Featured Reading Guide
Rose Tremain
Joseph and Harriet Blackstone, along with Joseph’s mother Lillian, emigrate from England in search of new beginnings and prosperity in New Zealand. 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 guiltily hides the discovery from his wife and mother and 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…
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Rose Tremain lives in North London and Norwich, with the biographer Richard Holmes. Her books have won many prizes including the Whitbread Novel of the Year, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Prix Femina Etranger, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Angel Literary Award and the Sunday Express Book of the Year. Restoration was shortlisted for the Booker and made into a film; The Colour was shortlisted for the Orange and selected by the Daily Mail Reading Club. Her most recent collection, The Darkness of Wallis Simpson, was shortlisted for both the First National Short story Award and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Two of her books ( The Colour and The Way I Found Her) are in development as films, and she is currently working on a TV screenplay to star Sir Ian McKellen.
topAbout the Book
Joseph and Harriet Blackstone, along with Joseph’s mother Lillian, emigrate from England in search of new beginnings and prosperity in New Zealand. 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 guiltily hides the discovery from his wife and mother and 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. Harriet bravely decides to pursue her own journey towards an uncertain future. But nothing has prepared her for what happens when she too arrives at the gold-diggings. Amid squalor and confusion, amid burning heat and icy flood, she comes face to face with the true cost of desire. Beautifully written, hauntingly evocative and by turns both moving and terrifying, The Colour is the story of a quest for the impossible, an attempt to mine the complexities of love and in the process discover what it is that makes men and women happy.
topRose Tremain interview/review
The Guardian – Saturday May 10, 2003 by Susanna Rustin
The setting of The Colour is New Zealand, during the 1860s gold rush.
Its principals are a recently married English couple whose early efforts at farming founder when the husband becomes intoxicated by his first sight of gold.
Tremain says “I stumbled on the relics of the gold rush when in New Zealand in 2000 at the Wellington Festival; there’s a little museum with the artefacts of the gold rush in Arrowtown – the tools, the hobnailed boots, the pans. I was really moved by the idea that people set out to change their lives with these very basic tools.”
Tremain is aware that she may be accused of getting it wrong. “I think what happens is that I start out with an obligation to learn as much as I can, and then it goes through this other process. Because it’s impossible from this distance in history to know everything, I don’t think you should deny yourself the opportunity to imagine – the test is, does the reader of this book believe in these characters?
What I strive for in my books is the landscape and the mental landscape that take the reader somewhere else.” “What the reader longs for is to embark on a journey. If you’re remotely attached to the characters you want them to overcome the things that are worrying them, you want them to escape from whatever it is they want to escape from, or to find whatever it is they want to find.”
topStarting Points for Discussion
- Consider the concept of Englishness in the novel, and how you feel Tremain deals with the idea of ‘reassembling’ little pieces of England in New
Zealand.
- How does Tremain handle the presence of the Maoris in the novel, in relation to the English people who have descended upon them?
- Many of the characters are driven by the force of escapism, an over-powering urge to leave all that is behind them and find a brave new utopia in New Zealand. Who do you think is most driven by this romantic notion, and is Tremain critical of this in any way?
- Compare Tremain’s treatment and characterisation of the indigenous Maoris, and their desire for greenstone, with that of Joseph’s, and the other gold-diggers, whom she describes as ‘Men like moths, going towards a golden light’ (p148).
- How does the 19th century notion of Goldrush relate to our modern day? Consider whether you can think of any contemporary examples where the Goldrush mentality – and all its social and cultural effects – is still manifest in our society.
- ‘Without desire, nothing is made.’ (p138). How important is this line to the overall story? Consider the concept of desire and the different forms it takes on in the novel.
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Other Books by Rose Tremain
Evangelista’s Fan
In Rose Tremain’s teasing and brilliant title story, Evangelista’s Fan set…
Letter To Sister Benedicta…
Fat and fity, educated only to be a wife and mother, Ruby Constad has reached…
Music & Silence
In the year 1629, a young English lutenist named Peter Claire arrives at the…
Restoration
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR Robert Merivel is a dissolute young …
Sacred Country
At the age of six, Mary Ward, the child of a poor farming family in Suffolk,…
Sadler’s Birthday
‘Sadler’s Birthday is as far from the stereotype of a young woman’s first novel…
The Colonel’s Daughter
At the moment that Colonel Browne is standing in the shallow end of the swi…
Suggested Further Reading
- According to Queeney ~ Beryl Bainbridge
- The French Lieutenant’s Woman ~ John Fowles
- The Girl at the Lion D’Or ~ Sebastian Faulks
- Perfume: The Story of a Murderer ~ Patrick Süskind
- Ingenious Pain ~ Andrew Miller
- Casanova ~ Andrew Miller
- Our Country’s Good ~ Timberlake Wertenbaker