Rule of the Bone: Review

This review originally appeared in Aesthetica Magazine in October 2006

Rule of the Bone
Russell Banks
Bloomsbury
ISBN 0747585318

Chapman has not had a good start in life. Living in nowhereseville, USA in a trailer park along with his mother and his abusive stepfather, there’s nothing to do other than steal to buy the drugs that help the time pass more quickly. If this were not miserable enough, Chapman suffers the further indignity of having a ridiculous nickname —Chappie. His prospects for future happiness do not look good.

After his stealing is discovered, Chappie finds himself homeless. He seeks a refuge of sorts with his friend Russ and the brutal chapter of bikers known as Adirondack Iron. Tired of being Chappie, he changes his name to Bone, getting himself a tattoo on the arm: two crossed bones. When the bikers’ flat is burned to the ground, Bone and Russ are cut adrift. Eventually Russ returns to the relative stability of his home life, whilst Bone ends up living in a converted school bus with I-man, an illegal immigrant from Jamaica. In this strange idyll, I-man encourages Bone to come to know his I-self, and it is under I-man’s strange tutelage that Bone at last begins to discover who he is.

I started reading Rule of the Bone with some trepidation. The tough but ultimately redemptive tale of a brutal childhood heroically overcome is now practically a genre of its own, and not one that I particularly relish, whether in fiction or non-fiction. Russell Banks’s novel, however, is distinguished on many counts, not least amongst them the sheer likeability of Bone, the narrator. Banks writes beautifully, and Bone’s voice is utterly convincing, humorous and wonderfully lyrical. Despite a few improbable turns in the story (is it really that easy to board a plane to Jamaica from the USA without passports?), Bone’s endearing, ironic and insightful commentary is never less than compelling. As the novel draws to an end, and Bone finally comes to know his I-self, Banks allows the story to list dangerously towards sentimentality; but I suspect that by this point only the hardest-hearted of readers will protest. The rest of us will just be grateful for this uncommonly generous tale, in which the very worst of life fails to obscure the warmth and optimism that run through even its darkest passages.