The Bone People by Keri Hulme

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.

Only what to do about the urchin's butter dreams? Or the man's evil shadows--the ghosts riding on his shoulders? The miasma of gloom that shrouded his lightning smile?

Kerewin Holmes is a recluse: part-white, part-Maori, and living by the sea in a round tower she built herself. She spends her days painting, playing guitar, and drinking. One day her solitude is broken by the sudden appearance of a white child in the Tower. He can't tell Kerewin why he came; he can't even speak. Eventually, she tracks down his foster father, a Maori man named Joe who explains that the boy, Simon, was recovered in a shipwreck. The experience has made Simon rebellious and temperamental: he cuts school, he fights, he steals Joe--whose wife and biological child have recently died--is all Simon has. Slowly, they become part of Kerewin's life, until she discovers that Joe has been viciously beating Simon for his bad behavior.

Maori writer Keri Hulme, who only finished this novel, depicts Kerewin as a clever eccentric, armed with a huge vocabulary and a chip on her shoulder. I was drawn to her at first, as to Joe and Simon, but they wore out their welcome for me. Which is to say I found Kerewin's cleverness annoying after a while. Hulme's style matches Kerewin's: long-winded, inflated, blowsy. Like Kerewin, it's one of a kind, and like Kerewin, it has its attractions but it sort of wears on you over 450 pages.

And I wasn't sure what to make of the way that The Bone People deals with Joe's abuse of Simon. On one hand, there's a seriousness and honesty to the novel's insistence that love and anger can be closer to one another than you'd think, and it refuses to do what you might expect from a novel in our era and paint Joe as fundamentally irredeemable, or flatten his anger into something that is inhuman or uninteresting. On the other hand, it's easy to bristle when Kerewin says to Joe something along the lines of, "At least you cared enough to show him when he was doing wrong." It's a lot for the novel to ask us to sympathize with the battered Simon--who is genuinely and permanently injured by Joe's climactic beating--and Joe, who loses his family when the boy is taken away from him. As much as the novel works to paint the scenario as complex, it's hard to believe that separating him from Joe isn't in the boy's best interests.

The part I thought was most interesting, actually, comes in the novel's final section, after Joe is released from a year in prison for his abuse of Simon: Joe travels to a remote beach to kill himself, but only manages to bust his arm. The old Maori man who discovers him and helps him heal tells Joe about a prophecy involving him, and a pair of figures who are obviously Kerewin and Simon; part of the prophecy is that Joe will come to take care of the man's ritual burial. The old man is described in the region as "the last of the cannibals," a traditional Maori whom the world has left behind, but he transfers onto Joe both the burden and the gift of keeping old ways alive. This section, with its many allusions to Maori religion and practices, finally seems rich and strange enough to be worthy of Hulme's unorthodox prose.