Rose Tremain: The Colour

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

In New Zealand for the 2000 Wellington Festival of the Arts, Rose Tremain visited the historic Central Otago goldmining town of Arrowtown and was so taken with the artefacts in the museum there - tools, hobnailed boots, pans - and the idea that people had set out to change their lives with these basic tools, that she set her latest novel during the 1860s gold rush.

It bears all the hallmarks of a good historical novel - a gripping yarn, strong emotion, mostly fastidious period detail - but, as always with Tremain, it's so much more besides. Her themes are universal and timeless: love, of course, and its all-too-often attendant disappointment, fear and revenge; the human desire for transformation; but also greed and dehumanising materialism.

The fever for gold that overcomes her characters is a canker, a debasing blindness that was not confined to the goldfields of 150 years ago but still, in different forms, continues to permeate the human condition.

Harriet and Joseph have recently met and married and come to New Zealand, along with Joseph's mother Lilian, to begin new lives as farmers in the Canterbury foothills. Joseph, already tormented by a crime committed back in Norfolk which, we come to realise, was the imperative behind his voyage to the colony, finds some grains of gold on their land and is overtaken with desire. He tells no one, and this secrecy compounds itself in the miserable, shrivelled heart and life of this extremely unpleasant man.

"For gold is deceitful; this he was beginning to understand. It is as duplicitous as a girl. It shows itself and beckons. Within its first gleam lies the promise of more, much more, and so men go forward, cajoling the earth, breaking their backs and their hearts, but very often they're rewarded with nothing ... "

Poor Harriet. Yet she doesn't need our sympathy - she's everything one could wish for in a heroine: questioning of the world, generous-spirited, strong, independent and far above the base yearnings of her husband.

When Joseph leaves on a boat for the goldfields near Hokitika, she eventually attempts to follow him there on horseback, down through the terrifying Hurunui Gorge, one of the many visions of hell that Tremain conjures from the physical and human landscape. When she eventually arrives at the goldfields (and what a Boschian nightmare they are) and at Joseph's rat-infested claim, she proves herself much better equipped for the physical and moral challenges of the life there than her bankrupt (in every sense) husband. All characters eventually find what they are looking for and, as experienced readers, we are not surprised to find that some realised dreams bring little happiness.

A New Zealand goldfield wouldn't be complete without a Chinese greengrocer, and Tremain provides us with Pao Yi who exists in quiet harmony with his surroundings while dreaming of his home and family back in China. Like other characters - Pare, the Maori tormented by spirits; Edwin, the boy who pines for love and believes in worlds that can't be seen; his English-born parents who believe only in what is before their eyes - Pao Yi is recognisably a symbol within the story and, while Tremain brings her characters to life, there is nevertheless a feeling of heavy portentousness that sometimes undermines the story. Meaning announces itself rather too insistently in places.

It's odd to read a book set in New Zealand yet aimed primarily at a non-New Zealand audience, and written by someone who has been here only briefly. Our landscape emerges as someone else's fantasy, a symbolic end-of-the-world, an "other" from which someone may or may not choose or be able to return (to Norfolk, to southeast China, to Scotland).

I found that aspect interesting rather than irritating or offensive. Her main subject, after all, is the human heart, and her novels' settings are custom-made for that purpose, not vice versa.

Tremain makes the odd mistake (I doubt the early settlers referred to this country as Aotearoa, for instance - a flight of fancy that makes one wince when it appears in these otherwise gritty pages) but overall I think her many fans will not be disappointed.

Chatto & Windus, $34.95