Book Report: Rule of the Bone

Book report: Rule of the Bone
By Russell Banks

'Flunking out of school and already hooked on drugs, the 14-year-old narrator, secretly molested by his stepfather, emotionally abandoned by his weak mother, leaves his mobile home in the depressed upstate New York community of Au Sable and becomes a homeless mall rat. In a burst of bravado, he acquires a crossed bones tattoo, changes his name from Chappie to Bone, and attempts to find some focus in his dead-end existence. Convinced that he is destined for a criminal career, Bone vents his anger in acts of senseless destruction. His vulnerability and his need for love and direction are fused when he and a seven-year-old waif he has rescued from a pedophile take refuge in an abandoned school bus with an illegal alien from Jamaica called I-Man, whose Rastafarian wisdom and gentle demeanor are fed by liberal consumption of marijuana, which he deals.'
-Publisher's Weekly


First Sentence:
"You'll probably think I'm making a lot of this up just to make me sound better than I really am or smarter or even luckier but I'm not."



This story opens with fourteen year old Chappie alone in his 'family's' trailer, playing hooky from school, watching MTV with the pet cat Willie. Out of boredom, Chappie begins to snoop through their meager possessions, and stumbles across two things of interest in his parent's closet: a high-powered rifle and a suitcase full of rare old coins. He assembles the gun and picks out targets on the street: a small boy, elderly neighbors, even Willie. As Willie stretches out to lick the end of the barrel, Chappie pulls the trigger. The safety is on. Chappie realizes what he is trying to do and becomes upset, feeling guilty and scared. His reaction is what earns him my empathy, and thus the reader/character bond begins.
And there is a long road ahead.
This was a long story. 390 pages of tight font and run-on sentences, heavily submersed in the viewpoint of a male teenager. We follow Chappie's slow destruction as he deals marijuana, shoplifts, gets kicked out of his family's home and moves in with a group of coke-snorting, electronics-stealing bikers. After a freak accident burns down the apartment, Chappie and his slightly older friend Russ hit the streets on their own and eventually wind up at an empty summer house in the mountains. They live there for weeks, eating all the food, burning the furniture for heat, keeping all the windows boarded up and staying inside so as not to give away their presence. When the cramped space drives a wedge between the friends, Russ heads back home to his aunt while Chappie, feeling betrayed and angry, heads out on his own.
Next he meets I-Man, a middle-aged Jamaican man living in a dilapidated school bus, living off the land and praying to spirits Chappie (now called Bone) has never heard of. He stays for months and learns a new, self-reliant way of living, develops a sense of right and wrong, learns generosity and to avoid gluttony. He does chores to earn his keep and has a true interest in learning I-Man's history and inner workings. But then one day I-Man tells Bone that he wants to go back home to Jamaica. Bone is saddened; he doesn't want to stay and live alone, but he doesn't know if he should follow. He decides to wait for a sign from the Jamaican God, and ends up following I-Man from New York to Jamaica.
And this is only the half-way point.



Likes

I liked how this book is the epitome of 'show don't tell'. This story slowly unravels and the reader is given the co-pilot seat, right in the front row as Bone experiences both gains and losses. Bone is one of the best characters I've ever met--he is well balanced and three dimensional and incredibly insightful. At the start, despite the drugs and alcohol and abuse, still possesses an innocence that as the story progresses, he loses. Or maybe not loses, but learns to ignore. In the first quarter of this book, Bone sees a 7 year old in possession of a child molester and tries to intervene, to distract the man and save her, even send her back home to her parents. And at the end of this story, Bone watches as two children suffer silently under their parent's coldness to each other--and he does not act. This is the first book I've read where the character came out (in some ways, at least) worse than when he started. Or has he? Is this not the law of nature and growing up? Do we not ALL lose our innocence?

The ending is sad, almost a tragedy, laced with just the tiniest strand of hope. What an amazing character arc.


Dislikes


It is when Bone follows I-Man to Jamaica that the story loses credibility. Though the drug-permeated Jamaican milieu is portrayed with impressive authenticity, the improbability of Bone's macabre adventures there frays the plot's believability. The novel's strengths are diluted by its excesses: too many descriptions of marijuana highs, too many coincidences. It becomes too grandiose.

The first person narrative, while intimate and necessary, is 90 percent mile-long run-on sentences that would have an English teacher cringing. The Jamaican dialect is strong and I couldn't figure it all out, but I think that might have been the point and I got better the more I read.



Yet one finishes the book with indelible sympathy for tough-guy Bone, touched by his loneliness, fear and desperation, and having absorbed Banks's message: that (as he said recently), society's failure to save its children is "the main unrecognized tragedy of our time."'

Four and a half stars out of Five for unforgettable characters, taking me new places, and giving me plenty to think about. I would read more by Russell Banks.