THE SURPRISE with which the literary world greeted the selection of New Zealander Keri Hulme's The Bone People as winner of the Booker Prize for 1985 looks distinctly stage-managed when you read the author's details on the dustcover. Published by a women's collective the book may be, but Keri Hulme you discover 'has been the recipient of many literary grants and awards' while the Bone People itself 'won the 1984 New Zealand Book Award for Fiction and the Mobil Pegasus Award for Maori literature.'
Far from raising a struggling unknown from obscurity, the Booker Prize panel has simply decided to set a British seal of approval on a product of a developing New Zealand cultural establishment — also manifested on the TV in the form of the serial 'Heart of the High Country' and underlined politically by the independent anti-nuclear policies of New Zealands's Labour government under David Lange.
The Bone People itself however shows the limits of the formation of a stable New Zealand identity, exposing as it does the chronic crisis in human relations which has arisen from the multiple social dislocations involved in the colonial settler experience.
The book has three central characters — woman, man, child — who, despite their formal resemblance to a basic nuclear family unit, are neither blood related nor legally tied to one another. The style of the book — three streams of consciousness, one for each of the three main characters — emphasises their separation from each other and from everyone else.
The woman — very nealy almost the author herself — is a dried-up artist of mixed race descent who emotionally identifies with the 12½% Maori blood in her veins. She lives alone in a tower and is estranged from her family for some unexplained reason. She defines her natural self as being a 'loner on the fringes'.
Her relative equilibrium is upset one day by the appearance of Simon Gillayley, followed by his adoptive father Joe. Joe is a working class Maori whose much loved wife and first child are dead and who is also at odds with his elaborate family network. He has adopted Simon, racially a pure Aryan who was washed up on shore after a shipwreck. Simon is deaf and dumb for psychological reasons, gets bullied at school, and has a reputation in the locality for being a naughty child.
All three characters erupt at intervals from their respective solitudes through outbursts of violence — usually accompanied by heavy drinking (including by the child). Joe beats Simon; Keri at one stage employs her Japanese martial arts training on Joe and Simon precipitates the crisis of the book by murdering the child molester Biny Daniels, and then wounding Joe, who reacts with an almost fatal assault on the boy.
As the three are torn apart — the child into care and the father to jail — the book begins to press for some kind of conclusion to the tragedy it has unleashed. The author rejects one escape root — for Joe at least — who makes a return into his national past where a dying old man offers him the task of watching over a forgotten Maori religious site for the rest of his life. Joe rejects this offer and returns to the present. However it soon becomes apparent that his return is essential in order that another pseudo-solution should be activated — this time by the Power of Love.
The stage has been set for this through the presentation of the theme of pain.
Pain is revealed as the source of the violence, in the sense that violence is a rejection of the burdens which healing the pains of others puts on the characters. One of the most powerful scenes in the book is when Simon gets a hook stuck in his thumb while fishing. While Joe removes the hook, Keri is paralysed and unable to help in the operation.
Specific pain, however, is constantly blurring into abstract, cosmic pain. Thus at one stage the killing of mice stimulates Kerwin to the thought 'You're a morbid subhuman bastard Holmes... where were you when they built Treblinka and Dachau?' One the one hand cosmic pain justifies withdrawal from human relationships and to some extent the violence.
On the other if pain is the result of love then cosmic pain is the result of cosmic love; and so a superhuman force of love is unleashed, able to sweep over all the obstacles of class, culture, and history as well as the effects of the brutalisation that Joe has inflicted on Simon and to provide a happy ending in which not only the three main characters but also their families are reconciled.
This ending flatly denies the reality of the body of the book! The world becomes separated into the realm of cosmic forces and that of history, and each can only dream the other (there are a lot of dreams in the book).
And perhaps this reveals one of the reasons why Booker Prize judges were attracted by 'The Bone People'. If historical problems can only be resolved in dreams then novels — the artefacts from which they make their living — become the privileged site not only of the exposition of real conflicts but also of their resolution.
Keri Hulme The Bone People Spiral/Hodder & Stoughton £9.95.