During a 1989 interview with Keri Hulme on the topic of the dreams in the bone people, she told me that the dreams, and particularly Simon's dream, were the essence of the novel. This paper has grown out of that comment. By examining Simon's dream I saw the links between building homes and building character. They revealed how Hulme treats the home as a microcosm of New Zealand society and ultimately as a way of gauging the national psyche. Hulme's central emblems, the Tower and the spiral, are engineered to provide a symbolic text for her novel which addresses post-colonial crisis in New Zealand and offers alternative ways of lessening its attendant problems. Both major symbols represent the character Ho(l)mes. The novelist's intention emerges cyclically through the differences in the construction of the initial Tower residence and the redesigned spiral shell house. Hulme and Holmes, the architects, build symbolic significance into the distinctive features of these buildings to match the development and changing philosophies of the chief protagonist; hence the novel as Bildungsroman? The novel's symbolic meaning, however, extends beyond the individual lives and homes of the protagonists. Through Simon, Joe and Kerewin as characters representing the gender and racial mix of New Zealand society, and through the concept of the home as the microcosmic hub of that society, Hulme challenges the dominant Eurocentric system in a desire to reinstate the indigenous culture of New Zealand and to integrate marginalised people into mainstream society.
