The ecstatic reception of Keri Hulme's 1984 Booker Prizewinning novel the bone people is inextricably linked to its interpretation as a fundamentally New Zealand novel capable of creating a new national identity in bicultural terms. As Simon During pointed out in 1985, its phenomenal success 'owes more to the desire of New Zealand to see a reconciliation of its postcolonising and postcolonised discourses than it does to either close reading of the text itself, or an examination of the book's cultural political effects'. (1) One side-effect of the critical and popular emphasis on the bone people's indigeneity and its hopes for bicultural harmony has been the neglect of the way its violence, macabre imagery, desolate environments, pseudomedieval architecture and supernatural apparitions connect it to a tradition of literary Gothic. Reading the bone people in terms of its Gothic elements provides an important corrective to the 'redemptive' mode of New Zealand Gothic-which Anna Neill finds at work in The Piano (2), for example--since Hulme's novel insists on the continued legacy of a conflicted history in the present. As a Gothic narrative, 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. Given the emphasis placed on the one hand on the bone people's supposed indigeneity, and on the other on its literary antecedents, it is perhaps not surprising that its Gothic elements have been largely overlooked. Mark Williams notes that on its publication Hulme's novel 'stood for literary excellence made locally out of indigenous materials alone' and was perceived as 'something utterly authentic and of this place'. (3) Reviews in popular forums lauded its inherent 'New Zealandness' by suggesting it revealed a 'flowering of talent which has not been transported from the northern hemisphere' but which grew 'from the breast of Papa' herself. (4) One commentator described it as 'the most New Zealand novel I've ever read', (5) while another went so far as to identify it as 'the first real New Zealand novel'. (6) Williams explains that a 'prevalent rhetoric in the 1980s stressed the difference of contemporary New Zealand writing from that which preceded it on the grounds that the latter was overly dependent on foreign models' and suggests that this attitude shaped the rapturous response to the bone people 'in proportion to the signals that book gives of its "indigenousness'". (7) While critics have been apt to note the novel's debt to European literary models--in particular to Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Herman Melville, Virginia Woolf, Edward Lear, Joyce and Yeats (8)--and although recent years have seen a substantial body of critical work appear on the Gothic in New Zealand literature, the bone people' s debt to the Gothic tradition has remained unexplored. (9)
