Volume 33, Number 3 · February 27, 1986
Worlds of Wonder
By D.J. Enright
The Bone People
by Keri Hulme
Louisiana State University Press, 450 pp., $17.95
What's Bred in the Bone
by Robertson Davies
Viking/Elisabeth Sifton Books, 436 pp., $17.95
In The Bone People, winner of the 1985 Booker Prize in Britain as well as the Pegasus Prize in America, nature will fight back valiantly, but the opening pages are all artifice, dispiritingly so. The stoutest reader must quail when he reads in the preface that the short story which the novel began as (and really ought to have stayed) was typed on the author's first typewriter, a present from her mother. The novel was turned down by three publishers on the grounds that it was unsuitably large and unwieldy and 'too different,' but then 'Enter, to sound of trumpets and cowrieshell rattles, the Spiral Collective.' Since the author lived five hundred miles away in a different part of New Zealand and didn't have a telephone, the Collective's editors weren't able to insist overmuch: 'Great! The voice of the writer won through.' Did Dickens and Hawthorne carry on like this? Or Emily Brontë and George Eliot?
Review, 2927 words
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