Shortlisted for the 2004 Women's Prize for Fiction.
The Colour is set during a nineteenth-century gold-rush in New Zealand. It chronicles the lives of Joseph Blackstone and his wife Harriet, newly arrived from Norfolk in England with Joseph's mother, Lilian, hoping to build a farm on South Island. Lilian longs to be back in the relative civilisation of Christchurch. Harriet, who has been rescued from boredom as a governess, dreams of adventure and of having a child. Joseph has a guilty secret.
Meanwhile Edwin and his Maori nurse share a spiritual connection which threatens him and forces her on a quest. I found this sub-plot a distraction to the main action.
Their inexperience and New Zealand's vicious climate combine to make their first year a disaster. Then Joseph discovers a few grains of gold ("colour") in his creek. And then he hears of miners heading for a remote region and gold fever enters his heart.
This is a book about human weakness and the accompanying guilt, and about hardships and their survival. Sometimes it is about the compromises and the sacrifices that one must make in order to survive, so that one's soul survives. Each of the characters attempts to put on an armoured exterior but deep in their soft and secret core they have a name and a dream and a hope and kindness. The only thing about the book which is always cruel and unforgiving is the countryside, a place of suffocating snow and bone-biting cold, of wind and torrential rain and flooding, weather that can kill and can even destroy a house. A place that offers gold but demands a sacrifice, a price that is perhaps too high to pay.
Characters:
The principal characters in this book are complex and carefully drawn so that the glimpses we catch of them can be assembled into real human beings.
The main protagonist Harriet is Joseph's wife, a position she undertook to liberate herself from "Twelve years of being a governess, yoked to a room, frozen behind a wooden desk as time kept passing and never stopping for her." (III: The Power of Dreams, 1) She longs for adventure and a child. Shes the practical one, shown early when she helps them escape from a snow-covered house. There is an element of the Hero's Journey about Harriet's plot once she has left the farm and set off in search of Joseph: at one point she faces an ordeal and fails, later there is a near death experience
Joseph is somehow an archetypal male: he dreams of wealth but he is hopeless when it comes to the details and all he really knows how to do is fail. Unfortunately, those he loves often suffer from his failures.
Lilian is Joseph's mother. We first encounter her mourning her crockery which has been broken on the journey from Norfolk; she spends her evenings puzzling and gluing them back together. This is a metaphor if nothing is. She spends her time in regrets over her husband, foolishly dead, and her once-respectable life.
Will is an utterly cynical rent boy who lives parasitically on the miners.
Chen is a Chinaman who grows vegetables and sells them to the miners. His has the Buddhist quality of detaching himself from the situation and maintaining inner peace, although his internal life with its hopes and desires is as complex as anyone's.
One is motivated to read, partly to discover Joseph's secret and partly to find out whether anyone finds any gold and, if they do, whether they can keep hold of it and, if so, whether it is going to make them happy.
Selected quotes:- “In the violet clouds of afternoon lay the promise of a great winding sheet of snow.” (I: The Cob House. 1864. 1)
- “Women understood each other, or so he assumed, for someone must understand them and he knew that he did not.” (I: Beauty’s Coat, 1)
- “‘I often wonder,’ said Lilian, as she cleared away the cutlery, ‘ why god gave the animals such ugly voices’.” (I: Beauty’s Coat, 4)
- “His clothes were noisy as he moved inside them.” (I: The Orchard Run, 2)
- “She spent her evening mending broken plates” (I: Bargains, 4)
- "Lit by the small flame, the expressions on the faces of the men seemed neither cheerful or sad, but to have about them a strong degree of resignation, as though the world had pestered them - like a mosquito or like a fly - pestered them for so long that they could no longer be bothered to swat it away, but just let it settle quietly on them." (I: D'Erlanger's Hotel, 6)
- "She thought that she was doing the best she could for it and she told herself that seldom is any 'best' so good that it could not be further perfected." (II: The Road to the Taramakan, 1)
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