included - how do we reconcile Joe as a sympathetic figure who has faced multiple traumas himself vs the Joe we now see as abusive? It's a reality that many parents have fallen into and what's been dubbed the "Cycle of Abuse", where there is legitimate love and care on their end but only know how to handle children through the example of their own abusive parents, and ultimately leads to the confusion of their own children as they get older and have to confront how they feel about parents who traumatized them while simultaneously loved them. Ultimately though, I don't think this was handled properly and the redemption arc that Joe goes through with both prison time and the fantasy element of reconnecting with his Maori god(s)/religion. It's not enough and feels inappropriate, although I feel like in the 1980s people saw violence as punishment for children as acceptable generally (spanking/hiding/etc.) and that Joe was simply a "good man who took it too far" which does not translate to modern views on parenting and abuse.

Something that I didn't really understand was this minor theme of homosexuality that continued to be brought up as well. There are hints that Joe is gay or bisexual, having had a relationship with another man when he was young (a teenager or early 20's I think?) and yet gay men are condemned/seen as distasteful by the main characters. One is even an actual pedophile, and used to liken gayness to pedophilia, particularly in men. My impression was that Simon was also facing sexual abuse from someone, not Joe but one of his relatives that routinely babysat him, and there are some vague implications towards this, but nothing ever comes of it. It just fades off into the background of Joe's violence and ultimate arrest. This is also very strange given that the other main character, Kerewin, ultimately comes out as asexual to Joe when he asks what her thoughts on marriage were. She has no sexual urges or interest, has never had sex with anyone, and this doesn't change throughout the book. In comparison this is quite progressive and an aspect that I really liked, but it is definitely confusing overall in terms of what Hulme is trying to say about sexuality (and potentially gender?).

I also did not like the end of the book where everything seems to be wrapped up nice and tidy where Joe is redeemed and reaccepted into their family and everyone is together again, but I also wondered if that was actually meant to be seen as real? The magical realism element is most potent in these final passages, including showing Kerewin being healed in her stomach cancer by a mysterious figure and such. Joe and Simon's final passages had been left off in very vague ways that could be interpreted as them dying, and so I thought perhaps the epilogue was meant to be them in their Heaven, emphasizing a sort of What Could Have Been. I don't know.

I still am not sure exactly how I feel about this book but I know that it will stay with me for a very long time.

Content Warnings

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