The colour of life and its attitudes

Black Orchids by Gillian Slovo. Photo / Supplied

In 1940's Ceylon, 19-year-old Evelyn, impetuous and golden-haired, is swept off her nyloned feet by rich, flamboyant, drop-dead handsome - and Sinhalese - Emil. As heads shake with doom and disapproval all around them, they marry and head for a shining life in England.

Their story through the next three decades is a parable of racism, and how it infects every possible facet of their and their lives and those of their children. It happens in a Britain exhausted by World War II, drab and mean in spirit as well as resources, but still swollen with the pretensions of a great power. E & E seem a success. They have the big house, the exotic enterprise (see title), the Rolls-Royce and the two talented children. But Evelyn wants to conform or withdraw from the prejudice all around them.

Emil wants to confront it and laugh at its pettiness. Though they stand and fight, the small meannesses of small minds start to erode them and their marriage. Their son is persecuted at school. Their daughter escapes into obsession.

Against her will and her very real love, Evelyn finds herself wishing that Emil could somehow be a little more ... well, white. Slovo's commitment to her theme means that Black Orchids is tract as much as novel. There's little attempt at balance: almost anyone British is bigoted and boring; almost everything British is meagre yet over-inflated.

Characters are intense but frequently artificial. They declaim rather than speak: "I don't hold out much hope that dreary post-war prudence will produce anything half as dazzling as this." But there are moments of dramatic and emotional force. (Slovo started as a top-level crime writer.) A young man falls terribly from a high tree; two senior boys bend languidly, venomous over a billiard table; Evelyn and her son, Milton, try to stand together against the prim cruelties of his boarding school.

And always there's the poignancy of protagonists who begin brimming with life and idealism, who don't care what little people think, and who by the end are diminished or destroyed by the same care and those same people.

Black Orchids
By Gillian Slovo (Virago $34.99)

* David Hill is a Taranaki writer.