988. The Colour

The Colour
Rose Tremain
2003
Around 370 pages

It's been awhile since we had a novel set in New Zealand on this List, with The Faces of Water being the last one I can recall. Rose Tremain isn't a New Zealander, but she does a fantastic job teaching the reader about the history and landscape of the country. 

In the 1860s, Joseph and Harriet Blackstone are newlyweds who move from England to New Zealand with Joseph's mother, in search of prosperity. Got to say, not envying Harriet at this point. Joseph discovers gold in a creek bed, but hides it from his mother and his wife.

I was impressed by Tremain's economy of phrasing. I was able to complete understand and sympathize with each of her characters with just a few simple sentences, like this one: "She thought that perhaps what she longed to hear was that almost every life was arranged like this, around a void where love should have been and was not, and that her predicament was therefore an ordinary one.” Humanity's flaws are pretty glaring during any Gold Rush period, so you can explore and incorporate a lot of truths about human nature simply by recounting the actions of one typical family. 

All that being said, I don't really enjoy those Grapes of Wrath-esque, slow-moving stories, where a family just faces one hardship after the other almost to the point of parody. So well written, but personally wasn't my taste.

RATING: ***--

Interesting Facts:

Nominated for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction.

UP NEXT: Drop City by T.C. Boyle