Bone Game

A novel by Louis Owens

I’m trying not to hurry through Bone Game, a novel by Louis Owens (University of Oklahoma, 1994). This is the kind of book I love — a murder mystery with pervasive supernatural elements. The story centers on mixed-blood Indian Professor Cole McCurtain and his friends and family who are caught up in an eruption of bloody violence and frightening dreams that are rooted in the past, on the cultural and historical fault-line territory of Santa Cruz, California. McCurtain, who has Choctaw and Cherokee heritage, has to find his way out of a personal crisis-zone to face a terrible manifestation of ancient wrath and betrayal, with the help of strength and insight drawn from the several Native traditions that gather on his side of the struggle.

Owens has a couple of other novels under his belt and I mean to search them out. The book is a bit choppy — a few too many point of view characters for my taste necessitates a sort of splinter-approach — and there’s some confusion at the beginning in getting the story going and filling in the background trauma; as some one with a history of slow or complicated beginnings to my own books, I am all sympathy, and I didn’t let this put me off the book.

In fact I see a similarity between Owens’ problem of introducing and presenting the historical elements of his background-tale and the SF author’s famous problem of explaining the invented or extrapolated ground of a story set in the future or on another world. In SF this is known as the problem of the Expository Lump (“Well, you see, Ensign, the reason that the Gremlins can’t accept our shipment of toxic moon colony waste is that according to their creation myth, which was discovered coded in the engravings on a Were-Bear tooth by the Kostikian Mining Expedition that touched down here due to an act of space-piracy in 2045 — ”).

But sometimes even if a “lump” is not precisely germane to the plot it’s irresistible stuff that you wouldn’t dream of objecting to, as when one character here proposes a grant-application for an expedition to dig up the graveyard at the Old North Church in Boston in order to do scientific analysis on the remains of Puritans, and then offer spare skeletons around to regional museums so that each one can have its very own example of that important American historical creature, a Puritan, on exhibit. Anyone familiar with the recent struggles of Native peoples to get back the remains of their ancestors that were “collected” for “scientific study” and then dumped in cardboard boxes in the basements and back rooms of certain scientific institutions will recognize the sardonic allusion and, in a dark way, enjoy the turnabout suggested.

Many White authors dip into Indian spiritual traditions to add color to mystery and suspense stories(and the resulting ethical questions of appropriation and treatment also reach over into SF of the anthropological and sociological type), with results that are sometimes excellent, sometimes weak, but always controversial to readers sensitive to cultural issues. It’s an adventure and a privilege to read a book like this, which speaks from the center outward rather than from the outside looking in (which is not to say that Owens’ handling of these elements is non-controversial, since Indians from different traditions and even from within the same tradition are just as likely to disagree about fictional representation as members of any other culturally diverse population might about similar fictional use —see dissention among Jewish critics over Philip Roth’s early novels).

This book’s picture of a number of Native American spiritual traditions coming together to deal with destructive rage from both past and present is striking and entertaining, and I’ll be sorry when it’s over.

Let me point out in passing that anyone interested in Native American authors and studies might check out the backlist of the University of Oklahoma Press, which has been publishing such work in a handsome trade paper format for some time. I think these books get less critical attention than you would expect because they come out of a university press; that’s certainly my experience with The Vampire Tapestry and the University of New Mexico Press, through nobody’s fault — that’s just the way the system works. So if you want to buy Bone Game, you’ll have to bug your bookstore people about it.

--SMC
October 11, 2000

Copyright © 2000 by Suzy McKee Charnas