The Colour

Shortlisted for the Orange prize for Fiction, 2004.Joseph and Harriet Blackstone emigrate from Norfolk to New Zealand 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 is seized by a rapturous obsession with the voluptuous riches awaiting him deep in the earth. Abandoning his farm and family, he sets off alone for the new gold-fields over the Southern Alps, a moral wilderness where many others, under the seductive dreams of "the colour", are violently rushing to their destinies. By turns both moving and terrifying, it is a story of the quest for the impossible, an attempt to mine the complexities of love and in the process discover the sacrifices to be made in the pursuit of happiness.

Read more AMAZON REVIEW
Rose Tremain has long been one of the most vigorous and imaginative of novelists; her sweeping narratives (set against the most vividly realised of canvases) have made her books as dramatic and assured as anything being written today. The Colour represents a further burnishing of her considerable talents; it is a powerful drama of greed and aspiration set in the New Zealand Gold Rush of the mid-19th Century. Tremain's protagonists are Harriet and Joseph Baxter, who (along with Joseph's mother) leave England for the promise of the new world that New Zealand represents. Needless to say, their relocation comes with many attendant (and nigh-insoluble) problems. But their struggle against the land continues apace until Joseph discovers gold in a nearby creek and ill-advisedly conceals the find from his mother and his wife. Gold fever takes an all-consuming grip upon him, and he leaves the family-owned farm to traverse the gold fields of the Southern Alps. There he will find a strange fate: one that affects those he has left behind as well as him.

As a study of human nature in extremis, this could well be Tremains most impressive book. Lacking the elegant stylishness of Restoration, The Colour grants us a fastidiously rendered picture of life lived at the sharp edge. And while her characters are confronted with terrifying decisions that few of us are ever likely to encounter, Tremains narrative gifts make it easy to identify with the decisions (both wise and catastrophic) that her characters take. The sense of period is forcefully conveyed, and while this is not as ingratiating a read as such earlier Tremain books as The Swimming Pool Season, her new level of ambition makes it perhaps the authors most important book yet. --Barry Forshaw



REVIEW
This is a writer whose breadth of imagination and supple prose transcend the genre: she is one of the finest writers in England ― Daily Telegraph

This is a beautifully crafted book - at once a gripping adventure story and a compelling portrayal of human emotion at its bravest and its most vulnerable ― Economist

Tremain is a magnificent storyteller with an enormous story to tell ― Independent on Sunday

Tremain has produced her own wondrous piece of gold ― Scotsman

A fabulous work, bravely imaginative, deeply moving, surprising, invigorating and satisfying ― Independent FROM THE PUBLISHER
The Colour is a gripping drama of sacrifice and greed set during the mid-nineteenth-century gold rush in New Zealand. ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rose Tremain's novels and short stories have been published in thirty countries and have won many awards, including the Orange Prize (The Road Home), the Dylan Thomas Award (The Colonel's Daughter and Other Stories), the Whitbread Novel of the Year (Music & Silence) the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Prix Femina in France (Sacred Country) and the South Bank Sky Arts Award (The Gustav Sonata). Her most recent novel is Lily, a Richard and Judy Book Club selection. Rose Tremain was made a CBE in 2007 and a Dame in 2020. She lives in Norfolk and London with the biographer, Richard Holmes. EXCERPT. © REPRINTED BY PERMISSION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
The Cob House. 1864
I
The coldest winds came from the south and the Cob House had been built in the pathway of the winds.
Joseph Blackstone lay awake at night. He wondered whether he should dismantle the house and reconstruct it in a different place, lower down in the valley, where it would be sheltered. He dismantled it in his mind.
He rebuilt it in his mind in the lee of a gentle hill. But he said nothing and did nothing. Days passed and weeks and the winter came, and the Cob House remained where it was, in the pathway of the annihilating winds.
It was their first winter. The earth under their boots was grey. The yellow tussock-grass was salty with hail. In the violet clouds of afternoon lay the promise of a great winding-sheet of snow.
Joseph's mother, Lilian, sat at the wooden table, wearing a bonnet against the chill in the room, mending china. China broken on its shipment from England. Broken by carelessness, said Lilian Blackstone, by inept loading and unloading, by the disregard of people who did not know the value of personal possessions. Joseph reminded her gently that you could not travel across the world - to its very furthest other side - and not expect something to be broken on the way. 'Something,' snapped Lilian. 'But this is a great deal more than something.
' Her furious voice dismayed him. He watched her with a kind of familiar dread. She seemed lost in the puzzle of the china, as though she were unable to remember the shape of ordinary things. She kept moving pieces around and around, like letters which refused to form a word. Only occasionally did she suddenly discover where something fitted and dare to smear a shard with glue. Then she would press this shard into place with a kind of passionate, unnecessary ardour and her lips would move in what might have been a prayer or might have been a silent utterance of the only French word in Lilian Blackstone's vocabulary: voila`, which she pronounced 'wulla'. And what Joseph saw in all of this was an affirmation of what he already knew: that by bringing his mother here to New Zealand he had failed her, just as he had always and always failed her. He had tried all his life - or so it seemed to him - to please her, but he couldn't remember any single day when he had pleased her enough.
But now he had a wife.
She was tall and her hair was brown. Her name was Harriet Salt. Of her, Lilian Blackstone had remarked: 'She carries herself well' and Joseph found this observation accurate and more acute than Lilian could know.
He turned away from his mother and looked admiringly at this new wife of his, kneeling by the reluctant fire. And he felt his heart suddenly fill to its very core with gratitude and affection. He watched her working the bellows, patient and still, 'carrying herself well' even here in the Cob House, in this cold and smoky room, even here, with the wind sighing outside and the smell of glue like some potent medicine all three of them were now obliged to take. Joseph wanted to cross the room and put his arms round Harriet and gather her hair into a knot in his hand. He wanted to lay his head on her shoulder and tell her the one thing that he would never be able to admit to her - that she had saved his life. Read more

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