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Rose Tremain
The characteristic
of a Rose Tremain novel is obsession. Sometimes,
as in The Way I Found
Her and The Swimming-Pool Season, this takes the predictable
form (unpredictably expressed) of a love story. Sometimes
the yearning is for stranger matters: a transsexual
operation (Sacred Country) music (Music & Silence)
or the King’s favour (Restoration). The Colour,
concerning the effects of New Zealand’s mid-nineteenth
century gold rush seems almost mundane. We all understand
greed for gold, or think we do. Yet nothing in Tremain’s
world is simple, and here the alchemy of her imagination
has turned gold into something more precious.
Joseph and Harriet Blackstone have
emigrated to New Zealand in the hope of a new life
in a new world. Joseph
is escaping from a dark past, whereas Harriet, a former
governess, yearns for novelty. Joseph’s widowed
mother, Lilian (the only character who comes close
to comedy) sniffs that “in this godforsaken place
everything is worse;” and it is certainly harsh.
Their cow, Beauty, freezes to death and Joseph has
obstinately insisted on building their primitive new
home too high up, where it catches the winter winds.
Joseph wants no children. Lilian, who “had lost
her old life and the little daily diet of hope that
had gone with it”, is resentful and lonely, humiliated
by her husband’s bankruptcy through gambling.
They have compatriots a day’s ride away, the
Orchards, who are as wealthy as the Blackstones are
poor, as sensible as Joseph is selfish and as generous
as he is mean. The Orchards have a delightful child,
Edwin, and befriend Harriet. Harriet, the moral centre
of the novel becomes aware of the lovelessness of her
marriage and courageously tries to lock this knowledge
away in a tin box brought from England. But Joseph
takes it to hide his great discovery: gold on his land.
The grains precipitate all that
is worst in Joseph, and best in Harriet. He keeps
it secret, but becomes
infected with lust for “the colour”, the
blue streak in clay that means it is auriferous. The
two women are left to struggle on alone in the makeshift
farm, while Joseph travels on a ship to Kokatahi, where
gold is occasionally discovered. At this point, the
narrative splits into several parts. Early on in the
story we have seen the banishment of Edwin’s
Maori nurse, Pare, from the Orchard house. Edwin loves
her, and she him, and their relationship, continued
in secret forges a magic realist link between the two
that is to prove tragic. Pare believes she is in disgrace,
which can only be expiated by the discovery of greenstone.
The Maoris know exactly where the gold for which hundreds
of white people search lies, but Pare, like them, must
cross a terrifying mountain range, and, half-starved,
needs the help of brawny two gold-diggers. Harriet,
too, is eventually drawn to Kokatahi, where Joseph
has found nothing but degradation and Pare, death.
The one person in all the mess of mud and misery who
has found his vocation is Pao Yi, the Chinese man who
has made an exquisite vegetable garden beyond the reach
of greed: and it is he, ironically, who discovers the
legendary cave of gold.
It would be possible to spend the
whole review recounting Tremain’s plot, for she is such a magical story-teller
that I can think of no reader, man, woman or child,
who would not be captivated by it. This is a historical
novel whose foundation in reality matters not a jot,
for it is as an artist that she works wonders. Just
as the settlers attempt to “transform” their
new world into a survivable approximation of the old,
they are themselves changed by it, metamorphosed into
beings who command compassion even when, like Joseph,
repulsively selfish and low. The gold, or the “colour” is
itself symbolic of more than wealth, and those who
are most likely to find redemption are those like Pao
Yi, the Orchards and Harriet, who have not forgotten
the colours of their own past. As Pao Yi’s father
tells him, “We may avoid shame if we choose,
for shame seldom takes us unawares, but has its warning
cry.” Part of the almost child-like pleasure
of Tremain’s fiction, no matter how strange the
psychology and territory it takes you into, is that
the moral compass remains fixed. Love and trust, corruption
and cruelty remain opposed. Even in this seemingly
limitless new place, whose novelty and strangeness
are vividly conveyed, the good become aware that “everything
in the world had its boundary and was finite.”
Her themes are those of the great Victorian novelists:
sacrifice, honour, greed and deception, and she delves
as deep into human nature with an intelligence as modern
as it is full of old-fashioned pity for the gentle,
the weak, the good. It is rare these days to find a
modern novel by which one feels enlarged as to the
beauty, sorrow, subtlety and joy of the world. The
Colour is such a treasure.
The New Statesman, April 2003
Amanda Craig’s new novel,
Love in Idleness, is published by LittleBrown in
July.
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