The Colour

Unlike Rose Tremain's earlier historical novels, The Colour is neither rollicking (Restoration) nor sweeping (Music & Silence).  Instead, it uses the New Zealand Gold Rush of the mid-1860s to explore some tautly focused questions about identity--its boundaries (and its possible porousness), its frailty, and its obligations.  Joseph Blackstone has come to New Zealand in order to escape and, if possible, obliterate the memory of a crime he connived at a few years previously.  He is accompanied by his wife, Harriet, who yearns to escape her life as a governess, and his critical mother, Lilian, embittered by both the death of her husband and her disappointment in her son.  Given the novel's emphasis on New Zealand's frightening expanses, it's fitting that there are just a few other significant characters, including the Orchard family (the Blackstones' nearest neighbors), Pare (a Maori and the Orchards' former nanny), Will Sefton (a young male prostitute), and Chen Pao Yi (a Chinese vegetable salesman). 

Early on, after a disastrous snowstorm kills the Blackstones' cow, Harriet tells Dorothy Orchard that "I hope we may stay always in the Cob House, always listening to the river, always walking out at night to see the stars..."  Dorothy responds with a warning:

"No," said Dorothy.  "Take my word for it.  We are not strong enough for rivers and stars.  We think we are at first, but we are not."

"What do you mean, Mrs. Orchard?" asked Harriet.

"I think you might call me Dorothy and I shall call you Harriet, if I may? What do I mean? I mean that inevitably we make a small world in the midst of a big one.  For a small world is all that we know how to make." (47)

In many ways, the novel is an extended gloss on this exchange.  Harriet fantasizes about living in a permanent present, with time frozen in an eternal "always," and about existing in unbounded and apparently unthreatening space.  As Dorothy's rejoinder suggests, however, these fantasies omit the terrors of a "big" world--represented in the novel by nature's murderous and sometimes unpredictable force--and the human need for comfort and containment.  Indeed, the cow's death already hints at the fallacy of Harriet's "always," just as the snowstorm upsets her edenic vision of eternal communion with rivers and stars.  Dorothy's warning is both literal and figurative: it's necessary to create a space that will preserve the body against nature's terrors, but it must be the right kind of space--one that preserves the self, not just its physical container.

How, then, to create such a space in a responsible fashion? This novel is absolutely clogged with all sorts of dwelling places: tents, caves, shacks, mineshafts, temporary homes, farm houses, and, at the end, a doll's house.  Significantly, Joseph Blackstone chooses the wrong location for Cob House--it is exposed to the winds and vulnerable in bad weather--and the house itself slowly disintegrates over the course of the novel, much like the Blackstones' marriage.  Cob House, with its lack of privacy, misguided location, and flimsy construction, fails to shelter its inhabitants.  In contrast, the Orchards put too much faith in their practical abilities as builders, and fail to realize that no amount of good construction can keep death out.  A boundary can do only so much. 

If human beings need good shelters, then, they also need to recognize that all shelters fail in the face of time.  Here, the novel's emphasis on home-building intersects with one of its other themes: the link between sexuality and a kind of necessary vulnerability.  Joseph Blackstone's refusal to impregnate his wife is not a moral or practical calculation; it comes out of the same impulse that led him to destroy the woman he earlier impregnated.  In effect, Joseph likes to keep his boundaries "closed," much like he initially keeps the gold he first finds "always in his fist or beneath his long fingers under the pillow" (66).  Joseph's selfishness even extends into his symbolically sterile relationship with Will Sefton.  While Will refuses love altogether--"Think I'm your darling, or something, Mister Blackstone? Told you when I first played my whistle, I was nobody's darling and nobody is mine" (219)--it's Joseph who breaks their contract by refusing to pay him and, eventually, attempting to rape him.  Joseph's sovereign "I" refuses to shoulder the obligations of any relationship; even his fantasy of atoning for his crime is all about putting an absolute end to obligation ("Then I will have done enough" [126]).  Obligation means ceding control of the self, and Joseph desperately yearns to keep all of himself under lock and key.  It's no surprise that the dollhouse he tries to make as a gift winds up, in essence, as his metaphorical tomb.

If, in his quest for absolute self-possession, Joseph literally and figuratively diminishes himself, Harriet finds herself by giving herself over to a paradoxically temporary "always."  Her illicit relationship with Chen Pao Yi takes place in a miniature space from which "the past" has been banished, even though, as Harriet admits, "one day, a different future would arrive" (360).  Whereas Joseph cannot bear to make a gift of either himself or his dollhouse, Harriet and Pao Yi fill their space with absolute, transformative passion, in which the very self breaks down and sex becomes akin to death (362).  As the lovers must concede, this fantasy of oneness is only temporary--but it is also what grants both the strength to utilize their gold properly, as it were, without Joseph's killing selfishness.  Unlike Harriet's sterile union with Joseph, this union proves literally and figuratively fruitful.