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Summary
Summary
A sweeping historical novel about love, ruin, and redemption in nineteenth-century New Zealand Rose Tremain's new novel is a saga of love and greed set during the mid-nineteenth-century gold rush in New Zealand. Newlyweds Joseph and Harriet Blackstone emigrate from England, along with Joseph's mother, Lilian, in search of new beginnings and prosperity. But the harsh land near Christchurch where they settle threatens to destroy them almost before they begin. When Joseph finds gold in the creek, he hides the discovery from both his wife and mother and becomes obsessed with the riches awaiting him deep in the earth. Abandoning his farm and family, he sets off alone for the new goldfields over the Southern Alps, a moral wilderness where many others, under the seductive dreams of "the colour," rush to their destinies. Harriet decides to pursue her own journey toward an uncertain future. But nothing has prepared her for what happens to her when she arrives at the gold diggings. Amid squalor and confusion, burning heat and icy flood, Harriet comes face-to-face with the true cost of desire. Beautifully written, hauntingly evocative, and by turns both moving and terrifying, The Colour is the story of a quest for the impossible, an attempt to mine the complexities of love and in the process discover what it is that makes men and women happy.
Author Notes
Rose Tremain was born in London, England on August 2, 1943. She has written several novels including The Way I Found Her, Merivel: A Man of His Time, and The American Lover. Restoration was adapted into a movie in 1995 and a stage production in 2009. She has won numerous awards including the James Tait Memorial Prize and the Prix Femina Etranger for Sacred Country, the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award for Music and Silence, and the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2008 for The Road Home. She was made a CBE in 2007.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Readers familiar with British writer Tremain's magisterial historical novel, Restoration, or her psychologically acute study of madness, Music & Silence, will not be surprised at the accuracy of historical detail in this elegant and dramatic novel about the mid-19th-century gold rush in New Zealand or by her nuanced portrait of the disintegration of a marriage. Writing at the top of her form, she tells a complex story centering on two immigrants to New Zealand, whose recent marriage represents new hopes for both of them. Joseph Blackstone fled England to rid himself of memories of a shameful act; cold and secretive, he is emotionally constricted by guilt. Strong, spirited ex-governess Harriet Salt has narrowly avoided spinsterdom; to her, New Zealand represents the freedom to explore new horizons. Together with Joseph's mother, they attempt to build a farm on the flats outside of Christchurch, but when Joseph finds gold in the creek, he becomes obsessed by "the colour," as the fabulous metal is known. Abandoning both women, he travels by ship to the west coast, where he encounters hundreds of other desperate men and the clamorous, filthy, dehumanizing conditions in which they live. Later, when Harriet attempts to follow him by land, she cannot cross the gorge between the Southern Alps, justly called "the stairway from hell." By the time she does join him, each of them despises the other, yet the discovery of gold binds them in a new way. From this point on, the narrative, already full of subtleties and surprises, becomes riveting, as nature and human nature collide. There's a wonderful subplot about the mystical connection of a white boy and his Maori nurse, and an inspired depiction of a Chinese gardener who peddles his vegetables and becomes the instrument of Harriet's salvation. With its combination of vivid historical adventure and sensual, late-blooming romance, it's hard to see how this novel can miss winning a new audience for the immensely talented Tremain. (May 21) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Most American readers are familiar with the California gold rush, for which both nonfiction and fictional treatments abound (for the latter, see Isabel Allende's Daughter of Fortune [1999] and Portrait in Sepia [2001]). But few will have even basic knowledge of the New Zealand gold rush of the same century. And while most appreciators of historical fiction will have previous reading experience with frontier novels, particularly those of the beloved Willa Cather, few will have encountered fictional depictions of immigrant life in the wilds of nineteenth-century New Zealand, where pioneers faced the same kind of excitement and tribulation--freedom with a price tag, in other words. Regardless, readers will be swept up here in the tale of a newly married couple, Joseph and Harriet Blackstone, who have left English shores to stake out a new life in the New Zealand wilderness. But gold--the "colour" --gets under Joseph's and Harriet's skin, and they are drawn to play out their destinies in light of how the discovery of gold releases them to their individual needs but separates them from their mutual ones. Astonishingly, Tremain lives up to the soaringly high standards set by The Restoration (1989), her splendid evocation of seventeenth-century England. Her new novel, like its well-received predecessor, is authentically detailed, compellingly plotted, and literarily accomplished. Brad Hooper
Guardian Review
Why does a novelist turn to history? Commonly it is for a new wealth of verifiable particulars, a ready supply of the circumstantial details that promise to make fiction probable. Rose Tremain followed this track for her commercially and critically successful novel, Restoration , a book full of the quirks and ruffles of a half-familiar past. There was, however, more than a hint of gadzookery about it. She is still writing historical novels, but history is becoming stranger and less cluttered, a way of escaping a known world. The times and places Tremain chooses are eccentric, unvisited by earlier novelists. Her last novel, Music and Silence , was a fable set in the 17th-century Danish court. The Colour takes us to the gold rush of late 19th-century New Zealand. In the first part of The Colour , the historical setting provides the opposite of what we expect from such fiction. Everything is bareness, blankness, a world without established habits and values. Joseph Blackstone has emigrated to New Zealand with his wife Harriet and his widowed mother Lilian. On a wind-blown slope, far from the nearest habitation, he has built his house and there the three of them will try to make a new life. They do so with little of the optimism that should be brought to a new world. Joseph, we are slowly led to understand, has fled something terrible in his past - fled, indeed, into his marriage to Harriet. He has saved her from that terrible fate of clever, impecunious Victorian women: a career as a governess. His mother, who has been ruined by his father's gambling, is with them out of bleak necessity. These three try to make "a small world" where everything around them is vast, impervious to their efforts. With great economy, Tremain creates a place swept by winds and bleached by weather, variously liberating or unconsoling to her characters. Harriet loves the wilderness to which she has been brought, but she comes to feel something like hatred for her husband. The marriage is frozen at its heart. Their farm makes them a small, hard living, but Joseph's hunger for something better is fed by his discovery of tiny amounts of gold on his land. It is enough to give him the fever for "the precious thing they called 'the colour' " - the visible trace of gold in clay or gravel. Joseph becomes one of the country's desperate prospectors. He leaves the farm to his wife and his mother and we follow him to the goldfields of the Hokitika River on the west coast. This is where the traditional work of the novelist-as-researcher comes to life. There are extraordinary - and grimly intriguing - descriptions of the business of trying to find gold. Ingeniously, the prospectors develop mining techniques and Heath Robinson machinery, strange contraptions to separate tiny amounts of gold from the earth that holds it, drills and windlasses and sluice boxes. They become burrowers in the earth, each small individual plot, roped off from ever-inquisitive neighbours, an island of human industry. Tempered only by a shared fatalism, it is a Hobbesian domain of mutual fear and resentment where hope takes the form of poisonous fantasy. Gold's powers of transformation fascinate the characters as well as the author. Lilian's sober Christchurch landlady, a fount of moralistic good sense, becomes a coquettish, tumble-haired pander to her clients' fantasies when "the rush" hits town. In the company of men, Joseph becomes something terribly like his hidden self, with all the energy of the anger and guilt, which we now see sustain him. He is dogged and then deserted by Will, a young man who gives his sexual services to whomever he thinks might find "the colour". Eventually Harriet follows him. She will not redeem him, but she will find her own somewhat implausible sexual fulfilment. It is a sign of Tremain's talents at her best that we are drawn into something like sympathy for the desperate Joseph. Yet her narrative wants access to a host of characters, and shifts its point of view in unpredictable, sometimes whimsical, ways. We are taken into the mind of Pao Yi, the solitary, apparently serene Chinaman who supplies vegetables to the diggers. Elsewhere, we see the world sometimes through the eyes of Harriet's nearest fellow farmers, Toby and Dorothy, who have made a good living from sheep, and through the dreams of their ailing son Edwin. Sometimes we have events as they appear to Edwin's Maori nurse Pare, her mind full of the myths of her tribe. The novel's explorations of the latter provide its longueurs. When Tremain is charting without false sentiment the mutually sustaining evasions and misunderstandings of marriage, her narrative method is true to its purpose. Joseph and Harriet are indeed separated by all that allows the reader to have sympathy for each. Elsewhere, the access to everyone's thoughts denies characters their solidity. Her confidence about the thoughts of her characters seems a consequence of her choice of setting. In this imagined world, characters are available not just to each other, but also to the narrator. And this picture of a time and place where people are returned to their elements - a psychological as well as physical frontier - is the novel's success. It is notable that when the story of Joseph's past takes us back to 19th-century Norfolk, time and place seem fabricated. Victorian rural life, complete with its social and sexual taboos, has to be given in a conventional historical shorthand. The ruddy-cheeked rustic temptress with whom Joseph has had his forbidden affair is recognisable from too many other novels. But then we turn back to the world without sanctions vividly conveyed by Tremain. There is a brilliant scene where Harriet returns from visiting Dorothy and Toby to find that, in her absence, her house has been simply taken apart by the elements. The hillside is covered with "the wild assembly of objects with which Harriet and Joseph had tried to begin their married life". Spilled out, objects have forgotten themselves. Pillows bulge like mushrooms; "shards of plates and cups decorated the ground like flowers". This novel invents a time and place where, in just this way, life's small lendings are scattered. John Mullan is senior lecturer in English at University College London. To order The Colour for pounds 14.99 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979. Caption: article-tremain.1 Why does a novelist turn to history? Commonly it is for a new wealth of verifiable particulars, a ready supply of the circumstantial details that promise to make fiction probable. [Rose Tremain] followed this track for her commercially and critically successful novel, Restoration , a book full of the quirks and ruffles of a half-familiar past. There was, however, more than a hint of gadzookery about it. She is still writing historical novels, but history is becoming stranger and less cluttered, a way of escaping a known world. The times and places Tremain chooses are eccentric, unvisited by earlier novelists. Her last novel, Music and Silence , was a fable set in the 17th-century Danish court. The Colour takes us to the gold rush of late 19th-century New Zealand. It is a sign of Tremain's talents at her best that we are drawn into something like sympathy for the desperate [Joseph]. Yet her narrative wants access to a host of characters, and shifts its point of view in unpredictable, sometimes whimsical, ways. We are taken into the mind of Pao Yi, the solitary, apparently serene Chinaman who supplies vegetables to the diggers. Elsewhere, we see the world sometimes through the eyes of Harriet's nearest fellow farmers, Toby and Dorothy, who have made a good living from sheep, and through the dreams of their ailing son Edwin. Sometimes we have events as they appear to Edwin's Maori nurse Pare, her mind full of the myths of her tribe. The novel's explorations of the latter provide its longueurs. Then we turn back to the world without sanctions vividly conveyed by Tremain. There is a brilliant scene where Harriet returns from visiting Dorothy and Toby to find that, in her absence, her house has been simply taken apart by the elements. The hillside is covered with "the wild assembly of objects with which Harriet and Joseph had tried to begin their married life". Spilled out, objects have forgotten themselves. Pillows bulge like mushrooms; "shards of plates and cups decorated the ground like flowers". This novel invents a time and place where, in just this way, life's small lendings are scattered. - John Mullan.
Kirkus Review
The Gold Rush is on, not out west but in 1860s New Zealand, and a young marriage is one of its casualties in this gripping pioneer story from the greatly gifted Tremain (Music and Silence, 2000, etc.). Few emigrants have wanted to start over as ardently as Joseph Blackstone, who is fleeing two deaths in his native England. His father died in a horrible freak accident, his sweetheart in a different accident, for which Joseph feels (rightly) profound guilt. He has brought to the South Island his mother Lilian (no woman is more important) and his bride Harriet, a former governess. Harriet is the ideal pioneer, "a woman who longed for the unfamiliar" and for tests of her strength. Joseph has bought land and built a primitive house. The three scurry like ants under a vast sky, plains before them, fearsome mountains behind--until Joseph finds traces of gold beside their creek. The gold seduces him. It becomes his secret love. Clever Harriet figures this out, though, and, on top of his selfishness, this secrecy dooms her love for him. Soon, Joseph joins the Rush (far away from his property), marks out his claim, sinks his shafts. Anything for the colour! (A teenage hustler makes his nights less lonely.) Tremain does a fine job exploring the culture of the Rush: the noise, the stink, the thrill of the "homeward bounder." Meanwhile, the elements have destroyed his house, and Lilian has died trying to save it. Harriet rejoins him, without tenderness, and sets up her own camp. True to form, Tremain doesn't confine herself to the white settler's viewpoint: other important characters include a Maori woman guided by the spirit world, and a Chinese market gardener who will play a crucial plot role and experience a transformation. Transformations, indeed, abound in this brittle world where everything is possible and yet everything is at risk. The result is a page-turner that's also a work of startling beauty. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In the mid-19th century, New Zealand's population of outsiders is swelled by dreamers and gamblers who willingly cross oceans in hopes of gaining a fortune from the country's newly discovered gold fields. At first, emigrants Joseph and Harriet Blackstone and Joseph's fragile mother, Lilian, are not among these hopefuls. They have instead focused on establishing a new life amid the fertile hills of the Land of the Long White Cloud, far away from the life of servitude, shame, and secret crime they left behind in England. But Joseph, lured by the precious "colour," abandons family and farm to stake a mining claim beyond the frightening Southern Alps. His adventurous, intrepid wife follows him, and Harriet's odyssey leads her to revelations of heart, mind, and body that eclipse even the riches of gold. Exotic and skillfully rendered settings, sympathetic characters, and compelling themes make this latest from a versatile stylist a good choice for readers who enjoy historical fiction, including Tremain's own Restoration and Music and Silence. Recommended for most collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/03.]-Starr E. Smith, Fairfax Cty. P.L., VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
