![]() ![]() But the characters are given a happy ending after learning to reconnect with Maori lore and mythology. There was darkness at the heart of the book: Joe, deeply loving his foster son but unable to cope with his precocious character, subjects the boy to brutal discipline. ![]() Long, impressionistic and knotty with symbolism, The Bone People focuses on the relationship between three characters: Kerewin Holmes, a reclusive artist who lives in a tower by the sea and was judged by critics to be an avatar of the author Simon, a mute seven-year-old who befriends her and Joe, a Maori widower who has been caring for Simon since he washed up on the beach after a shipwreck. Keri Hulme, the writer, who has died aged 74, won the Booker Prize in 1985 for her first and, as it transpired, only novel.Ī weatherbeaten, pipe-smoking New Zealander of part-Maori descent, Keri Hulme worked on the book for 12 years, writing at night while by day fishing for whitebait near her home in Okarito, a West Coast former gold-mining village. ![]()
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