Mysteries made easy

Keri Hulme's The Bone People has finally made it to India after being published in 1984 and going on to win the Booker Prize in 1985.

It is a novel that is hard to categorise, flitting in and out of genres and writing styles; in places it is written in a wandering Joycean first person and in others the third person; sometimes it reads like a slow, thoughtful diary and sometimes like a chatty detective novel.

It is partly because of this variety that the novel makes such easy reading, even at 546 pages.

The plot revolves around three main characters, Kerewin Holmes (based loosely on Keri Hulme), a mute little boy, Simon Gillayley, and his adoptive father Joseph.

Kerewin is a former artist who has cut herself off, for reasons we never become fully aware of, from her family, and as the novel begins, we find her living in a Tower in a small town in New Zealand, falling into a downward spiral of increasing isolation, alcoholism and creative frustration.

Then she meets Simon, and finds herself drawn against her will to him, his Maori father, and their many mysteries. The foremost mystery is that of Simon's past, since he was found washed up from a shipwreck and no one knows anything about him (and he's not talking, literally and metaphorically).

There are other mysteries too, though: of the relationship between Simon and Joe, which veers wildly between love and hate; of Kerewin's past; of Joseph's Maori relations.

These are the mysteries that the reader and characters puzzle over. However, other mysteries speckle the book, mysteries that the characters do not puzzle over much, but nevertheless seem to comprise cosmic secrets of great portent: the suneater, for example, a haphazard invention of Kerewin's, a "mirror focused on a crystal to which were attached many fine copper wires".

The crystal turns "blurringly fast", but Kerewin cannot hook it up to a motor and further has not the "faintest idea why they work". "As useful and pointed", she thinks wryly, "as myself."

Then there are Simon's "music hutches", seemingly random constructions that make music if you listen closely enough: "[Kerewin] listened very intently, and was suddenly aware that the pulse of her blood and the surge of the surf and the thin rustle of the wind round the beaches were combining to make something like music"; later she realises that "they only make music when someone's listening".

It is instances such as these that give the novel an air of dream like unreality, even during the sudden turns into harsh and sometimes appalling violence.

Mysteries do not interest Joe, they even frighten him, but in the end, he is presented the greatest mystery of all by a Maori kaumatua (an elder): a secret of the very land, one of the many Maori gods, who has receded as Maoris increasingly go the way of the settling Europeans. But we are not treated to a heavy-handed lecture about the importance of tradition; the elder, in fact, is more interested in talking about his dogs, having his tea and pulling on a cigar.

As Joe despairs the mess the "Pakeha" (a New Zealander of European descent) have made, a mess Maoris would never have made if left to their own devices ("We might have started some of the havoc, but we would never have carried it so far ... I can't see [the god] ever waking now.

The whole order of the world would have to change ..."), the elder, who has the most at stake, having looked after the god all his life, is equable: "Eternity is a long time. 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 would be easy for Hulme, given the overarching, vast subject matter she has chosen to deal with, to descend into hyperbole. But she adopts, for the most part, a languid, lyrical tone, mixed in with a certain sharpness that stops it from becoming mawkish.

Kerewin has a tendency to think in long, flamboyant sweeps: "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".

But this is offset by her dry humour and self-awareness, and passages like the above are almost always followed by curtness: "You're talking bullshit as usual".

The dreamy language succeeds not only in setting the backdrop for the unhurried pace of life in sleepy, rural New Zealand, but also establishes itself as a theme, important in Maori culture, in dreams the characters have themselves: Simon's shaking nightmares, Kerewin's dreams of the island breathing.

Hulme's book is as sprawling, as enthralling, and in places as mysterious as the island of New Zealand, so apt a landscape for Peter Jackson's Middle Earth (oddly enough, Kerewin does contemplate digging a tunnel home before she decides to build her Tower, "she was fond of hobbits").

It explores the internal and the external; the home and the world; love and hate (even the form of martial arts that Kerewin practises to dangerous effect is a doctrine of love: "[Aikido] is not a technique to fight with.

It is the way to reconcile the world"); of knowledge and ignorance; and also the deep power that language has over all of these things. If all this, and a keen insight into Maori culture, is not enough, there are also plenty of fights, plenty of drinking and plenty of laughs.

The Bone People

Keri Hulme
Picador
Pages: 546