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Ngakaukawa, kei te ora taku ngakau
Jul. 15th, 2005 10:29 pmI just finished Keri Hulme's The Bone People. I don't know, I don't know. It was a harrowing book, and it gripped me more than anything I've read in ages--it kept me up until 3 am for the past two nights, and I can't remember the last time that happened. Now that I am no longer in thrall to the book, however, I find it hard to say how good it actually is. It is tremendously emotionally involving, but I would have liked it to be more tightly constructed. There were too many questions that went unanswered, too many bits of foreshadowing that went nowhere. But the book is like a vast rich stew of so many elements: three broken people, their secrets and mysteries, Maori magic and mythology, the New Zealand landscape, isolation and connection, personal history and ethnic history, family and home and identity and sexuality and culture clash and the unknowable past... The concoction seethes; individual elements float to the surface and then sink; perhaps it's only natural in a book like this for questions to go unanswered, for plot elements to be suggested and then disappear. And the book is certainly vivid--vivid enough that I was swept right by the flaws almost without noticing them while I was reading.
It's hard for me to be analytical about a book as intense as this one. There were lines that made me gasp, and once I even cried out. The entire book is just suffused with brutality, enough to satisfy even Pat Barker, that queen of brutal fiction. And it contains a scene that is surely one of the most horrifying I have ever read. And it's horrifying not just because of its subject matter, but because the man perpetrating the unthinkable violence is one that we have come to know, and like, and we know that he's not a bad man, and yet... Oh, awful, awful. And it just gets worse in the aftermath, worse and worse until it feels like nothing will be right ever again. Hulme does bring things around into a sort of rightness at the end, but I'm not sure I believe in it. There's a great deal of Maori mysticism called into play at the end to do the work of making things right, but I don't think that's why I can't believe in the ending. And it's not that I don't believe the characters could be transformed; the experiences that they've been through would be enough to transform anyone. Perhaps it's just that it's too neat, too easy. Perhaps I'm not convinced that Joe is deserving of redemption. I don't know. Would I have preferred it if Hulme had allowed her story to continue in brutality, down to the bitterest of bitter ends? I don't know.
In the absence of the ability to think clearly or objectively about the book, I will offer a few observations:
It's interesting that Keri Hulme's main character was a woman named Kerewin (called Kere) Holmes. The names are a bit too close for me to accept that it's accidental. It leads me to assume that Kerewin functions as a self-portrait, or at least a self-caricature, of the author.
I found the glossary of Maori terms in the back of the book to be rather annoying to use. Rather than putting the terms in alphabetical order, they were listed in order of the page on which they first appeared. Frustrating when you come upon a term that was used once a hundred pages ago and you've got to go flipping through the whole glossary to find it again.
I appreciated Hulme's unconventional use of English. At times it was slightly jarring, but at others it worked perfectly. I also liked the wordplay scattered throughout the book, particularly Kerewin's conflation of the phrases "a butch stranger" and "a strange butcher." Doesn't sound terribly clever now that it's out of context, but it was funny in the book, I promise.
Despite not being satisfied by the ending, I thought that the whole book was a really powerful depiction of the ways human beings make families, and the ways in which those families are not always what we expect a family to be.
It's funny that I ended my last post by comparing Simon to Therru, because what should turn up near the end of the book but a mysterious figure with one blind eye and a face half-slabbed by old burn scars. And when I made the comparison I didn't even know about Simon's scars. Ah, and now I'm thinking of Ged, showing his scars to Arha under the Tombs... Maybe it's time for me to read those books again. It often is when I start getting scenes and images from them floating into my head of their own will. It might be good to read something familiar and comfortable after this unsettling book, and it is the right time of year, after all. Well, I'll think about it a bit.
It's hard for me to be analytical about a book as intense as this one. There were lines that made me gasp, and once I even cried out. The entire book is just suffused with brutality, enough to satisfy even Pat Barker, that queen of brutal fiction. And it contains a scene that is surely one of the most horrifying I have ever read. And it's horrifying not just because of its subject matter, but because the man perpetrating the unthinkable violence is one that we have come to know, and like, and we know that he's not a bad man, and yet... Oh, awful, awful. And it just gets worse in the aftermath, worse and worse until it feels like nothing will be right ever again. Hulme does bring things around into a sort of rightness at the end, but I'm not sure I believe in it. There's a great deal of Maori mysticism called into play at the end to do the work of making things right, but I don't think that's why I can't believe in the ending. And it's not that I don't believe the characters could be transformed; the experiences that they've been through would be enough to transform anyone. Perhaps it's just that it's too neat, too easy. Perhaps I'm not convinced that Joe is deserving of redemption. I don't know. Would I have preferred it if Hulme had allowed her story to continue in brutality, down to the bitterest of bitter ends? I don't know.
In the absence of the ability to think clearly or objectively about the book, I will offer a few observations:
It's interesting that Keri Hulme's main character was a woman named Kerewin (called Kere) Holmes. The names are a bit too close for me to accept that it's accidental. It leads me to assume that Kerewin functions as a self-portrait, or at least a self-caricature, of the author.
I found the glossary of Maori terms in the back of the book to be rather annoying to use. Rather than putting the terms in alphabetical order, they were listed in order of the page on which they first appeared. Frustrating when you come upon a term that was used once a hundred pages ago and you've got to go flipping through the whole glossary to find it again.
I appreciated Hulme's unconventional use of English. At times it was slightly jarring, but at others it worked perfectly. I also liked the wordplay scattered throughout the book, particularly Kerewin's conflation of the phrases "a butch stranger" and "a strange butcher." Doesn't sound terribly clever now that it's out of context, but it was funny in the book, I promise.
Despite not being satisfied by the ending, I thought that the whole book was a really powerful depiction of the ways human beings make families, and the ways in which those families are not always what we expect a family to be.
It's funny that I ended my last post by comparing Simon to Therru, because what should turn up near the end of the book but a mysterious figure with one blind eye and a face half-slabbed by old burn scars. And when I made the comparison I didn't even know about Simon's scars. Ah, and now I'm thinking of Ged, showing his scars to Arha under the Tombs... Maybe it's time for me to read those books again. It often is when I start getting scenes and images from them floating into my head of their own will. It might be good to read something familiar and comfortable after this unsettling book, and it is the right time of year, after all. Well, I'll think about it a bit.
