Published 2003 / Length 368 pages
The Colour is an utterly compelling story of a quest for fulfilment, absolution and gold. Joseph Blackstone, his new wife Harriet, and his widowed mother Lilian have come to mid-nineteenth-century New Zealand to start over. Once the flimsy civilization of Christchurch has been left behind, however, they find themselves with a fight on their hands – both to wrest control of this new land they have come to, and to prevent the past from breaking down their fragile relationships with each other. While Harriet embraces and indeed begins in small ways to tame the wild environment, Joseph and Lilian soon lose faith in their endeavours to build a home, and former shames continue to disable them. Then Joseph sees ‘a flicker of colour in the grey mud’ of the creek and takes on a new hope and a new secret. For that colour is gold. By the time Joseph leaves to join the gold rush that is gathering momentum on the other side of the Southern Alps, Harriet has begun to look to her own needs – until events force her, too, to undertake the arduous journey to the goldfields.
‘Tremain’s novel is about the power of transformation. Do we choose a quiet life over a daring and difficult one? What does it feel like to be unlovable? Do we understand our darker sexual selves? [… A]n acute study of ambition, guilt and repressed desire.’ – The Observer
• In the book, man and nature are frequently at war with one another. What do you make of Dorothy’s belief that ‘inevitably we make a small world in the midst of a big one. For a small world is all that we know how to make’?
• When Joseph begins his search for gold, he literally succumbs to a debilitating fever. Discuss the changes that the gold rush has effected in the town of Christchurch and how this affects Lilian.
• Consider the story of Edwin and his Maori nurse Pare. What does this add to the book?
• Discuss the character, relationships and fate of Joseph Blackstone.
• What do we think of Harriet? Is her relationship with Pao Yi convincing?
• The Colour was shortlisted for the 2004 Orange Prize for Fiction.
• Tremain was moved to write about the mid-nineteenth-century gold rush in New Zealand when she saw the flimsiness of the prospectors’ tools in a museum there.
• The Virgin Blue by TRACEY CHEVALIER – a haunting tale in which a woman’s disturbing nightmares are suffused by the colour blue, leading her to trace the fate of her French Huguenot ancestors.
• Villette by CHARLOTTE BRONTË – another young woman flees from an unhappy past to make her way in the world; the book similarly examines the lot of middle-class women in the Victorian period, and questions whether marriage is a better option than working as a governess.
• The Mosquito Coast by PAUL THEROUX – seeking to escape the evils of modern living, inventor Allie Fox turns his back on civilization and attempts to build a new life for his family in the Honduran rainforest.