The Bone People (1984) by Asexual Author Keri Hulme

48 min readApr 13, 2024

Started in 1966, finished in 1983, The Bone People by asexual Māori author Keri Hulme is one of the few Aotearoa New Zealand novels to have ever won the Man Booker Prize. As a New Zealander myself who studied this book in school, I’d like to introduce asexual aromantic readers to Keri Hulme — who I think remains the one and only Booker Prize winning author who was also out as aroace.

(I doubt I’ll see another in my lifetime — but who knows!)

WHAT SORT OF BOOK IS THE BONE PEOPLE, AND IS IT FOR ME?

For USA readers, Keri Hulme has been compared to Carson McCullers. The commonality: Outcast status. I don’t see much in common other than this — although I do believe both authors were genderqueer, and perhaps this is what people are seeing. I’ve noticed people are now using they/them pronouns when writing about the late Keri Hulme. Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby gets the same treatment— even before she started to microdose on the T. As of writing, Gadsby doesn’t care what pronouns people use because they refuse to let pronoun misuse ruin his day. I’ll use she/her pronouns for Keri Hulme, simply because she died before she had changed them. And who knows, she may never have changed them. Also, I don’t think pronouns can ever capture the true complexity of gender anyway.

Others compare Keri Hulme to James Joyce due to her ‘wordiness’ (I think also the stream of consciousness.) Hulme’s work is dark but also funny — I’ve heard the descriptor “mordant humour”. Others compare The Bone People to the work of Toni Morrison. There’s a bit of Edgar Allan Poe in there, too.

If you’ve never visited Aotearoa New Zealand you may have a bit of trouble imagining the setting of The Bone People. Don’t think Lord of the Rings for this one. I recommend first watching Jane Campion’s film The Piano (1993). Although filmed in a different part of the country, The Piano is another example of the New Zealand Gothic. I think the audience for The Piano and the audience for The Bone People is a circle. (I remember when audiences en masse walked out of theatres during initial screenings of The Piano.) Aside from the stormy seaside setting and violence, Simon’s mischievousness in The Bone People also puts me in mind of Anna Paquin’s character in The Piano. Both of these works contain a non-speaking character, reminiscent of fairy tales such as “The Little Mermaid”.

European fairytale also influences the work: Like one of the children of the Hansel and Gretel fairytale, Simon is a lost, neglected and abused child who ventures into the world and is drawn to this strange house. Once inside, the owner and main character, Kerewin Holmes, feeds him. She offers him the modern version of a potion; liquor, and a sleeping concoction. This book is a fairytale with a realism wrapper.

As the story continues, Kerewin learns Simon washed in from the sea (literally), his parents can’t be found, and a Māori guy called Joe has taken him in, trying to look after him having previously losing his own wife and child.

Kerewin Holmes lives in an octagonal tower by the sea and is filthy rich having succeeded as a painter, but these days is in a depressive slump, falling into addiction and unable to do much in the way of art. When she discovers the abused boy in her house, she is drawn into a new social world, in the wake of being dropped by her own family who live on the opposite coast.

At age 40, Keri Hulme wears Elvis sunglasses, a mop of curly hair, and a Hei Tiki pendant, representing the first man in Maori mythology. This connects the wearer to the dead. — Keri Hulme age 40

INTRODUCING KERI HULME: QUITE THE CHARACTER

Even if you don’t read her prize-winning novel, let me tell you about the author.

Hulme said in her preface to the novel that The Bone People took 12 years to write, but later clarified it started to form in her mind in 1966 as she was picking tobacco. So the story took 17 years all up.

Hulme is pronounced HEWM.

Keri Hulme loved to catch whitebait. Fishing was her lifelong passion. Whitebait are a New Zealand delicacy — tiny worm-like seafood which change from translucent to white when fried up. Generally eaten as fritters. Many people are repulsed by the eyes. Because they are expensive to buy, my mother used to make ‘whitebait’ patties with grated potato and poppyseeds. Why you’d want to recreate the crunch of whitebait eyes, I don’t know. But while the adults enjoyed the real thing — or pretended to — we kids got served ‘potato and poppyseed’ patties.

Keri smoked cigars, and sometimes pipes filled with Borkum Riff, “a lolly tobacco”. The pipe was kept in a back pocket. While at home, she generally wore a wide brimmed black hat. She often wore that mop of hair in a mullet, especially in the 80s and 90s. She walked around with a knife on her hip and loved to play Scrabble.

Born and bred in Christchurch (a largely white city, especially in those days), Keri didn’t grow up with the opportunity to learn Māori natively, so had to learn it herself. She reached fluency.

She started a law degree but the normie life was not for her. She quit her degree to go tobacco picking at the top of the South Island, in a small town called Motueka. For the rest of her life she did working class jobs around the South Island. I’m guessing royalties from The Bone People covered quite a few expenses, but not quite all of them. At first she’d have made quite a bit of money. After that, a slow but steady trickle.

I’m not sure how she got into this job, but Keri Hulme also worked as a TV director for shows like A Country Calendar and Play School for a while. She could have had a long career in TV, but left because she found many people working in TV to be ‘fake’.

I have lived in several of the places Keri Hulme also lived on the South Island of New Zealand, though not in the same era.

When I was a seven-year-old primary school student in Motueka, our teacher took us on an excursion to the tobacco farm (and also to the hops farm and the local police station*). It’s possible that Keri Hulme had once picked tobacco at the very plantation we visited.

*Yes — it does strike me in hindsight that our teachers took us on some mighty weird excursions. The blood on the walls of the police holding cell is an especially resonant image. And I’ll never forget the smell of the hops at the hops farm. The tobacco farm left me feeling like I’d entered the set of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids — we were tiny humans walking through massive grasses. And yes, there were little kids in my class that year who went on to form an enduring acquaintance with hops, tobacco and police cells.

Like Keri Hulme, and like many New Zealanders, my father was a big fan of fish and chips. Back when driving was promoted as a leisure activity in its own right, he would drive around the South Island popping in for a feed whenever he could, tasting the local fry ups in small towns. He kept a bottle of tomato sauce in the car, just in case. I like to imagine my father at least once ate fish and chips or oysters cooked up by Keri Hulme herself. After all, New Zealand comprises a population with two degrees of separation.

KERI HULME’S CHILDHOOD

Keri Hulme grew up in Ōtautahi Christchurch, in the suburb of New Brighton. Unlike almost every other seaside suburb in the world, New Brighton has historically been one of the cheapest places in Christchurch to buy a house. She attended Aranui High School, which for a long time was the South Island’s lowest SES school (going by its decile rating — a system which was for a long time used to determine equity funding of schools). At Aranui High School you have the best chance in Christchurch of meeting a broad cross-section of society, compared to the white, insular schools you find dotted across other parts of the same city. (In Christchurch, the most expensive houses are nearest the airport — it’s a back-to-front city in that regard.)

Though gentrifying somewhat now, New Brighton is a brutal beach on a typical day — though beautiful in its own way, it is also very windy. This is not sunbather’s paradise. Keri Hulme’s childhood home was on Leaver Terrace, just off Marine Parade. She used to go fishing off New Brighton pier. When her father died at the age of 42, Keri (or Kerry as it was spelt back then) was only 11. Her mother Mary understood Keri’s need for space and solitude, and after her father died, Mary had the porch closed in so that Keri could have a space of her own, to use a study. Nobody else went in there — it was Keri’s own space.

After the Christchurch earthquakes, Keri was very reluctant to revisit her hometown, as it was no longer the place it had been before.

Keri Hulme does not come from a violent family, unlike the characters in her book. She did see evidence of violence in her extended family, inflicted on women and children. So she wanted to throw a light on male violence, because at that time it was not talked about.

When Keri was a child, teachers told Mary they believed Keri to have a learning disability. Mary didn’t believe a word of this, and worked out that Keri instead needed her eyes tested — she wasn’t learning as expected because she couldn’t see the blackboard.

Autistics may relate to this story — many Autistic people were misunderstood and underestimated by teachers as children. Also, eye problems are very common in the Autistic population — if you think you feel affinity to Autistic people in general and also have a weird eye problem like lazy eye, visual snow, light sensitivity, eye pain when driving at night, nystagmus, a sublexed lens, Golden Har syndrome and so on and so forth, consider you might be Autistic:

75% of people with astigmatism are Autistic, 90% of Autistic people can be accurately identified by a distinctive pupil response, and we’re still diagnosing Autism by observing behavior and deciding how weird it looks to neurotypical people.
— Erika Hersteria Heidewald on Xitter

KERI’S MOTHER MARY

Keri Hulme’s mother Mary died in Oamaru in 2019, aged 91, a victim of a car accident. Keri had always been very close to her mother, who seemed to understand her brilliantly, and this had a huge negative impact on Keri, unable to continue with her writing after that loss. Around this time Keri also lost one of her best friends from Ōkārito, Judith Maloney. The pair had been firm friends for much of their lives.

Keri was also very close to her sister Diane. Keri was the eldest in the family of six, and Diane came along 21 months later.

But the relationship Keri had with her mother was always the strongest of all. The pendant you see Keri Hulme wearing in many photos is of a mother and children, a hei niho (literally “necklace tooth”). Mary travelled alongside Keri as she did the mandatory Booker Prize tour. After losing her husband young, Mary brought up six kids on her own (the youngest had been a baby at the time of her husband’s death) and established her own business, later working as a credit controller.

KERI BUILT HER OWN HOUSE

In The Bone People, main character Kerewin Holmes lives in a beautiful home full of spirals and wood. The main room is an octagonal, book-lined, tower-like structure with a huge desk beside a picture window. In reality, Keri Hulme was writing this book in a garage she had built herself, which took a decade to get windows. Her section became waterlogged whenever it rained, and it rains a lot on the West Coast of the South Island. This necessitated gumboots whenever Keri set foot outside. With all this damp, her manuscripts mouldered. However, over years Keri Hulme turned her home into something more like what she had imagined — her massive book collection served as insulation.

Kerewin’s formidable castle is her home, ‘built on an almost island’; the sea itself, vast and isolating, becomes her moat. Real estate details simultaneously describe home and owner. Featuring an impenetrable stony exterior, remoteness and privacy, this exclusive residence registers Holmes’s personal stand-off.
Val Melhop

KERI AS A YOUNG ADULT

Keri Hulme was raised Presbyterian but converted to Catholicism at 18. By her early 20s she’d moved on to “some kind of Taoism”. By middle age she had come to the conclusion that religion has two sides — it can do so much good, and so much evil. She cautioned people to be careful about what they believed because what you believe becomes what you see. After much exploring, she settled on atheism, and could probably add another ‘A’ to her list of descriptors — her youthful exploration into religion had made her a little angry about it. While volunteering at the Catholic church as as young adult she was disturbed to come across a boy who had been severely abused.

A SECOND NOVEL

When she died, she had made inroads on a second novel, BAIT, which has not been published. (Despite no capitals in the bone people, this novel is all caps.) She already had a third of this next book done by the time The Bone People was published. Though never finished to the author’s own satisfaction, there are stacks of manuscripts in existence, and she had read excerpts from BAIT at festivals. Those closest to her believe she didn’t want to share BAIT with the world because of the intense pressure that came with reactions to The Bone People. BAIT was even more experimental. I guess he kept it just for herself. People kept asking her for it in the years after The Bone People won The Booker, before eventually giving up. Keri said in an interview that she can only write when things are going well with her family, and things had not been going well with her family. She said it was basically finished but she couldn’t decide between three different endings. The main character of BAIT works in a fish and chip shop, a trade Keri Hulme was quite fond of. She is “a very large woman, probably Tongan.”

Keri was also like this with waka (boats) — she worked for years on three different waka but never got them to a seaworthy standard. She clearly liked to have projects in progress — more than she liked having them finished.

The pressure of winning the Booker Prize, including the backlash that followed in the land of Tall Poppy Syndrome as well as internationally, proved too much for Keri Hulme. She always maintained that she took no notice of the critics, but I can’t imagine it’s easy to get another novel finished when the first one won The Booker.

Keri Hulme never published another novel, and chose instead to make like Enya — spending the next 30 years living in the least populated little village she could find. When she won her Ōkārito plot in a land ballot, there were only two other families in the village at that time — it wasn’t a tourist hub, but a truly desolate old gold mining town with nothing there but a lagoon and also Donovan’s Store, the oldest known building along the West Coast. Ōkārito is still only home to about 30 residents, with the rest blowing in for stints in their holiday homes.

It might seem that I’m low in the productive stakes. But I don’t think the writing game is about being productive. I don’t think it’s about being a celebrity at all. It’s about creating stories and songs that will last. Otherwise, it’s not worthwhile.
— Keri Hulme, in a 2011 interview at Radio New Zealand

KERI’S REPUTATION AS ‘RECLUSIVE’

The media loved to call Keri Hulme ‘reclusive’, often alongside other negative adjectives. But her family paint a picture of a very social person — family was always important to Keri Hulme and she was close to her mother, her nieces and nephews and so on. A nephew said, “She loved spending time with people, but on her own terms.”

Like Janet Frame (who was also most definitely Autistic, and also had a mop of curly hair), Keri Hulme was no fan of constant communication, and required weeks of swapped faxes before any interview, in which she had to know the questions in advance.

In her early fifties Keri Hulme put her foot down and said she’d no longer attend literary events outside Aotearoa — they are simply too taxing. One thing that happens as Autistics get older — we are much better able to cope with life, because we’ve learned so much — but we no longer have the same energy to expend catering to people’s demands.

Many of the books in her house were reference books. She was fond of pulling out a reference book to prove a point she had made.

The word ‘reclusive’ is a pejorative adjective, and any single person (not just aroaces) may justifiably bristle at it, as may introverts.

I was once asked in a job interview, “Are you a team player or a loner?” The question annoyed me, because ‘team player’ and ‘loner’ are not opposite ends of the same continuum. Moreover, ‘Able to work well unsupervised’ is not mutually exclusive with ‘team player’. (Explaining this didn’t help me any — I didn’t get that particular job.)

KERI HULME’S OKARITO

Occasionally literary tourists would locate her house in the small seaside township of Ōkārito, a former gold mining town, but she never appreciated that. When I say Ōkārito was small, it really was small while Keri Hulme was living there, with just 35 permanent residents.

At the age of 67 she moved from Ōkārito to Moeraki (another seaside town on the other side of the island) and said of Ōkārito that it had become too full of McMansions. As a result, the rates went up and Hulme was no longer able to afford to live there. To me, the fact that the rates were still pretty low (under $1000 per annum) demonstrates how Keri Hulme managed to exist on royalties from The Bone People for the rest of her life, supplemented with the occasional stint of returning to the fish and chip shop to fry oysters. She also earned some money selling whitebait — a local delicacy. Whitebaiting is dangerous work — in New Zealand, rivers rise fast. But Keri Hulme was very good at it, attributing her success to the fact she was short, stocky, broad-shouldered and well-covered in fat. She fished twice per day, and fished between 3–7 hours per day during whitebait season, which starts September first. It involved standing sometimes neck deep in water in the lagoon with a massive pole, sieving the waves coming in, most of the time catching nothing at all, occasionally catching a few kilos.

I can walk on the river beach for 20 miles, cross the mouths of four rivers and not see anybody.
Keri Hulme, describing Ōkārito

I’d encourage anyone reading to look around Ōkārito via Google maps. Then take a look at mean annual temperatures — in September, Ōkārito has a mean of less than 10 degrees Celsius.

We studied Keri Hulme’s short story “King Bait” in high school — a magical realist narrative about a town suddenly inundated with white bait. The locals get dollar signs in their eyes. Keri Hulme was politically very against hoarding resources for oneself. She was all about looking after things for the following generation. Hear Keri Hulme read the short story here.

Keri Hulme lived a modest lifestyle. A small increase in rates was enough to drive her out of town — no doubt added to the fact she never wanted to live surrounded by holiday homes in the first place.

Selling her own house, which she had built herself over many years, she said: “If anyone wants to buy a self-built house full of borer, regularly visited by possums and rats, I have got just the property.”

KERI AND WILDLIFE

She didn’t like cats, because cats are incompatible with native birds. A sign outside her Ōkārito house read: “Unknown cats and dogs will be shot on sight.” Ōkārito is home to Aotearoa’s rarest kiwi, which is saying something because all kiwis are very rare. The lagoon attracts white heron in summer. The author’s attitude towards cats and dogs may seem harsh to the cat and dog lovers among us, but unrestrained pets pose a very real threat to New Zealand’s endangered species. I’m glad Keri Hulme wasn’t around to hear the news that dogs had mauled six kiwis in August of 2023. That single mauling put a significant dent in the kiwi population. As was always the case with Keri Hulme, an outer gruffness was really about justice, safety and environmental protection.

Another sign at her Ōkārito home said, “Unless I know you, or you’ve contacted me first, don’t come in.” But how many of us would appreciate visitors turning up unannounced? Keri Hulme never asked for fame. She only ever wanted to tell stories, fry fish and chips and go whitebaiting in peace.

I have a beautiful house because it’s self built. I’m not worried about its imperfections. It’s comfortable for me. It’s basically book lined… and it’s based on the way I felt about the family cribs, baches, at Moeraki. In there, spiders used to be a fact of life. They’d drape themselves round the lamp hooks on the ceiling. They were kind of everywhere.
— Keri Hulme, in a 2011 interview at Radio New Zealand, embarking on a lengthy spiel about the wonderful insects she has found inside and outside her house.

THE FIRST MAORI WOMAN WRITER?

After winning The Booker Prize, Keri Hulme was described in The Listener, a prominent New Zealand magazine, as ‘the first Māori woman writer’. This was manifestly untrue. Aside from the invisibilisation of other Māori woman writers (notably Patricia Grace), there’s a sharp double-edge to being described as ‘the first’ of anything. Subtext: This work is popular because it’s the first of its kind, and people are interested in firsts, not because the work is inherently good.

As a Pākehā (white NZer), I can’t speak to the Māori significance of Keri Hulme’s work. I do wish I’d met her, or emailed. Perhaps if I’d introduced myself by saying, “Hey, I’m aroace too!” she might’ve been amenable to some gentle questions about that, and how she felt her identity impacted her work. I don’t believe she was ever asked that question in a way that was interesting. Even now, allosexuals don’t typically consider asexual identity a thing. They consider it rather an absence of a thing, and why ask an author about that? What would possibly be said about something that’s not there? Or, just as troubling, why ask an author about her sexuality when she’s clearly a closeted lesbian… who should be left in peace with that kind of secret.

Keri Hulme was not lesbian. She said so herself, very clearly. The Bone People is an aroace novel through and through. It’s not an easy-breezy read. Many people find it baffling, and I believe this is because the aceness shines through. Allosexuals find aspecs baffling. In general.

Keri Hulme never sold the rights for a screen adaptation of The Bone People. She included a clause in her will which says her family is not to sell the rights either, with the exception of animation. In 2011, she expressed admiration for advances in animation, which has only gotten better since then. So who knows what we might see in future. She did say the soundscape would be vital in making an animated adaptation a success. But The Bone People would have to be made by New Zealanders, and Aotearoa does not have a large-scale, well-established animation industry. (SFX and props? A different story cf. Wētā Workshop.)

THE BONE PEOPLE AS AN EXAMPLE OF NEW ZEALAND GOTHIC

What does Gothic mean, anyway? Well, even academics can’t agree on that, but let’s give it a go:

Traces of the past make their way into the present
Reality includes an almost magical realist element, but is more about ancient ideas about monsters coming back out of the shadows. The monsters are no longer considered ‘real’, but nor are they entirely separate and gone.
Liminality! The Gothic concerns characters who are outsiders, living on the edge of society, probably where land meets the sea… The Bone People is multiply liminal.
Whereas the Gothic buildings of classic Gothic works (e.g. by Ann Radcliff) are stone towers on barren landscapes, the main character’s Tower by the sea is the perfect New Zealand equivalent — a modern building in a pseudo-medieval setting. Kerewin has a wine cellar instead of a basement.
Gothic themes: identity, heritage, secrets and trauma.
Characters are haunted by events from the past. The Bone People’s symbolism includes: disembodied voices, spectral imagery, the return of dead people via dreams plus literal (indigenous) ghosts. (The main characters eat a broth of magic mushrooms — these ghosts could be hallucinated.)
Simon — the white boy who washes in on the tide — is an example of the uncanny, and maps onto the Gothic archetype of the persecuted innocent.
Keri Hulme doesn’t shy away from Gothic imagery — when she and Simon first meet there’s a fierce storm brewing. But if you’re spent any time on the West Coast of the South Island, it really is a Gothic place. There always seems to be a rain dumping on the radar. Gumboots are regular footwear. (Keri’s own house would regularly flood, creating an actual moat.)
The main character Kerewin refers to herself as a ‘bloody werewolf’. There’s constant reference to Kerewin’s vampiric ‘fangs’. She feels monstrous, in a way. She also feels vampires are around her.
Might we regard Kerewin as a modern witch archetype, New Zealand version? Pretty much every culture has a version of witchery; Māoritanga has mākutu. Witches in stories often had a non-standard house. (The bewitching edible house of “Hansel and Gretel” springs to mind.) Laura Wright (in Diggers, Strangers and Broken Men) considers Kerewin an “Earth Mother”, which I’d say is akin to a “Wise Woman”, coded historically as a subcategory of witch. In modern terms, we might say Kerewin is an ecofeminist. (Ecofeminism is an activist and academic movement that sees critical connections between the domination of nature and the exploitation of women.)
Hulme makes use of religious symbolism, e.g. when describing someone suspended in the window ‘like some weird saint’. Although Keri Hulme was a self-described atheist, she explored religion in her youth. Imagery, symbolism and metaphor go even further back than religion. Hulme is tapping into something very deep when she writes of sacrifice and the three-person character web of the man, woman and offspring.

We have a trinity; we have a child that is “sacrificed” to a greater end; we have a father figure called Joseph; we have a mother figure who is a virgin; we even have a powerful image of the three in one: It is impossible to not see religious symbolism in this. To cap it all, the strength of the narrative derives its power from that symbolism.
consumer review

The Piano is a form of ‘redemptive’ Gothic (typical of New Zealand Gothic), whereas The Bone People ‘advances an understanding of how the mode operates in a postcolonial society by moving beyond such categories as ‘settler Gothic’ or ‘indigenous Gothic’ to what we might think of as ‘bicultural Gothic’, identifying potential disharmony and disjuncture within a bicultural framework (Erin Mercer)

THE BONE PEOPLE AS ASEXUAL LITERATURE

I believe aroace readers will find The Bone People less baffling than the average Joe Blow. Let me just say, aside from the small number of massive enthusiasts at the time of winning The Booker, the normies typically find this book difficult to swallow.

The cadre of men who ruled the literary world in the 1980s did not like that this book had won The Booker. They did not. They didn’t get it at all. Who was this (one-eighth!) Māori woman? How dare she?!

Of all the things Keri Hulme said about The Bone People in interviews, the following resonates most, since asexuality isn’t about sex per se, but instead concerns a specific way of interacting with the world:

Despite the violence… I find the book to be of some considerable joy. These people do work out their fates. It does have kind of a happy ending. It’s a recipe for people to be blatant individualists and still love themselves at the end of it. It’s got good recipes for flounders in it, too.
— Keri Hulme, describing The Bone People

Like a (stereo)typical asexual, Keri Hulme liked to talk about food, and derived great pleasure from fresh (and fried) local staples. (She said that last bit about the flounders with a knowing smile.)

The Bone People continues to sell reliably within Aotearoa.

I hope I can persuade International asexual readers to get your hands on a copy of The Bone People, especially if you’re new to New Zealand literature — The Bone People is one of the country’s best works of literature, and more than that, its author was one of the nicest people, as well as being aroace.

To non-Kiwi aroaces, let’s keep Keri Hulme’s name alive internationally! Who knows when we’ll have another Booker Prize winner among us?

Content note: The Bone People is not for everyone. It’s violent. Sure, I was required to read it as a minor myself in high school, but I also told you about my primary school excursions, so…

In Aotearoa New Zealand, The Bone People is sometimes taught in senior English, which is where I was first introduced to it. (These days it might be replaced by Once Were Warriors, also violent, and by a completely different kind of author.)

I wasn’t a huge fan of The Bone People at first, partly because I was 16, it was mandatory reading, and I always prefer to read on my own schedule according to whim. But a few years later I studied New Zealand Literature at university under Patrick Evans, where I had to read it again. Second go-around I appreciated it a lot more. In high school, our (queer) teacher didn’t have the freedom to mention the more disturbing parts, the queerer and more violent parts. But at university, we dived right in.

I had no intention of reading it a third time. It’s grim. So I sold my copy in a garage sale, even though I’d shipped it across the Tasman Sea when emigrating to Australia.

Then one day in the early 2010s I came across an article about Keri Hulme, and learned that she now identified as ‘asexual, aromantic and atheist’ — the three As, she called herself. Of course, the words ‘asexual’ and ‘aromantic’ had not been mentioned back when I was studying her work in the 1990s. So I purchased another copy, in my never-ending quest to avoid hoarding, see-sawing against the wish to surround myself with many things.

I had no recollection of how the main character had described herself in the book as ‘neuter’. A few decades later, I learned that Keri Hulme herself used to describe herself as ‘neuter’ before the aspec community had settled upon shared labels. When she came across the words, she used them.

As is so often the case, when taboo minorities don’t have access to shared language, we are forced to make up language for ourselves. When Keri Hulme described herself (and her character) as ‘neuter’ I believe she was referring to both her gender expression and her sexuality. While sexuality and gender are two separate things, and it’s important to maintain that distinction, they are very much linked. So it is for me — I consider my agender and asexuality one and the same, inextricably entwined.

Of course, she was asked in interviews whether she considered herself a feminist (a question interviewers should start asking men):

I’m a feminist because I was born female…[but] never belonged to a feminist group [because she is] not a joiner.
— Keri Hulme

In the same interview (printed in a book edited by Sue Kedgley) keri Hulme explained that she didn’t mind too much if people described her as “a women’s writer” but at the same time, she felt there was widespread public confusion between sex and gender. Keri Hulme felt perfectly at home in her female body, but didn’t identify strongly with woman as a gender: “My sex is female by my gender is neuter, which leaves me uncertain as to what kind of a woman I am”. She “felt committed” to the female side of life, and shared values commonly thought to be female values. She said there were “experiences which are unique to being a woman, even to someone who perceives herself to be a neuter woman.”

In The Bone People, Simon doesn’t know if Keri’s character Kerewin is a man or a woman. Kerewin says she doesn’t like “getting mizzed or mistered”, preferring to go by the name of Kerewin or Kere.

Keri Hulme might just as well be describing me, and I self-identify as agender. I accept she/her pronouns, but they/them describe my gender more accurately.

In 2014, Hulme gave her last interview for the New Zealand public on news show Campbell Live. Had she lived without dementia for another decade or so, I believe she would’ve gotten to ‘agender’ eventually. But Keri Hulme died two days after Christmas in 2021, at the age of 74. She’d been living in a nursing home in Waimate on the South Island.

Note that when we don’t have language to describe ourselves, others will apply words to us regardless. The Daily Telegraph on 2 November 1985 called the main character of The Bone People (an avatar of Keri Hulme herself), a “virgin feminist”. Sometimes, woman (or non-male) authors can’t win. The Bone People had been turned down by a feminist publisher for ‘not being feminist enough’. Spiral Collective had been hoping a more established publisher would take the risk because the novel was so long, and therefore expensive to produce. They only decided to publish it once Keri had done the rounds everywhere else.

When I came back to the book in the 21st century, I, too, knew that I was asexual, somewhat aromantic and also atheist. If The Bone People had been introduced to me at age 16–17 as ‘a novel by an asexual, aromantic author’, with those terms explained, this would have changed the course of my life. I would have known who I was right away. For some reason, I glossed over the part about Kerewin being ‘neuter’. I obviously didn’t see myself in that particular word, which feels to me now like ‘eunuch’ — something biological rather than internal. After all, we take our pets to the vet to get ‘neutered’.

Words are that important.

THE BONE PEOPLE AS MAORI LITERATURE

Main character Kerewin is “blue-eyed, brown-haired, and mushroom pale,” by blood “but an eighth Māori, by heart, spirit, and inclination”.

Keri Hulme said she herself ‘looked the least Māori, but felt the most Māori’ in her family. Hulme is of the Kāi Tahu (a.k.a. Ngāi Tahu) tribe, which belongs to the South. Kāi Tahu has its own storytelling tradition. Main character Kerewin Holmes shares Keri Hulme’s heritage.

According to whakapapa (heritage), Keri Hulme said, “You are what you are. That gives you a very strong foundation to stand in. But this is the negative aspect of it — you can’t actually escape it. It can be a great thing, as well as something oppressive.”

The past informs the present constantly (Gothic tradition to a T). The white side of Hulme’s family originally came to Aotearoa as whalers in the 1700s. (The first whalers arrived in New Zealand in 1791.) Keri was very connected to family and ancestry, and had a deep interest in genealogy.

A MOSES PLOT?

Vintage children’s book illustration based on the Moses motif

At first I thought The Bone People had a ‘Moses’ plot. In an event that takes place before the story opens, widower Joe Gillayley found Simon washed ashore.

Antje M. Rauwerda points out in “The White Whipping Boy: Simon in Keri Hulme’s The Bone People” that Simon’s origin story is similar to origin story of Maui. This trope is from Māori mythology, not Biblical mythology.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TITLE

The title The Bone People draws parallels between the Māori people, who use bone extensively in art and tools, and the notion of the core or skeleton of a person: in the novel the characters are figuratively stripped to the bone. In Māori, the term iwi, usually referring to a tribal group, literally means “bone”. Thus, in the novel, “E nga iwi o nga iwi” p. 395, translates to “O the bones of the people” (where ‘bones’ stands for ancestors or relations), but it also translates to “O the people of the bones” (i.e. the beginning people, the people who make another people).
Wikipedia

MAORI COMMUNITY STRUCTURE

Māori community breaks down broadly into three interconnected spheres (socio-political groups) and English translations go like this:

Whānau: the family, including extended family. This extended family includes physical, emotional and spiritual dimensions, and is based on who you’re related to (whakapapa), but you don’t have to be blood related for someone to be part of your whānau. Your close friends and associates are also your whānau. In usage, it can mean an immediate family or much wider family. That depends on context.
Hapū: a section of a tribe. Sometimes translated as ‘clan’.
Iwi: a ‘tribe’. There’s no clear distinction between what makes a hapū and what makes iwi, but in NZ politics you way more often hear the word iwi. In modern NZ, the iwi is considered the top of this social hierarchy― policy makers go to iwi leaders.

MAORI LANGUAGE

Keri Hulme’s work contains numerous Māori words, which adds a layer of meaning to Kiwis familiar with Māori language, but doesn’t preclude an International audience from understanding the narrative. Scroll down to p94 of this document for a Māori-English glossary of words used in The Bone People. (It’s not much, really — contemporary Māori authors tend to use far more because there has since been a resurgence in Māori language.)

Rather than the odd Māori word here and there being the ‘most Māori thing’ about the novel, Keri Hulme’s prose in The Bone People is said to reflect the intonation and style of the Māori language. So, although there’s ‘not much’ Māori language in the book, the entire book is Māori.

*The Bone People* is 464 pages long, full of symbolism and Impressionism.

The plot of The Bone People is simple.

For a complete plot summary of The Bone People, see here.

ASEXUALITY AND TAHI WAIRUA

Importantly, the more symbolic layer is a close look at tahi wairua, which loosely translates to “spiritual wellbeing”.

Except this concept is all about relationships, not just with other people, but also about relationships with the land and with the dead, including with ancestors you’ve never personally met.

Aromantic asexuals, too, must somehow find our own family and we are forced to look beyond ‘the normie’ way of going about things. I can see exactly why Keri Hulme embraced her Māori ancestry — Māori ideas around family and relationships are perfect for aroaces.

Like other indigenous cultures which existed for centuries before colonisation, the Māori peoples were much more open and accepting of the various sexualities and gender expressions. It was only once Christian missionaries hit the shores that the husband-wife-children set-up became enforced.

Traditional Māori attitudes towards gender and sexuality can be seen in carvings, traditional waiata (songs) and in karakia (incantations/charms), which were explicit.

THE ENDING

One of the main consumer complaints about The Bone People is its ‘deus ex machina’ ending.

[SPOILER ALERT]

Everyone finds an ancient god, and all of their troubles vanish. Kerewin’s cancer disappears, and she is reunited with her family. The ending of this book is just chock full of deus ex machina. The last fifty pages creak under the weight of it. Everything is mended between Joe and Simon. They all move in together, and it’s swell. I could overlook the other flaws of the book if it wasn’t for this. The characters don’t earn their own redemption or suffer because of their own mistakes. The gods fix everything. Maybe it’s a grand metaphor for cultural healing or the power of tradition, but it just doesn’t work.
consumer review

‘Woo-woo’ is the word for it… unless the reader has some understanding of Māoritanga, or a Māori way of looking at the world. Eldon Best has described the Māori way of looking at nature as a ‘mythopoetic co-fellowship’. Rehab Hosney Abdelghany expands on this, saying:

Central to [Māori] culture is an integral combination of myth and reality; the two are inseparable in Māori consciousness and experience of life, since myth is the point of reference of reality. Their essential belief is that the supernatural, the natural, the social and the human are all linked in one and the same chain of being. The Māori have always expressed this concept in their carvings and in a rich oral tradition of waiata, genealogies, and above all, stories.
The (Handi)Craft of Fiction: Raranga and Whatu in “the bone people”

White readers bring a specific set of expectations to storytelling, which comes from a long, Western tradition. Approaching indigenous work requires an open-minded attitude towards story structure, with the understanding that the ‘rules’ are no such thing.

Late in The Bone People… Māori elder Tiaki Mira imparts a prophecy that requires that he “wait until the stranger came home or until the digger began planting, or until the broken man was found and healed” (360) before he can die. The fictional fulfillment of this prophecy at the end of the novel is achieved when the three protagonists, Kerewin, Joe, and Simon― previously separated from one another through acts of violence―come together to reinvent and reinterpret the concept of family and, in so doing, generate a multicultural national model for the future of Aotearoa.
Laura Wright, Diggers, Strangers and Broken Men: Environmental Prophecy and the Commodification of Nature in Keri Hulme’s The Bone People

WRITING AND PUBLISHING THE BONE PEOPLE

The Bone People isn’t capitalised. However, I have difficulty not capitalising book titles, so forgive my capitalisation here.

The Spiral Collective had never published a novel before. This was their first. The Bone People had already been rejected by almost every other publisher in New Zealand by the time The Spiral Collective got it — a small house owned and run by three Wellington women. (Those bigger publishers may have taken it, but Keri Hulme refused to edit it for structure)

As part of the publishing agreement, a proportion of the profits are donated to women’s causes throughout New Zealand.

Hulme never let a structural editor near it. The only person Keri Hulme listened to was her mother Mary, who was a good and experienced reader. It was Mary who gifted Keri her first typewriter. In regards to The Bone People, Mary thought there were too many adjectives and adverbs, so many of those got cut.

Rejecting the exhortation frequently heard in creative writing courses that novice writers should focus on just one narrative point of view, Hulme switches perspectives between her three principal characters. She mixes poetry and song with prose, mingles English with the Polynesian language of the indigenous Māori population of New Zealand and even creates new words where she believes a standard lexicon simply doesn’t adequately capture the meaning she wants to convey.
— BookerTalk

Her refusal to be structurally edited speaks to the personality trait that Keri Hulme always knew exactly who she was and what she wanted to do. She seemed wholly unswayed by social pressure to do something else.

I wouldn’t mind betting Keri Hulme was synaesthesic. At the very least, this prose could only be written by someone in tune with their sensory processing. Keri writes in the first edition preface that due to being incommunicado as much as possible as her editors worked on this book, much of her idiosyncratic word choice has remained in the book, and defies the general rules of conformity that publishers impose upon their writers. (There are rules about which words are hyphenated, and so on.) Personally, I’ve always despised hyphen rules, partly because I can never remember which words are meant to be hyphenated. It’s impossible to try to understand hyphenation via logic, because there is no logic. To the rules, that is. Hulme describes her own logic:

I was lucky with my editors, who respected how I feel about… oddities. For instance, I think the shape of words brings a response from the reader― a tiny, subconscious, unacknowledged but definite response. “OK” studs a sentence. “Okay” is a more mellow flowing word when read silently. “Bluegreen” is a meld, conveying a colour neither blue nor green but both: “blue-green” is a two-colour mix.
Keri Hulme

The Bone People sold 1.2 million copies as a result of The Booker Prize, which helped put New Zealand literature on the map. This was a huge surprise to the author and to her small publishing house. At the book launch, held at Wellington Teachers’ College, it was lamented that a thousand copies had been printed, because there was little chance of selling them all. However, they consoled themselves by saying they all had enough extended family to sell them all. This was Keri Hulme’s imagined audience — domestic.

CRITICAL RESPONSE TO THE BONE PEOPLE

The largely male literary establishment which ruled New Zealand’s literary landscape until very recently don’t think much of The Bone People. As C.K. Stead infamously said, “Her uses of Māori language and mythology strike me as willed, self-conscious, not inevitable, not entirely authentic.” Stead (a white man, grammar educated) also said that as only one eighth Maori, Keri Hulme didn’t qualify as a real Maori. Oof.

Well-known feminists are happy to declare Keri Hulme an influential writer. Joy Cowley loved it, Sandi Hall loved it, feminist bookstores love to stock it and recommend it.

Not so much the men. Author of Once Were Warriors, Alan Duff, queried whether any normal person the street had actually read The Bone People. In 1985 Philip Purser over in England called the women who collected the prize on Hulme’s behalf a “posse of keening harpies”. Another literary editor, Philip Howard said “to call it the best novel of the year is a subjective statement.”

And not all women, of course. White British actress and model Joanna Lumley was on the Booker committee that year and said, “This is over-my-dead-body stuff for me.” She hated The Bone People. Said she couldn’t abide a book about child abuse no matter how it was handled. But she at least admitted the book was lyrically written, before refusing to attend the final judging. She had to attend rehearsals. Lumley wanted The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing to win. Note that this novel is set in London — a city Joanna Lumley no doubt feels is more ‘relatable’ than a remote fishing village on the West Coast of Aotearoa.

White British children’s author Nina Bawden absolutely hated The Bone People and went to lengths to distance herself from it.

By the way, Bernadine Evaristo considers The Bone People one of her favourite novels of all time.

Do you see a pattern emerging? The people who love this book are: feminist, BIPOC, or otherwise not allied firmly with the hegemonic-dominant culture, for queer reasons, neurodivergent reasons or a combo. For me, this is a very Autistic book, as well as a very aroace book. BIPOC readers will find it refreshing because it’s not a white book.

AN ASEXUAL PERSPECTIVE ON THE BONE PEOPLE AS A WORK OF ART

If you’re aspec, you may find things in this book that resonate as an aspec reader. Especially if you’re aroace.

On p174 Keri Hulme addresses the (allosexual) reader expectation that the two main characters, one female, one male, will eventually get together romantically. Kerewin lets Joe know in no uncertain terms that that won’t be happening. That’s not how she’s built. Many aspecs will relate to the difficulty of disclosing very personal things to a new person, hoping to ward off possible future misunderstandings, rejection and even violence.

On p186, in a stream-of-conscious nightmare passage, Kerewin wakes up after a nightmare. In the nightmare, she was being kissed. Sex repulsed and sex averse aspecs may find that relatable.

Across the book, Kerewin has chosen a solitary life for herself, setting herself up accordingly, but is surrounded by the violence that is other people and other people’s relationships. How much must she wade into other people’s problems? What is her personal responsibility to the community? While this book takes an extreme version of this moral dilemma (child abuse), the question more broadly is one that impacts aroaces. What do we owe the world before we can be considered acceptable?

ON “LIKEABILITY”

It is frequently said that the characters in The Bone People are not ‘likeable’.

While the characters may not be likeable, Hulme’s psychological portrayal of all three is amazingly astute.
— Lizzy’s Literary Life

Likeability is a nasty concept, alongside ‘relatability’. When writing consumer reviews on Goodreads? Sure, go for it, everyone’s allowed to find characters unlikeable and unrelatable for whatever reason. But be very wary if you enter creative writing spaces, or academic spaces, and continue to judge work by this “metric”. Because who cares if you personally find a character likeable or relatable?

In his creative writing workshops, author and creative writing teacher Matthew Salesses bans commentary around relatability. He finds the concept of relatability silences the non-white American students in his classes. If a white American finds a Korean main character unrelatable, that’s probably because the white student has had too little exposure to Korean culture. Minorities always know more about the dominant-hegemonic culture than the other way around. I believe the relatability issue is why the needle isn’t budging when it comes to seeing more diverse voices in mainstream publishing. When the gatekeepers ‘don’t connect’, they won’t champion a new voice.

The same applies to marginalised sexualities depicted in fiction. To me, the character of Kerewin Holmes is a very good — highly relatable — depiction of an agender, asexual, Autistic* person, and readers with a similar identity will be far less likely to find her ‘unrelatable’, and therefore ‘unlikeable’.

*I have no problem claiming the late Keri Hulme as probably Autistic. I recognise her as neurokin. Janet Frame’s family resent the late Janet Frame being called Autistic by scholars who continue to study her work, and have spoken out against it. Following their logic, Janet Frame must remain neurotypical in the public imagination. This is ableist bullshit. When Autism is seen as a neurotype every bit as equal as the dominant neurotype, to be deemed Autistic is no longer a problem. Unless The Bone People is read via an AAA+ lens, you’re simply not getting as much out of it.

The dispiriting reality is this: The very same readers who find Kerewin Holmes unrelatable probably wouldn’t understand me, either, if I revealed my full self.

Literary commentators, alongside the culture at large, have a hard time understanding asexuality as a concept, including into the 21st century:

Kerewin’s description of herself as ‘neuter’ and her magpie-like cultural borrowings are obvious manifestations of the indeterminate and the feigned, but biculcultural idenityt is also called into question by the novel’s Gothic strategies.
— Frae Ghosties an ghoulies deliver us, a 2009 paper by Erin Mercer (title is a line from the novel)

Kerewin’s sexuality and gender is ‘feigned’, apparently. Another word for ‘fake’. Now, where have aspecs heard that accusation before?

Note that Keri Hulme herself attracted labels such as ‘divisive enigma’. I might borrow that for my social media descriptor.

KEREWIN AS ANNOYINGLY PERFECT

I find it interesting that (at least) one reader finds Kerewin insufferably perfect:

If you’ve familiar with the mysterious, sometimes scary realm of fan fiction, you’ll know the term Mary Sue. Kerewin has got the Mary Sues something bad. The similarity of her name to the author’s is only the first clue. She’s also fabulously wealthy, talented in art, music, and language, a survivalist, and oh― she can kill a man with her bare hands. In conversation and in monologue, she sounds exactly like someone with all of these traits would sound: that is, she sounds ridiculous. About three quarters of the way though the book, I was wincing every time she opened her mouth.
consumer review

I once confided (off-hand) to an older, married Japanese co-worker that I never wished to be married.

His response came surprisingly fast and sharp. “Do you think you’re perfect?”

My Japanese co-worker was speaking his non-native language. Having studied Japanese myself, I understand that when he said ‘perfect’, he probably meant ‘whole’ or ‘complete’.

As it happens, I did partner up, but people who choose to remain single are frequently on the receiving end of such commentary. It comes from a worldview in which men and women are two halves of a whole, forever incomplete until becoming ‘one’ in marriage.

So when a reader of The Bone People finds the single-by-choice Kerewin impossibly ‘perfect’, I wonder how much of her aromanticism has to do with their reaction.

Reading through an Autistic lens, the close relationship between Simon and Kerewin takes on a different hue. Autistic neurotypes tend to find each other. Simon is, in many ways, a relatable Autistic child. Symbolically, he came from ‘nowhere’ (an apple who fell far from the tree). He is non-speaking, but can read and write like a child almost double his age (splinter skills). He frequently absconds. He is constantly ‘rude’. His caregivers don’t know how to handle him and require a wider community to help out rather than censure. It makes sense that Simon would be attracted to Kerewin. He recognises a fellow phenotype, someone who is ‘kind but not nice’, as we can say of many Autistic adults, who know that allistic behaviour seldom matches words, and have become jaded as a result.

I don’t think it’s Kerewin’s ‘perfection’ that annoys allistic readers at all. I believe readers are put off by her atypical outlook and response to the world.

Does Kerewin really count as a dreaded Mary Sue? Well… maybe, if we’re prepared to consider that the requirements of Mary Sue changes depending on the social context. The same reviewer calls her a Mary Sue even while pointing out that Kerewin does nothing to stop the abuse she’s seeing.

And by the look of the scars on him, it’s all been going on for a long long time. Man, I wouldn’t bash a dog in the fashion you’ve hurt your son.
I’d shoot it, if the beast was incorrigible or a killer, but never lacerate it like that. […] Somehow, Joe, e hoa, dear friend, you’ve managed to make him ashamed of what you’ve done.
The Bone People, Keri Hulme

By traditional yardsticks, Kerewin is pretty fxxking far from a Mary Sue. She finds a kid in a rainstorm, seriously considers kicking him straight out, and then gives him coffee and alcohol. But if I really think about it, Kerewin does conform to a ‘Guys’ Gal’ masculine ideal of femme existence: She is entirely self-sufficient, made her own money (through talent and luck), is clearly a good artist and architect and she’s pretty much immune to the bullshit conformity required by polite society. She’s the perfect Prepper Butch (without the guns, because this is New Zealand). Kerewin did once study aikido in Japan for a year. (I’m recalling The Bride from the Kill Bill movies, Beatrix Kiddo.)

ASEXUALITY AS ALONENESS

“This place is almost self-sufficient. The range can live off driftwood. There’s a coal seam on the property I could mine, and extract kerosene for the lamps if I needed to. I’ve got four solar panels providing hot water, and two that charge the nicad batteries… only the stereo and the drawing light need the electricity anyway.”
“Why the emphasis on self-sufficiency? Do you believe in the millennium or something?”
“Nope. I just like to be able to do most things for myself.”
— Keri Hulme, The Bone People, Spiral, 1986, p.107

Not surprisingly, critics are also inclined to see Kerewin’s asexuality as an extension of her general aloneness:

Kerewin explains that she knows no explanation for her asexuality, which appears to provide another example of her characteristic isolation from other human beings.
— George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History, Brown University

Landow quotes the passage in The Bone People which describes asexuality perfectly, on the page, before there was a shared word for the concept. Contemporary asexual readers will find this relatable in a way credentialed critics clearly cannot:

“I haven’t been raped or jilted or abused in any fashion. There’s nothing in my background to explain the way I am.” She steadies her voice, taking the impatience out of it. “I’m the odd one out, the peculiarity in my family, because they’re all normal and demonstrative physically. But ever since I can remember, I’ve disliked close contact. . . charged contact, emotional contact, as well as any overtly sexual contact. I veer away from it, because it always feels like the other person is draining something out of me. I know that’s irrational, but that’s the way I feel.”
She touches the lamp and the flaring flame stills.
“I spent a considerable amount of time when I was adolescent wondering why I was different, whether there were other people like me. Why, when everyone else was fascinated by their developing sexual nature, I couldn’t give a damn. I’ve never been attracted to men. Or women. Or anything else. It’s difficult to explain, and nobody has ever believed it when I have tried to explain, but while I have an apparently normal female body, I don’t have any sexual urge or appetite. I think I am a neuter.”
[Joe] picks up the painting again, considering it.
“Maybe you have so much energy tied up in this, you have none left for sex.” He doesn’t sound doubting, or horrified. “Sublimated is the jargon, eh.” He looks at her. “I’m not being funny, but that’s a Maori thing in a way… I used to carve a lot, and one of the old prohibitions was, while engaged in a carving, you did not lie with a woman or spend your seed, as the euphemism goes. It wasn’t that sex was bad, but because all the energy was tied up in a tapu thing, was needed for it.”
“Maybe so,” says Kerewin heavily. “I don’t know.”
— Keri Hulme, The Bone People, NY, Penguin, 1986, pp. 265–67.

This isn’t the first mention in the novel of Kerewin’s sexuality. Writing to her estranged family on the opposite coast, Kerewin says:

Hello,
It is six and a half years since I last wrote. Well, six years and five months, and an uncertain number of days, 21 or 22, because I lost track of time then, for a weekend or so…
A lot has happened. I have a home, befitting the eccentricity of a hOlmes. I am still myself, iron lady cool and virgin. Maybe not lady. But when to call that sport, the neuter human?
— Keri Hulme, The Bone People, Spiral, 1986, p.96

More so than the ‘virginity’, it is Kerewin’s decision to make her own life rules which stands out as relatable to me, and surely to many aspecs. In discussion with Joe about her self-sufficient, eccentric house, she has this to say:

I’m a secret back-to-the-lander.” She laughs. “Not really, but you know originally this place was going to be a dome or a yurt or an icosa. I was going to build it out of recycled goodies. Run goats and fowls, and a guinea-pig or two, and have a vegetbale garden about six acres square. Then one night, while I was still in the planning stages, I sat down on the beach and thought, Holmes, what do you want? Because all these other people’s ideas… nothing wrong with them, but they didn’t really fit me.”
— Keri Hulme, The Bone People, Spiral, 1986, p.106

That passage to me describes what it’s like to be the aspec kind of asexual. Other queer communities are already quite established, to the point where there’s a clear path if you’re a gay man, for instance, even though a gay life is still off the beaten track. But aspecs — especially non-partnering aspecs — are still in the weeds as far as forging a life that is truly individualised. Aroaces are doubly queer, even with the same letter A, even without the genderqueerness: To be both asexual and aromantic pushes back against heteronormativity in two separate ways: Sexually and romantically.

There’s no preset for this kind of life — not now, and certainly not in the mid 1980s when Keri was finishing off this novel.

Today’s aspec elders are mostly silent, not because they don’t exist, but because the vast majority are either silent about it or haven’t had the opportunity to consider an alternative lifestyle for themselves, and live it out accordingly. Aspec ‘elders’ are in our mid-forties and fifties. The aspec community skews so young, a thirty-year-old is considered an ‘elder’.

SEPARATING AUTHOR FROM CHARACTER

Although Kerewin Holmes is a clear avatar for the author herself, it’s important not to mistake the creation from the author. Importantly, Kerewin Holmes is estranged from her family. By massive contrast, Keri Hulme was very connected to hers, and had close, life-long friendships.

I lent Kerewin a lot of my characteristics, but I don’t think I would like to meet her. We both like smoke and whiskey a lot. I behave differently under stress.
— Keri Hulme, Vogue interview with Antonia Williams

Aside from the nature of the ending, the other main consumer criticism of this book concerns the fact that this book seems to be an author writing a fantasy version of herself.

In fan fiction, this is now known as ‘self insertion fiction’ and is commonly regarded as ‘cringe’.

Before we scoff at self-insertion fiction, much ‘self-insert fic’ been taken seriously. Let’s not forget that Keri Hulme was a wide reader who spent her young adulthood exploring Catholicism. “The Divine Comedy” might be considered epic self-insertion fic for the Catholic doctrine.

Another term we might use:

Author surrogate. A character whom the author, consciously or unconsciously, models after himself. Such characters (e.g. Jubal Harshaw, Stranger in a Strange Land) often dominate the story when they should not, or acquire too many positive attributes, too few faults. Author surrogates often hog the point of view to the detriment of other characters.
Glossary of Terms Useful in Critiquing Science Fiction

Since The Bone People was first published, in 1984, a number of other storytellers have inserted themselves into their fiction. Not their selves, though. We know that Jemaine and Brett from Flight of the Conchords are not Jemaine and Brett the creators, though Jemaine Clement in particular stays in character for interviews, partly as a way of maintaining privacy. Likewise, we know that the police officers of Wellington Paranormal are not the actors themselves, even though the characters inherit the names of the actors.

When storytellers create characters with clear parallels to themselves (or to their actors) what are we to make of that? The suggestion, whether accurate or not, is that the fictional characters are exaggerations of the real storytellers. In comedy we accept this as part of the gag. I’ve heard no criticism of Brett and Jemaine from Flight of the Conchords for creating funnier versions of their real, day-to-day selves.

Part of this criticism is gendered. However Keri Hulme felt about her own (and Kerewin’s gender), she was read as a woman. And woman authors get away with less.

As Joanna Russ wrote in her (surprisingly funny) book How To Suppress Women’s Writing, women are more likely than men to be told that we’re not really writing. We’re just writing autobiography. (Once you notice this phenomenon, you see it everywhere — not just applied to women, but to anyone who is not a white cis man.)

The cover to Joanna Russ’s How To Suppress Women’s Writing, containing the main points of the book: A lot of sentences starting with She wrote it but, then giving a different excuse as to why women’s writing should not be taken seriously. — “She wrote it, but she was only writing about her own life — she didn’t contribute anything artistically”

Let’s step back a bit.

What’s so wrong with an aroace author sharing her own fantasy life? I know why I wrote my novel about an aroace main character — I wanted on my own bookshelf, somewhere between the hundreds of stories about allosexual characters, just one or two characters who were highly relatable to me. In order to write something relatable to me, I had to draw from my own emotional life even if the material circumstances of my main characters were nothing like me at all. Like Keri’s Kerewin, my main character is more accomplished, far more wealthy. He has built a dream home. (It is really only now, writing this sentence, I realise what a huge effect Keri Hulme’s The Bone People has had on me, as a person and as a writer.)

Whenever authors with marginalised identities write characters who share the same labels, no matter how dissimilar these characters are from our real, author selves, the accusation will always be that we are writing autobiographically. Even if we’re not. This is not something that authors with dominant-hegemonic identities need to think about.

MODE OF NARRATION

The first thing you notice when starting to read The Bone People: The non-standard style of narration.

I’ll do my best to describe it, though here’s what it looks like on the page:

As you can see, the novel is multivocal. At times we hear the story via an omniscient narrator and at other times from Kerewin, first person.

Even then, the distinction between omniscient and first person is muddied by design. I haven’t seen this exact thing done anywhere else: Hulme is writing in close third person, focalising on Kerewin but, via formatting usually reserved for quotations (indented paragraphs), the reader gets a deeper insight into her thoughts. Here’s another example:

[STRAIGHT NARRATIVE] For the first time she can see the child clearly. Slender and prominently boned, his smallness making him seem frail. A tallowness about his face, a waxen depth that accentuates the bruise marks of tiredness under his eyes, and the narrowness of his face.
[INDENTED INTERIOR MONOLOGUE]
Hey where you been?
Watch you been doin?
[STRAIGHT NARRATIVE] For, as he stands there waiting on her next move or geture so he may make his reciprocal offering, all the vivacity has gone out of him.
— The Bone People, Keri Hulme

This indented part of a text is often called internal monologue. Fiction writers use it widely, though the convention is to integrate it more seamlessly into the rest of the text. Normally, if interior monologue is done well, the reader won’t even notice it’s happening. Hulme has in contrast required us to notice it; she indents it, and gives the interior monologue prominence in its own paragraph.

Why? Well, looking at those questions in the indented portion above, it’s not actually clear who is asking the questions: Is it Kerewin, or is it or the child who she has just found peering through the window of her tower? Significantly, the boy is non-speaking. So Kerewin has to guess what he is saying to her. By convention, the interior monologue part of text has a character attached within the same paragraph, so readers know who is thinking what.

But these questions are being asked by the boy, interpreted via Kerewin for the reader, and so this technique has a very specific purpose in this specific part of the text: Kerewin and boy are experiencing a mind-meld. Despite Kerewin’s prickliness and self-imposed isolation, this is the one person who can get under her skin.

There are other storytelling reasons for this choice of layout.

The interior monologue paragraphs juxtapose against whatever the narrator is saying, and this kind of juxtaposition offers the reader a parallactic experience. These characters misunderstand each other’s motivations. The juxtaposition allows the reader to see that in real time.

Hulme’s indented paragraphs aren’t always internal monologue, though:

Running up the dark stairway, surefooted, lightheaded, giddy in the spiral between the walls…
Her original plan had included a garderobe, but there’d been problems. A convenient stream was one, the stench another. Let Genet sniff his farts like flowers, she preferred other incense. So a modern watercloset flush in the medieval stone…
— The Bone People, Keri Hulme

That looks more like plain old backstory to me, though it might count as internal monologue if we buy that Kerewin is reminded of all this when she sees the newcomer running up her spiral staircase.

Why go non-standard for the narration?

Why might Keri Hulme want readers to see both the external and internal experiences of Kerewin at once? Precisely because this is the sort of character who is (mis)judged, misinterpreted, misunderstood.

In fact, this character — a proxy for the author — is a very typical representation of Asexual, agender, Autistic+++

When authors with marginalised identities create character, we cannot rely on readers to fill in any gaps. Our way of seeing the world is not the dominant way of seeing the world.

But publishers routinely expect just two modes of narration these days: First person and close third. Unless you’re an established author, good luck getting anything else published, especially in the USA.

I do wonder if this exemplifies the manifold unacknowledged expectations that ultimately put a hard limit on more marginalised authors getting published via mainstream avenues.

REFERENCES

Books: The Monday Extract — Ali Ikram’s Brief Encounter with Keri Hulme (2015), The Spinoff, in which TV crew try to interview Keri Hulme but she keeps disappearing, eventually found at a fish and chip shop, snapped carrying two blue cod and a packet of chips under her arm. They decided not to publish this invasive photograph.

How Keri Hulme’s The Bone People changed the way we read now, The Booker Prizes

Kedgely, Sue. “Our Own Country”. Penguin. 1989.

Mercer, Erin. “Frae Ghosties an Ghoulies Deliver Us”: Keri Hulme’s the Bone People and the Bicultural Gothic.” Journal of New Zealand Literature (JNZL), no. 27, 2009, pp. 111–30.

Gutiérrez C, Santoni JLM, Merino P, de Liaño PG. Ophthalmologic Manifestations in Autism Spectrum Disorder. Turk J Ophthalmol. 2022 Aug 25;52(4):246–251. doi: 10.4274/tjo.galenos.2021.46588. PMID: 36016969; PMCID: PMC9421935. (In 2022 papers should not be using the phrase Autism Spectrum Disorder).

Rauwerda, A. M. (2005). The White Whipping Boy: Simon in Keri Hulme’s The Bone People. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 40(2), 23–42.

Roos, B. and Hunt, A.Eds. “Diggers, Strangers, and Broken Men: Environmental Prophecy and the Commodification of Nature in Keri Hulme’s The Bone People.” Postcolonial Green: Environmental Politics and World Narratives. Charlottesville and London: U of Virginia P, 2010. 64–79.

Like other standout novels from New Zealand, The Bone People is about damage done to young people. As I re-read The Bone People in 2020, a new UNICEF report reminds New Zealand that the country is doing very poorly in regards to child welfare. New Zealand ranks fourth worst out of 44 countries. New Zealand does a poor job of protecting its most vulnerable children, and it stems from continuing inequality.