Michael O’Leary
Mila and the Bone Man by Lauren Roche (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2022), 272pp, $38
Lauren Roche’s debut novel, Mila and the Bone Man, tells a well-constructed story about intergenerational trauma, the solace nature offers, and the redemptive power of healing and forgiveness.
Mila is a child of the bush, and her sensitive nature comes from her Croatian grandmother, Baka, who holds the secrets of ancient healing. Associating this healing with that of a rongoā Māori practitioner who lives next door, Mila grows up with a respect and knowledge for cultural differences and other ways of understanding the world.
The novel is set in the Far North near an old kauri forest, where Mila’s blended and extended whānau live the good life. The close-knit family of seven enjoy the bounty of a large garden while the capable family head, Tama, hunts for meat to put on the table. The combination of Croatian and Māori traditions, recipes, crafts and native-forest storytelling is woven together with a magical touch by this novelist. But the whānau’s idyllic existence abruptly ends, destroyed by a tragic accident in which Mila’s younger sister dies. Grief affects each member differently, but guilt and self-destructive behaviour pave the way for the family to implode. Teenager Mila tries to navigate her own guilt by leaving the North as soon as she can, hitchhiking to Auckland to get as far away as possible. Her anger at her mother Esther’s abnegation of responsibilities and descent into drug addiction serves to fuel her own righteous quest to be self-sufficient and sober.
Mila eventually finds work in the city as a healthcare assistant, which allows her to draw on her knowledge of healing. But while she feels like she is in the right place with her patients, she can’t connect to the Big Smoke in the same way. She becomes a loner in one sense, solitary, and her inability to bridge her personal emotional gap during this urban sojourn leaves the reader empathising with her feelings of loss and alienation. But running away is not the answer, and she is haunted by the world she left behind: the bush, her whānau and the land—the place that formed her, her spiritual home. She returns North with a great sense of trepidation when she discovers her beloved step-father Tama is dying. There, she confronts her whānau, her demons and the half-truths that persist from memories of childhood.
The book navigates a diverse array of responses to grief, from the youngest to the oldest members of the extended whānau. Mila’s extended family network includes her three brothers and the friend she grew up with, the neurodiverse Tommy—who builds sculptural figures from bones he finds in the forest—as well as aunties and her grandmother Baka. Mila’s love of the natural world, particularly the river and the bush surrounding her childhood home, succeeds in reestablishing her bond to the whānau as well as her sense of self.
The novelist’s skill is in her ability to show the flaws of human nature with love and understanding as the narrative depicts the pain and the sense of frustration that the consequences of addiction bring into the whānau. Blame and guilt run through the years, and it is only when the loss of another whānau member draws everyone back together that the healing truly begins. Damaged people are everywhere, although some hide it better than others, and this tale, with its rawness and intimacy, confirms the vulnerabilities that we all share, whether admitted to or not.
As a first foray into the novel form, Roche’s prose is impressively lyrical, immersing you in the environment she describes. We can feel the rain drip on the fern fronds, smell the damp forest floor, and listen to the quiet flow of the river.
But this book is not so much about a fall from a primeval paradise as a recognition that to live in paradise comes with obligations and duties. In navigating her relationship with Tommy, Mila shows a tender friendship, though loyalty is represented by an act of violence following the discovery of sexual abuse. While this is understandable, the vigilante nature of justice being meted out is a little problematic, even though the gritty logic of the melodramatic narrative dictates that the perpetrator is delivered up for retribution. Meanwhile, we get to understand and love the staunch Mila and her quest to find a different path to her mother’s.
Mila’s story transports you into the heart of her community; one insulated to an extent from the outside world. We learn something of the collision of cultures of the North, of the intersection of Croatian and Māori traditions, and of their differences and synergies. We discover paradoxes of love and passion down the decades that involve long-held secrets and perhaps surprising latter-day revelations. With its subtle resonances, Mila and the Bone Man is not only a haunting tale about home and belonging and ancestors but also a fable about the cost of belonging. Ultimately, the importance of the simple yet profound things in life triumph: friendship, nature and facing up to the past in pursuit of healing. The novel offers a brave and rich exploration of the legacies of colonialism, class and the resultant complex whānau of the Far North.
Lauren Roche became a successful author in 2000 with her courageous autobiography, Bent Not Broken. In that book she provided personal testimony of the resilience of the human spirit when life’s challenges seem overwhelming. Bent Not Broken describes Lauren’s childhood and adolescence as she struggles to deal with sexual abuse and rape and her life as a stripper and prostitute in late twentieth-century New Zealand before she turns her life around—returning to high school and university, eventually graduating as a medical doctor. The following year, Lauren released the sequel, Life On The Line, which chronicles the twists and turns in her life, including bankruptcy, depression, attempted suicide and the shocking revelation that her son is a sex offender.
In 2007 she completed her first Ironman New Zealand event while working as a GP and studying extramurally for a bachelor’s degree in applied theology. Despite a training accident injury, Roche did her second Ironman NZ event in 2012. Complications from a routine micro-discectomy three weeks after the Ironman event caused a spinal cord injury with resulting arachnoiditis. Arachnoiditis is an incurable, progressive, painful disorder. Roche continues to exercise where she can despite no longer being able to swim, bike, or run. She now walks bush trails around Whangārei. In 2017, she became a Fellow of the Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners, but in 2019, she retired from General Practice because of complications of arachnoiditis.
While Mila and the Bone Man is a novel, you can’t help but feel that Roche’s own traumatic life has imbued much of Mila’s experiences. In fact, her father, when he heard Roche was contemplating writing another book, more or less pleaded with her to write about someone else’s family this time.
Her empathy for the suffering of others is implicit throughout the novel. In one particular chapter, ‘Mr Jackson’s Hands’, Mila is working as a nurse aide in an Auckland hospital. She sees it as her role to patiently comfort the sick, a task often overlooked by the overworked, under-pressure doctors and nurses. Mila sees that holding hands with the patients in the hospital can bring them great relief. She says:
I held hands with the frightened, the newly born, the bereft, the dying and the sick. The hands I held were trembling, weak, scarred, sweating, dry hands, handcuffed hands, some with bitten-to-the-quick fingers, some soft with perfect texture, others roughened by callouses and splits. Some felt like velvet when I stroked my thumb over them; others were rough as cat’s tongues. I’d held hundreds of hands in the years I’d worked here and wondered what secrets they’d taken, unrecognised, to the grave.
To my mind, this passage encapsulates Mila’s, and by implication, Roche’s, basic philosophy about being kind and helping where you can, despite whatever bad or traumatic or abusive things may have occurred in your own life. It also reads like a secular version of the Catholic Liturgy regarding the sacrament of the ‘Laying on of Hands’, to wit:
the steps for Anointing the Sick may vary by the needs of the sick and the tradition of the priest. The main steps include the laying of hands on the sick, the anointing of the forehead and then hands with oil, and then prayer. Additional prayers may be provided throughout the sacrament, and Confession and/or Communion may also be given.
I have a close friend who is also a doctor, and she believes very strongly in the remedial power of foot massage for her patients.
MICHAEL O’LEARY is a writer, small-press publisher and bookshop proprietor based in Paekākāriki. He holds a doctorate from Victoria University Wellington Te Herenga Waka and is the author of many novels and collections of poetry.
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