New Statesman: After the gold rush. . - The Book Half: Spring Books - The Colour

The Colour

Rose Tremain

Chatto & Windus, 368pp, [pounds sterling]16.99

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 and Silence) or the king's favour (Restoration). The Colour, concerning the effects of New Zealand's mid-19th-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 troubled 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 l ovelessness of her marriage and 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 on 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 learn of 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 link between the two that proves tragic. Pare believes she is in disgrace, which can be expiated only 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. Half-starved, she also needs the help of two brawny gold-diggers. Harriet, too, is eventually drawn to Kokatahi, where Joseph has found nothing but degrada tion and Pare has found 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, paradoxically, who discovers the legendary cave of gold.

It would be possible to use the whole review to recount Tremain's plot, for she is such a magical storyteller. This is a historical novel whose foundation in reality matters not a jot, because it is as an artist that she excels. 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 if, like Joseph, they are repulsively selfish and low. 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.

Part of the almost childlike 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 newplace, 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 deeply into human nature, with an intelligence as modern as it is full of old-fashioned pity for the gentle, the weak and the good.