I’d rather stick with these guys.Īt five hundred plus pages it’s a dense read, and while the narration is generally third person omniscent (godlike and all knowing, for you laymen) it is limited by who it is following, and by sudden insertions of first person narration. If you want to hang out with the holy trinity, that’s your deal.

Anyone with a religious bent could take The Bone People and turn it into some kind of massive parable. If you were determined, you could find a Judas, a Lazarus, an Adam and an Eve. Many words that a trained literati would use as effective whistleblows- communion, for example- appear in text. A determined graduate student could make all sorts of allusions to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Their stories start separately and by the time the book ends they become predictably entangled. The three characters you follow are Kerewin Homes and Joe and Simon Gillayley. If you’re not interested in the true depth of the human condition, or find things like that trite or overdone, then this book is not for you. In fact, a large part of the novel follows its three protagonists doing everyday things. It contains no major car crashes, no intricate government conspiracies. Stylistically, The Bone People is not for everyone. If, like me, you read in short allotted increments- like two fifteen minute breaks at your menial temp job- then you’ll find it difficult to stop and return to whatever you were doing. The Bone People is not a book you can easily put down. I judged this particular book by its cover, and for once it was a good choice. I love their greenstone pendants, their traditional facial tattoos, their use of ferns and fishooks into just about everything. This particular edition- a penguin ink special- features a black and white maori-tattoo styled design by Pepa Heller, who operates a tattoo parlor in Tauranga, New Zealand. Covers are a large part of why I buy books. I picked up The Bone People because of its cover.

The bone people author