The Colour

Gold is the colour, and The Colour lays beautifully bare the cost of its pursuit, in love and the cruel, muddy earth.

It is 1864, and Joseph and Harriet Blackstone have arrived in Canterbury County, New Zealand with Joseph’s reluctant mother Lilian. Each is running from something, searching for something, following the allure of a new world, a new life.

But what they are each searching for is different, and as they settle in for the long haul to tame their little slice of wilderness together, that which binds them starts to fragment almost immediately.

The beautiful, harsh environment holds many surprises: punishing, deathly changes in weather to cripple them externally, and golden dust to drive them apart. For when Joseph discovers the colour in their humble creek, he sees an escape not only from the years of hardship ahead but also from his secret demons that have pursued him from Norfolk, and he hides his discovery.

The first seam of division between him and Harriet opens up and their fragile pact of warm companionship turns cold and distant.

His find is meagre but his mind is infected with a misplaced hope of redemption from his lot and he soon decides to join the fast-growing rush to the other side of the Southern Alps, leaving his wife and mother to the disintegration of their home – the home he foolishly built in the path of unforgiving nature.

The book then lifts off as the narrative threads separate and accelerate, and the colour takes its grip simultaneously on the reader and the unfortunate and desperate men who rushed to their fates in the lawless marshes of South Island.

The stakes shoot up, the central characters deepen, and on all fronts this beautiful, violent world becomes peopled by forgotten, hard and mostly short-lived ghosts from this romantic hellhole of history.

The fifteen-year-old Victorian rent-boy who has learned 'they like it different ways and it’s all one to me', the cursed Maori seeking respite from the angry spirit-world, the Chinese vegetable man, ekeing out a living while nightly dreaming through his opium of his distant son.

Like all completely absorbing stories, for every hour reading I spent several imagining my own journey and hunt for the 'homeward bounder' – the find to take you safely to your vision of comfort and ease.

The detail of this compelling period becomes utterly gripping – by taking a subject so in tune with our universal weakness and essential greed, the author lays an extremely rich foundation for her tale, its harshness in stark contrast to the magnitude and splendour of its untamed backdrop.

While Joseph drives himself to near-madness as his dream recedes in mud and squalor, Harriet’s long-held dreams of freedom and horizon are turned nightmare in reality as the threads gradually re-entwine.

Though the time-frame is compressed the story achieves an epic quality through its ambition: the levelling cruelty of nature and greed, the hopeless attempts to escape your own history, and the search – for love, home, happiness; for the colour of life, and for gold.