The Bone People by Keri Hulme

Blurb: In a tower on the New Zealand sea lives Kerewin Holmes, part Maori, part European, an artist estranged from her art, a woman in exile from her family. One night her solitude is disrupted by a visitor—a speechless, mercurial boy named Simon, who tries to steal from her and then repays her with his most precious possession. As Kerewin succumbs to Simon's feral charm, she also falls under the spell of his Maori foster father Joe, who rescued the boy from a shipwreck and now treats him with an unsettling mixture of tenderness and brutality. Out of this unorthodox trinity Keri Hulme has created what is at once a mystery, a love story, and an ambitious exploration of the zone where Maori and European New Zealand meet, clash, and sometimes merge. Winner of both a Booker Prize and Pegasus Prize for Literature, The Bone People is a work of unfettered wordplay and mesmerizing emotional complexity.

My bezzie moved to New Zealand this year and for my birthday present she aptly bought me this, The Bone People by Keri Hulme. Hulme was the last New Zealander to win the Man Booker Prize before Eleanor Catton won the esteemed prize this year with her novel, The Luminaries.

I really loved this book. Not necessarily for its literal story or its specific characters, although both were extremely good, but for the tone it set and how I felt reading it, particularly the first half. New Zealand has an extraordinary landscape and has remained, for many, a mystery as Australia normally seems to win the tourists for some reason. This landscape and sense of the unknown comes across in abundance in this novel. With the risk of sounding like the biggest ponce, I'd go as far as saying you could almost feel the waves crashing on the sand - the novel's cover arguably helping me construct this image...

There are three main characters in this novel, all completely different and all adding something to the novel. Kerewin's eccentricity could perhaps have the potential to make her seem caricatured and unbelievable (which fits in with the book itself, which does, in places, touch upon the magically realist...) But despite and because of these slightly odd moments, Hulme has crafted Kerewin (and her world) wonderfully; her grace, her insecurities, her unique mind and her inner-conflicts all come across to create a very full, 'real' person that you can't help feel affection for.

If I had anything negative to say, it would be that I could have done without the author's introduction. As brilliant a writer as she is, she's definitely indulgent. The novel is long, with not much plot - and I liked that - but she's clearly a woman who is difficult to edit. Her preamble felt a little aggressive and a little self-consciously eccentric, which easily winds me up. Saying that, I don't know the woman but I do know her book, and I really loved it.