The Colour

In 1864, a newly married couple - Joseph and Harriet Blackstone - travel with Joseph’s mother Lilian from England to New Zealand to begin their lives together. For Harriet, it is the beginning of a future, a dream about her own home in the beautiful wilderness of New Zealand, a chance to have a garden and animals and to create something out of her life. For Lilian, the move represents failure and loneliness where she must give up her comfortable existence in England, be forced to piece back together the shattered remains of her china, and live on dirt floors in a cob house which leaks. For Joseph, the move to New Zealand is an escape from his past - a past he has buried and hidden from everyone - and a chance to heal his guilt and show more make his mother (finally) be proud of him.

The inhospitable and breathtaking land of New Zealand seems pitted against these people almost from the very first when Joseph mistakenly builds his home on an exposed hill instead of the protected flats. Then one day Joseph discovers gold dust in the creek near his home and keeps it a secret from both Harriet and Lilian. It becomes an obsession which promises his redemption and one which will finally drive him to the other side of the Southern Alps where a Gold Rush is underway.

Rose Tremain writes extraordinary prose which thrusts her reader into the midst of a stark and unforgiving environment. She develops her characters flawlessly - uncovering Joseph’s motivations, desires and finally his devastating secret as he struggles to find gold among desperate men. Joseph’s loss of love and morality is heartbreaking.

Harriet Blackstone is a raw character who grows before the reader’s eyes from an uncertain individual to a woman of courage and fortitude. In Tremain’s hands, Harriet is fully realized.

Lilian, too, grows from a difficult woman into one the reader comes to respect. Faced with the loss of everything she knows, she eventually puts aside the broken pieces of her life and strives to make something of what she has been given.

Thematically The Colour revolves around the power of nature, love and desire, materialism vs. inner contentment, and the connection between cultures. Tremain introduces a Chinese man who has left his family in China to join the Rush - not as a seeker of gold, but as a gardener providing sustenance for the miners. There is also Pare - a Maori woman who develops a mystical relationship with a small boy whom she once cared for. Despite the wide scope of theme and character in this novel, it never feels scattered. Tremain connects all the threads for her readers, giving them a book which is illuminating and satisfying. Tremain is a gifted storyteller, and in The Colour she combines all her talents and creates a novel which resonates with the reader.

Highly recommended. show less

Newly married couple Harriet and Joseph Blackstone travel from England to New Zealand in the 1860s to start a new life. They are accompanied by Joseph’s widowed mother. They build a cottage and attempt to farm. They are inexperienced so they make mistakes and suffer the consequences. The harsh weather adds to their woes. When Joseph finds “the colour” in the river on his plot of land, gold fever takes over and changes everything.

Their marriage is troubled from the start for reasons that will eventually be revealed: “She thought that perhaps what she longed to hear was that almost every life was arranged like this, around a void where love should have been and was not, and that her predicament was therefore an ordinary show more one.”

This book is right up my alley. It is a sweeping adventure, filled with evocative details of the landscapes, natural disasters, and a rugged life. The characters are deeply developed, and even the animals are given a personality. The storyline explores themes such as greed, hubris, unhappiness, and yearning for a better life. It ultimately portrays love as more a powerful force than riches.

This book is beautifully and atmospherically written. It conjures a sense of time and place and reminds me of the type of writing we find in novels of the 19th century. All the senses come into play in the creation of these scenes. Tremain brings these characters to life. We understand their deepest desires, anxieties, strengths, flaws, and what drives their actions, even acts that are not particularly pleasant.

We get a glimpse of life in this historic time – farming and ranching life, neighbors, indigenous people, Chinese immigrants, travel by ship and over land. It is an absorbing story. The ending is satisfying. I just loved it and am adding it to my favorites.

“Most of what Man does, moment to moment, is for his imagined future, for the coming time, in which he will be happier than in time present.” show less

Newly married couple Harriet and Joseph Blackstone travel from England to New Zealand in the 1860s to start a new life. They are accompanied by Joseph’s widowed mother. They build a cottage and attempt to farm. They are inexperienced so they make mistakes and suffer the consequences. The harsh weather adds to their woes. When Joseph finds “the colour” in the river on his plot of land, gold fever takes over and changes everything.

Their marriage is troubled from the start for reasons that will eventually be revealed: “She thought that perhaps what she longed to hear was that almost every life was arranged like this, around a void where love should have been and was not, and that her predicament was therefore an ordinary show more one.”

This book is right up my alley. It is a sweeping adventure, filled with evocative details of the landscapes, natural disasters, and a rugged life. The characters are deeply developed, and even the animals are given a personality. The storyline explores themes such as greed, hubris, unhappiness, and yearning for a better life. It ultimately portrays love as more a powerful force than riches.

This book is beautifully and atmospherically written. It conjures a sense of time and place and reminds me of the type of writing we find in novels of the 19th century. All the senses come into play in the creation of these scenes. Tremain brings these characters to life. We understand their deepest desires, anxieties, strengths, flaws, and what drives their actions, even acts that are not particularly pleasant.

We get a glimpse of life in this historic time – farming and ranching life, neighbors, indigenous people, Chinese immigrants, travel by ship and over land. It is an absorbing story. The ending is satisfying. I just loved it and am adding it to my favorites.

“Most of what Man does, moment to moment, is for his imagined future, for the coming time, in which he will be happier than in time present.” show less

The Colour by Rose Tremain is an exceedingly well written historical fiction novel with a strong story, well developed characters and an interesting setting. This is the story of Harriet and Joseph Blackstone who marry and come to New Zealand full of hope and determination to forge a homestead from the wilds of New Zealand’s Southern Island. Joseph’s mother, Lillian, is a reluctant addition to this small family, she despises the isolation and would far rather be making her home in the town of Christchurch. Joseph and Harriet barely know each other, Joseph needs a wife to help create the new life he envisions while Harriet is escaping her unmarried life as a governess.

The layers and secrets of each character are slowly revealed show more throughout the course of the story. Love never develops between Harriet and Joseph, instead Joseph loses both his head and his heart to gold fever and he eventually abandons both his mother and his wife for the gold fields. Harriet and Lillian carry on but their homestead is doomed. Harriet then follows Joseph to the gold fields but this strong and resourceful woman soon finds her life heading in a new direction.

The author delves deep into her characters to reveal their motivations, hopes and desires. We learn very quickly that Joseph lacks strength of character and purpose and that Harriet is very clever and has a core strength of iron. Joseph spends most of his time feeling regretful of all that he has done yet continues to avoid any confrontation. Harriet, who soon sees Joseph for what he is, is on a voyage of self-discovery. While the story is generally rather melancholy, the author writes in such a way that the reader is totally transported to late 19th Century New Zealand. The supporting characters are all realistic and interesting and help in building the layers that abound in this rich historical novel. show less

In 1864, Joseph Blackstone, his new wife Harriet, and his mother Lilian emigrated from England to New Zealand in search of a better life. Lilian, recently widowed, pines for her former lifestyle and resents having to live on their remote farm. But at the same time, she also hopes to rise above her station, and is disappointed to encounter familiar class barriers in New Zealand:
The familiar feeling of being snubbed -- a feeling she'd thought belonged only to England, where the disdain of the upper classes infected every encounter -- made Lilian want to weep, or, worse, give Dorothy Orchard a vicious swipe across her badly coiffed head. Lilian was particularly vexed by the knowledge that she never understood exactly how people like show more Dorothy Orchard achieved their instantaneous mastery over others outside their class. It happened before you noticed it, like a perfectly executed card trick. (p. 78)

Joseph is arrogant and stubborn, refusing to listen to advice from the locals on where to build his house, and what materials to use. Joseph and Harriet have an odd relationship. Joseph has a secret in his past, and married for all the wrong reasons. It's not clear what they see in one another, and it doesn't take long for Harriet to realize she will never truly love Joseph:
For day by day, she kept secret from him her own lovelessness. It piled up in her. At times, it was not merely lack of love that she felt; it was hatred of the blackest kind. And though she struggled to conceal it from him, perhaps she succeeded no better than he did with his blatant heaps of earth? In the nights, she often awoke at first light to see him staring at her, his eye close to hers, his fists clenched around the sheets. Did he know that she did not love him? Did he understand all too clearly that she loved the wilderness he had brought her to, but not him? (p. 95)

Yet both Harriet and Lilian are committed to making their farm a success, even after Joseph finds gold in a nearby creek and decides to join the hundreds of other men seeking their fortunes in New Zealand's gold rush. Circumstances eventually force Harriet to go off on her own, in search of Joseph.

The story is told from alternating points of view with chapters narrated by Harriet, Joseph, and a couple of other characters who weave nicely into the storyline. Joseph turns out to be an arrogant and hapless loner, unable to relate to women and desperate to please his mother by accumulating wealth. Harriet is strong and independent, undaunted by Joseph's failings and refusing to bow to societal expectations of women. It is only through Harriet's intelligence that the couple have any chance of finding gold and making something of their lives together.

But that's only part of this story; Rose Tremain has more to say than "just" historical drama laced with love. She also shows how the quest for gold took its toll on the land and destroyed both individuals and communities. Those who are untouched by greed and continued leading simple lives were by far the happiest and, one could argue, the most successful. show less

If anybody but Rose Tremain had written The Colour, I would think it her masterpiece. It contains wonderfully assured writing and characters in a fascinating historical setting. I liked it less well than The Road Home and Music and Silence because of Joseph Blackstone. He is a damaged man who never finds redemption from the damage he has sustained and inflicted on others. His wife Harriet, on the other hand, is a strong, fascinating survivor whose natural propensity for reaching out to other people makes her a decent human being. Those decent human beings are the reason that I turn to Ms. Tremain again and again. Harriet is far from perfect, but her courage and her ability to care for others and for herself make her a heroine worth show more reading about.
This is a book of visions and of vision, a book that seriously considers the quest beloved by English teachers as a theme in literature. Now that I have finished it, I believe that four stars may be too few, but while I was reading, I was less satisfied than I had been in her other books. I'll let the four stars stand, but say that this one is well worth the time. show less

All of the characters in this book are believeable although not necessarily likeable. Harriet has a strength about her that was necessary if a woman was to survive during these hard times. Even her mother-in-law Lillian, who at first meeting appears to be weak and self-centered learns to adapt to the hard circumstances of their life. Joseph is a complex, distant, and distrusting man filled with a guilt that he himself does not seem to understand. The setting of New Zealand with its rugged terrain seems to almost become a character. All of the realistic and harsh aspects of this novel pulled me into the story. However, the mysterious "spiritual" world of the Maori nurse and her relationship to young Edwin seems out of place in the story. show more I was disappointed in this aspect of the book. The contrast between how the Maori reacted to the environment around them and how the English settlers reacted could have better developed. Overall, a really good historical fiction read

4-24-2018: Reread this after finding it on my shelf and having absolutely no memory of reading it. Probably didn't like it as much as I said I did the first time (five stars). The "colour" refers to the gold Joseph and many others were searching for in New Zealand. Again, none of the characters were particularly likeable, and once again, I didn't particularly like the plot thread of the Maori nurse and Edwin. Kind of a magical realism thing which I'm just not into. Still, a good read for the historical and cultural angle. show less