The Colour — Rose Tremain

The blurb on the back of my paperback version of The Colour has Britain’s Daily Telegraph describing its author Rose Tremain as ‘one of the finest writers in English’, and the Britain’s The Independent gushes that the novel is ‘a fabulous work, bravely imaginative, deeply moving, surprising, invigorating and satisfying’. (You can read the Telegraph’s review here.)

When reading that fluff, bear in mind the symbiotic relationship media book reviewers and publishers have and the tacit helping hand book reviewers give to the sale of books. It might go some way to explaining the hyperbole. The New York Times is, thankfully, a little more sober and warns that the novel can be, and often is, a little ‘windy’. I know exactly what that paper’s critic meant. I agree and intend to be less kind than the Telegraph and The Indy hacks: Tremain aficionados, champions of ‘fine writing’ and those of a sensitive disposition, look away now.

I was not moved (and certainly not ‘deeply’), not surprised, not invigorated or and not satisfied by The Colour. In fact, I forced myself to finish reading the novel, mainly because I dislike loose ends, but as I’d decided to review it, I thought it only fair to Ms Tremain that I should read it all. It was, though, no pleasure — The Colour is 363 pages long and remorseless.

Ironically, the novel might well have successfully been boiled down to a quarter its length and, far more tautly written, would possibly more effectively have conveyed whatever Ms Tremain hoped to convey (which, I confess, is still not clear to me).

I often felt, in fact, that in The Colour there was material for four, five or six quite good and quite distinct short stories. But yoked together as the different themes and characters’ back stories are, it is all too amorphous and at times — this is cruel but I have to say so — distinctly turgid.

Somehow it just didn’t hang together: the separate strands of the novel remain stubbornly separate and do not gel as I think Ms Tremain hoped they might gel. Certainly there was ‘story’ enough, but the different strands might well have made up separate books with no loss to each other.

The quasi-mystical account of an outcast middle-aged Maori women looking — I think — for some kind of redemption had essentially very little to do with the central account of the English immigrant who becomes obsessed with finding gold (it all takes place in New Zealand’s mid-19th century gold rush).

This man, escaping in shame from the death of a young girl in a botched abortion, is married to a woman in her mid-30s who is also escaping a former life, in her case one which promised nothing but a sterile future working as a governess. The union, on both sides, was one of convenience, but — crucially — the reader fails to care at all about either party. The ‘heroine’s’ musings on freedom and the rest read more like the yearnings an adolescent girl confiding to her diary than anything we might reasonably be expected to take seriously.

There’s a fourth central character, a Chinese market gardener with his own back story, who occasions a fair amount more quasi-mysticism. It’s true that an author can expect a reasonable degree of intelligent attention from a reader, but it is a two-way relationship, and the writer also has obligations, not least to give the reader enough information to piece together what the hell it is all about. It’s a fine line, of course, but one good writers tread well. Tremain comes nowhere close. Ideally, we shouldn’t have to wait to read a Sunday paper books supplement review to discover what the hell it was all about.

From the first page to the last, Ms Tremain, whose presence as ‘the author’ is apparent throughout, gives us the thoughts and ‘insights’ of pretty much every character at every turn. All — even a preternaturally articulate eight-year-old boy and the outcast middle-aged Maori women — express themselves as they might were they (like Ms Tremain) writing a novel. It is incessant, interminable and wearying, especially when such insights come loaded with all Tremain’s bloody similes.

Pretty much everything the characters see, hear, feel or ‘understand’ — they are much given to ‘understanding’ themselves and getting insight into their lives, their pasts and their futures — has some kind of spurious significance, and they examine and reflect on their thoughts and feelings at every turn. It’s more like eavesdropping on a university creative writing class than being out in the windy wilds and open country of New Zealand’s South Island. 

Ironically and despite that, all the characters, with the possible exception the Englishman’s widowed mother who emigrated with her son and his wife, and a 15-year-old male prostitute, remain distinctly two-dimensional. We don’t — well, at least I didn’t — care much about any of them and what fate might have in store for them at all.

Tremain has apparently not come across the sage dictum that ‘less is more’, or if she has, she chooses wilfully to ignore it. The Colour is horribly overwritten. For one thing, Tremain cannot resist a simile or two or three or even 3,000 where even one would often be one too many. Worse, they often come in odd and unrelated pairs, thus doing nothing but negate each other.

Those similes are often forced, stick out like a sore thumb and illuminate nothing. They are usually assumed by those who indulge in them to be an essential element of ‘fine writing’, but they aren’t. As a rule, one simile will go a very long way, Ms Tremain, so please take note.

Tremain is also addicted to longwinded, inappropriate and often contradictory metaphors which serve no purpose except, I suspect, because she thinks they will give her work a literary flavour. They don’t, they lend it a faux-literary flavour, although I don’t doubt that some readers, among whom we must count the enthusiastic reviewers on the Daily Telegraph and The Independent, must often have paused and reflected ‘good God, but can Tremain write!’

She is obviously very much at home with words, but there is more to writing than superficially sounding good, and the flood of metaphors jar and confuse. Her descriptions also sometimes just don’t ring true, can be confusing and convey far less than they might have done or should do.

A few years ago, I came upon a word similar to the now well-known term ‘journalese’, which describes The Colour and Tremain’s style of writing: ‘novelese’. You might know what I am talking about. To my mind The Colour is nothing but ‘novelese’ and might be your thing, but it ain’t mine.