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Overview
By turns both moving and terrifying, The Colour is about a quest for the impossible, an attempt to mine the complexities of love and explore the sacrifices to be made in the pursuit of happiness.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780312423100 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Picador |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2004 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 400 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.88(d) |
About the Author
www.rosetremain.co.uk
Read an Excerpt
The Cob House, 1864
I
The coldest winds came from the south and the Cob House had been built in the pathway of the winds.
Joseph Blackstone lay awake at night. He wondered whether he should dismantle the house and reconstruct it in a different place, lower down in the valley, where it would be sheltered. He dismantled it in his mind.
He rebuilt it in his mind in the lee of a gentle hill. But he said nothing and did nothing. Days passed and weeks and the winter came, and the Cob House remained where it was, in the pathway of the annihilating winds.
It was their first winter. The earth under their boots was grey. The yellow tussock grass was salty with hail. In the violet clouds of afternoon lay the promise of a great winding sheet of snow.
Joseph's mother, Lilian, sat at the wooden table, wearing a bonnet against the chill in the room, mending china. China broken on its shipment from England. Broken by carelessness, said Lilian Blackstone, by inept loading and unloading, by the disregard of people who did not know the value of personal possessions. Joseph reminded her gently that you could not travel across the world — to its very furthest other side — and not expect something to be broken on the way. "Something," snapped Lilian. "But this is a great deal more than something."
But now he had a wife.
She was tall and her hair was brown. Her name was Harriet Salt. Of her, Lilian Blackstone had remarked: "She carries herself well", and Joseph found this observation accurate and more acute than Lilian could know.
He turned away from his mother and looked admiringly at this new wife of his, kneeling by the reluctant fire. And he felt his heart suddenly fill to its very core with gratitude and affection. He watched her working the bellows, patient and still, "carrying herself well" even here in the Cob House, in this cold and smoky room, even here, with the wind sighing outside and the smell of glue like some potent medicine all three of them were now obliged to take. Joseph wanted to cross the room and put his arms round Harriet and gather her hair into a knot in his hand. He wanted to lay his head on her shoulder and tell her the one thing that he would never be able to admit to her — that she had saved his life.
II
After their arrival in Christchurch, Joseph had supervised the purchasing of materials for building the Cob House and hired men to help him and horses and drays to lug the tin and the pine planks and the sacks of nails and bales of calico and at last made ready to set off northwestwards, towards the Okuku River.
As he was about to leave, Harriet asked her new husband to take her with him. She clung to him and pleaded — she who never whined or complained, who carried herself so well. But she was a woman who longed for the unfamiliar and the strange. As a child, she'd seen it waiting for her, in dreams or in the colossal darkness of the sky: some wild world which lay outside the realm of everything she knew. And the idea that she could build a house out of stones and earth and put windows and doors in it and a chimney and a roof to keep out the weather and then live in it thrilled her. She wanted to see it take shape like that, out of nothing. She wanted to learn how to mash mud and chop the yellow tussock to make the cob. She wanted to see her own hand in everything. No matter if it took a long time. No matter if her skin was burned in the summer heat. No matter if she had to learn each new task like a child. She had been a governess for twelve years. Now she had travelled an ocean and stood in a new place, but still she wanted to go further, into a wilderness.
Joseph Blackstone had looked tenderly at her. He saw how ardently she wanted to embark on the next stage of their journey, but, as always, there was Lilian to think of. As always, the choices that he made were never simple.
"Harriet," he said, "I am sorry, but you must stay in Christchurch. I'm relying on you to help Lilian to become accustomed to New Zealand life. A choral society must be found for her."
Harriet suggested that, with the help of Mrs. Dinsdale, in whose neat and tidy Rooms they were lodging, Lilian would be able to find the choral society on her own. "And then," Harriet added, "she will have no more need of me, Joseph, for it is her voice that sings, not mine."
"There is the strangeness of everything," said Joseph. "You cannot comprehend the degree to which this new world is disconcerting to a woman of sixty-three."
"The Rooms are not strange," insisted Harriet. "The jug and basin are of an almost identical pattern to the pot your mother kept under her bed in Norfolk . . . "
"Different birds sing outside the window."
"Oh, but still they are birds singing, not monkeys."
"The light is other."
"Brighter. But only within a degree of brightness. It will not harm her."
On and on it went, this conversation, for it was not a conversation but a war, a small war, the first war they had ever had, but one which would never be quite forgotten, even after Harriet had lost it. And on the morning when Joseph set off towards the ochre-coloured plains, Harriet had to turn away from him and from Lilian so that neither of them would see how bitterly angry she felt.
She ran up the wooden stairs, went into the green-painted parlour and closed the door. She stood at the open window, breathing the salty air. She longed to be a bird or a whale — some creature which might slip between men's actions and their forgetfulness to arrive at their own private destination. For she knew that in her thirty-four years of life she had never been tried or tested, never gone beyond the boundaries society had set for her. And now, once again, she had been left behind. It would be Joseph who would make their house rise out of nothing on the empty plains, Joseph who would build a fire under the stars and hear the cry of the distant bush. Harriet yawned. In the tidy parlour, she felt her anger gradually give way to a deep and paralysing boredom.
III
Settlers from England like him were known as "cockatoos", Joseph was informed.
"Cockatoos?" He couldn't imagine why. He couldn't even remember what kind of bird a cockatoo really was.
"Scratch a bit of ground, take what you can get from it, screech a bit, and move on, like a cockatoo."
Joseph thought of a parrot, grey and morose, fretting among seeds in a cage. He said this wasn't appropriate to him. He said he wanted to make a new life near the Okuku River, make his acres pay, strive for things which would last.
"Good for you, Mister Blackstone," the men opined. "All credit to you."
What Joseph did not say was that, in England, he had done a disgraceful thing.
"You're a thoughtful one," the men said when the building of the Cob House began. They were mashing mud and grass for the walls, breaking stones for the chimney, and they were stronger than Joseph, who rested more often and was observed staring down at the miles of plain, plains known as "flats" here, flat plains with hardly any trees stretching to infinity below him, staring as still as an owl.
"Penny for them? Missing home?"
"No."
"Wouldn't blame you, Mister Blackstone. Homesickness: we know a lot about that here."
"No," he said again. And took up his knife and sharpened it and returned to his task of the grass shredding and made himself whistle so that the men could read his mood correctly, his mood of optimism. Because what he felt as he surveyed the flats or turned and looked up towards the distant mountains was a sudden surge of hope. He was here. He was in the South Island of New Zealand, the place they called Aotearoa — Land of the Long White Cloud. Though he had done a terrible thing in England, he had survived. The future lay around him, in the stones, in the restless water of the creek, in the distant forest.
Copyright © 2003 Rose Tremain
Reading Group Guide
Reading Group Guide Questions
1. Discuss the significance of houses and homes in The Colour. Why is such attentive detail paid to the architecture and décor of these places. Why, for instance, is Harriet and Joseph's Cob
House built around the chimney?
2. In the beginning of the novel husband, wife, and mother all think greatly about the future and the past – in some respects, an escape from their previous home and an expectation for their current one. Joseph comments on page 54 that: "All life…is a flight from mistake to mistake."
And while Lilian comments on page 29 that "nothing here is ever quite as one has imagined it"
she then reveals she too has a "plan" for the future. What does these characters' ideas about the future and the past say about them as characters? What sort of expectations does Tremain establish by delivering such information?
3. Further to the previous question: the lives lived in The Colour seem to operate by two opposite poles — those guided by an unknowable destiny or fate, and those guide by their own actions or ingenuity. Who lives by which in the novel, and what does it determine about them and about the author's role in creating their lives. Whose destiny is actually at work, and is this also some sort of commentary about history itself?
4. How is the notion of responsibility handles in the novel? Lilian to her son Joseph; Joseph to his wife and mother; Pare to the boy Edwin; Pao Yi to Harriet. Who has a responsibility to whom in the book?
5. The Colour is very much a novel about perception and self-perception, most often when depicting Class structure. How does the society of 19th century England re-create itself in the wilds of New Zealand? What is upheld and what breaks down?
6. The eel man in Christchurch uses the word "Preservation" in describing the pickling of the eel.
How does this word resonate throughout the rest of the novel? What might this salesman know that others do not?
7. It can be said that landscape plays an enormous role in these characters' lives, but can it be said that landscape actually changes who these people are? If so, what does it turn them into?
8. Again and again the characters in The Colour make attempts to connect with one another, and not simply by speaking but through subtler, more intimate gestures. One such attempt, handled
in a variety of fashions, is sex. How does each character approach sexuality?