Kerewin, Simon and Joseph take on the World

Tu Tangata, Issue 26, 1 October 1985, Page 32

Kerewin, Simon and Joseph take on the World

by Michael Romanos

The Bone People, the intense, alive and astonishing first novel by Keri Hulme is a literary force already in New Zealand. Keri’s book is about to pour forth on the world market. .

Nearly 12 years in the making and several years in search of a publisher, The Bone People was first published in 1984 by a feminist collective called Spiral who produced two editions totalling 4000 copies. The editions were an immediate sell-out. Reissued in 1985, Spiral joined forces with Hodder and. Houghton and by the end of this year (1985), 25,000 hard-cover copies will have been sold almost exclusively in New Zealand in less than 12 months. Well and truly a New Zealand quick selling record.

It is estimated that 25.000 copies sold is equivalent to 400,000 copies in the United Kingdom. Picador Publishers have the Commonwealth rights and will soon print 20,000 copies. Translation rights in a dozen languages are being sought by publishers. Sydney University are using The Bone People as a text for their literature courses.

Just like what The Thornbirds achieved for Australia, The Bone People will place New Zealand on the world fictional literary map over the next few years. With paperback and world distribution still to come, sales should rise to 100.000 during 1986.

In short. The Bone People is a gutsy, vivid and enchanting novel. Flowing through is a masterly use of words which blend reality with dreams, meld Maori and European and weave strange and hurtful pasts into futures of hope. It is both simple and complex.

The writer presents a pain-felt story of an uneasy alliance between three people. Kerewin is a sometime artist living alone on the edge of the seas, whose solitary, self-sufficient life is interrupted by Simon, a silent urchin who communicates only by sign language. He is claimed eventually by his stepfather, Joseph whose relationship with the boy often errupts into violence, frustration and despair.

The main characters are symbolic of the three main racial strands of contemporary New Zealand: Maori mixed with a little pakeha, pakeha mixed with a little Maori and unmixed pakeha.

The trinity Kerewin, Simon and Joe crippled by their unrelated pasts, try to redeem themselves through their imperfect love for one another. The bonds of that ambivalent love and the chasms that yawn when the bonds snap make for powerful literature. The most commanding features in Kerewin, Joe and in the land itself are Polynesian: Maori. They reveal themselves in concepts, expressions and words that give a mystical quality to life that is quite unobtrusive until the book's unexpected climax.

Critic, Joy Cowley said an Australian had exclaimed to her when on first reading Patrick White's The Tree of Man that "White gave us ourselves". Cowley said she now understands what the Australian meant. "Keri Hulme has given us us." Hulme's characters become inhabitants of the mind. The descriptive first sighting of Simon, The Intruder, displays some of the book's qualities. “Bleak grey mood to match the bleak grey weather.' and she hunches over to the nearest bookshelf. “Stow the book on cooking fish. Gimme something escapist, Narnia or Gormenghast or Middle Earth, or." it wasn't a move-

ment that made her look up. There is a gap between two tiers of bookshelves. Her chest of pounamu rests in between them, and above it, there is a slit window. In the window, standing stiff and straight like some weird saint in a stained gold window, is a child. A thin shockheaded person, haloed in hair, shrouded in the dying sunlight. The eyes are invisable. It is silent, immobile. Kerewin stares, shocked and gawping and speechless. The thunder sounds again, louder, and a cloud covers the last of the sunlight. The room goes very dark. If it moves suddenly, it's going to go through that glass. Hit rock bottom forty feet below and end up looking like an imploded plum.... She barks. "Get the bloody hell down from there!" Her breathing has quickened and her heart thuds as though she were the intruder. The head shifts. Then the child turns slowly and carefully round in the niche, and wriggles over the side in an awkward progression, feet ankles shins hips, half-skipping half-slithering down to the chest, splayed like a lizard on a wall. It turns round and gingerly steps onto the floor.

The title. The Bone People is quite apt because the story is concerned with the spiritual and emotional needs of a whanau and the demands placed upon it by the common bonds of descent, tangata whenua and environment. The author. Keri Hulme is also close to the bone of the novel's character. Kerewin Holmes.

Hulme was born in 1947 and is of Maori (Kai Tahu tribe), Orkney Island and English ancestry. She has been a fish and chips cook, television director, law student, tobacco picker, woollen mill worker and Post Office mail deliverer.

Like Kerewin, Hulme presently lives alone on the West Coast of the South Island in a remote settlement called Okarito. She devotes her time to fishing (whitebaiting), reading, drawing/painting, drinking Scotch and of course, writing.

“I live in an isolated area where I talk a lot to my typewriter. I take great pleasure in observing people. We make fascinating studies," she said.

“I would say there are three things I’ve written that to me are almost perfection. They affect people the way I intended them to affect people: chapter eight in The Bone People, the poem E Hoha and the short story Hooks and Feelers." (Melanie Reed turned this story into a film).

Hulme’s writing often deals with the crippled, the deformed, those suffering pain.

“Pain itself can be the message: the child with the hook, the mute Simon, the schizophrenic woman. I don't think there has ever been a human who has been untrammelled from birth onwards. Maybe my maimed people are saying what we could have been had you let us. Maybe I'm saying it's an imperfect world."

During the 1970's Hulme won three New Zealand literary fund grants, the Maori purposes trust fund, the Burns Fellowship at the Otago University and two short story awards which all combined to keep her just above breadline existence.

“I can't remember being taught to write," says Keri. “My theory is that if you can do it you can do it. Either you can write or you don’t."

Hulme started writing The Bone People in 1967 as another of her short stories. It grew to the extent she had to cut over 60,000 words from the finally completed novel.

Prior to The Bone People, her published works consisted of The Silences Between: Moeraki Conversations (poetry and prose) and The Windeater (short stories). Her poems are notable for being profound and beautifully compiled. She is currently working on her next novel, “Bait".

It seems an impossibility that Bait when completed, will be confronted with closed doors that halted The Bone People for so long from publication.

Last year Hulme received the Mobil Oil sponsored Pegasus Prize for Maori literature from 25 entries for her work. The Bone People. Mobil Oil presented

the winner with a gold medal, S4OOO cash and an expense-paid promotional tour of the United States when her novel is published in that country. The Bone People won for Hulme the New Zealand Book Award for fiction in 1984.

Her previous biggest award winning haul was in 1982 when she took the ICI S6OOO Writers Award for her poetry book, The Silences Between.

When The Bone People was finally published it was celebrated with a formal hui; a Maori welcome for a Maori book. Publishers had thumbed down the novel for years. Too different, too long (450 pages hard-back) they said.

A trio of Wellington women including two with tribal Maori connections with Keri, took up the cause. They formed their own publishing company, Spiral and made The Bone People their major

enterprise borne from such emotions as the championing of women writers and Maori literature. On a shoe-string budget and learn-as-you-go approach. Spiral triumphantly published the first two editions of Keri’s book.

Already those flawed, cheaply produced editions are collections' items. Hodder and Stoughton, the international publishers entered and in a copublishing association with Spiral, a new cover and editorial improvements have graced subsequent editions, taking the novel towards international acclaim.

Keri Hulme is in good company. Women novelists in New Zealand have it over their males counterparts. Women like Katherine Mansfield, Ngaio Marsh, Fiona Kidman, Sue McCauley and Janet Frame have all reached world-wide fame.