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Keri Hulme

The Bone People

Keri Hulme. Preface to the First Edition

Standards in a non-standard Book

The Bone People began life as a short story called "Simon Peter's Shell". I typed it out on my first typewriter, nights after working in the Motueka tobacco fields. The typewriter was a present for my 18th birthday from my mother, but that's another story.

"Simon Peter's Shell" began to warp into a novel. The characters wouldn't go away. They took 12 years to reach this shape. To me, it's a finished shape, so finished that I don't want to have anything to do with any alteration of it. Which is why I was going to embalm the whole thing in a block of perspex when the first three publishers turned it down on the grounds, among others, that it was too large, too unwieldy, too different when compared with the normal shape of novel.

Enter, to sound of trumpets and cowrieshell rattles, the Spiral Collective.

The exigencies of collective publishing demand that individuals work in an individual way. Communication with me was difficult

— I live five hundred miles away, don't have a telephone, and receive only intermittent mail delivery — so consensus on small points of punctuation never was reached. I like the diversity.

The editor should have ensured a uniformity? Well, 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. Maybe the editors were too gentle with my experiments and eccentricities.

To those used to one standard, this book may offer a taste passing strange, like the original mouthful of kina roe. Persist. Kina can Become a favourite food.

"O yes, you can become a member. It'll cost $10. " I offer a plastic card very bloody conscious I don't have a dollar, let alone ten. I say, guiltily, whakama, "This jersey I'm wearing, the moth holes only came up now. It was really white before. " She smiles, and goes away into the dark. It really surprises me when she returns with a jug of beer and another smile for me and my friend. We all sit there, dozens of us, train rocking sadly, mountains cold, moth-holes, but not a squash court in sight.

Make of it what you will.

Kia ora koutou katoa.

Keri Hulme, 1984

Prologue. The End At The Beginning

He walks down the street. The asphalt reels by him.