Other characters made similarly vulnerable by hope cluster around the Blackstones - their apparently secure neighbours, Dorothy and Toby Orchard and their young son Edwin, and Edwin's nurse, Pare, whose Maori mysticism furnishes one of the weakest strands of the novel. To say it is an exciting read makes The Colour sound old-fashioned, but there are shocks on another level, too: a nasty anal rape, a botched abortion, and an incident of drug-fuelled sexual ecstasy which the Literary Review's bad sex panel may like to investigate. Such is the care and pace of her writing that Tremain has at her disposal a range of special effects that would tax Hollywood technicians. Terrible snows and floods arrive suddenly, with disastrous consequences.Ī passage around Cape Farewell in an old steamboat is evoked in painful detail: nausea, spray, cold, terror, the bruises caused by the rearing up of the ship's rail.

Buildings collapse without warning in the heat, or are entirely scoured away by drought and wind. These are the sequences in the novel that will stay with you. In pursuit of their dreams, and later of each other, they pit themselves against some of the island's most hostile terrain. Joseph dreams of gold, which he believes will allow him to atone for his disgraceful secret Harriet dreams, more reasonably you might think, of 'land and children': but neither dream looks likely to come true. The novel is about hope, or the point at which hope becomes destructive or turns into madness. Tremain has said that she was moved to write about the mid-19th-century gold rush in New Zealand by the desperate flimsiness of the prospectors' tools, which she saw in a museum there, and she is particularly good at describing optimism in the face of overwhelming odds. While they are jointly occupied in scraping a living from the inhospitable soil of their farm, their marriage seems sturdy enough, despite a series of disasters, but when Joseph glimpses a way of literally scraping a rather easier living - when he finds gold dust, or 'the colour', in their creek - their shared dream begins to rupture. Joseph, apparently 'rather an ordinary man', has left England of necessity, having done something mysterious and terrible Harriet, on the other hand, is an adventurous sort, who always longed to go 'beyond the boundaries society had set for her' during her 12 years as a governess.

The colour by rose tremain