Rating: 
Summary: Lust and Love in New Zealand
Review: Tremain will capture the heart of readers who pine for the lost
and hopeless in love. Selfishness, greed, and other deadly sins move the character Joseph to despicable deeds--so unlike his wife, "Hal-yet" who yearns for the love of being free of the world of 19th century England. The New Zealand landscape comes alive with its aggressiveness in the winter: imagine a snow so deep, cold and ravaging that it can.....Greed has to be a character in the novel as it pushes the plot to an unbelievable ending....why wasn't he killed instead of....
What a movie this book would make!!!!
Rating:
Summary: Lust and Love in New Zealand
Review: Tremain will capture the heart of readers who pine for the lost
and hopeless in love. Selfishness, greed, and other deadly sins move the character Joseph to despicable deeds--so unlike his wife, "Hal-yet" who yearns for the love of being free of the world of 19th century England. The New Zealand landscape comes alive with its aggressiveness in the winter: imagine a snow so deep, cold and ravaging that it can.....Greed has to be a character in the novel as it pushes the plot to an unbelievable ending....why wasn't he killed instead of....
What a movie this book would make!!!!
Rating:
Summary: (4.5)The inescapable lure of treasure, the heart of greed...
Review: With remarkable skill Rose Tremain reconstructs New Zealand in the mid-nineteenth century, where newlyweds John and Harriet Blackstone build their new, if temporary, home. Accompanied by John's widowed mother, Lillian, a saturnine woman who longs to return to her beloved England, the three live together, separated by flimsy walls of calico. Sturdy and resourceful, Harriet falls in love with this open land, her flourishing vegetable garden one small retreat from an ill-suited marriage to a man either unwilling or unable to be a good husband.When John discovers a tiny amount of gold dust in their creek, he is infected with the fever for more, the same gold fever currently raging on the west coast of New Zealand. He hides this meager treasure from his wife, beginning a long process of denying the partnership with Harriet. His desire is single-minded and selfish, as dreams of wealth consume him. Disappointed with his negligible booty, John decides to board a ship and sail to the gold mines to seek his fortune and he intends to do so alone. John becomes one of the miners, obsessed and driven, common sense a thing of the past. With observations unflinching as a camera, Tremain captures the force of this lust, wherein the quest becomes the goal. Here is this drive, this need in exquisite detail, the lives of the miners and the claims that patchwork the landscape exposed like helpless suitors in pursuit of an inconstant lover. Meanwhile, purveyors of goods collect handsome amounts of currency, providing necessities to the miners, a cottage industry springing up wherever Gold Fever strikes. When Lillian dies and the newlywed's Cob House collapses from the onslaught of winter, Harriet goes after John to inform him of Lillian's death. Their first meeting is as awkward and formal as it was in the beginning of their relationship. Leaving John's camp, Harriet climbs higher, starting a claim near the produce garden of Chen Pao Yi, who sells his fresh vegetables to the miners. Given time, the miners would scramble over the land and wantonly purge it, without a thought to the devastation left in their wake. But, like a sleeping giant, New Zealand has only to shift while dreaming and the men are scattered and destroyed, the continent returned to its former pristine beauty. With one brutal stroke, nature intervenes, changing all their lives. Separated, John and Harriet struggle to survive and it is clear that John is the glass half empty, while Harriet is certainly the glass half full. Harriet enters a period of awakening, cherishing each moment as it comes, while John is tormented by loss and self-pity. And the gardener, Pao Yi, is fortunate as well, for he is essentially the water, without need of a glass at all, inhabiting his world with quiet acquiescence. Tremain is one of those accomplished writers who fleshes out her characters, all the trivial moments and secret longings that give them depth and believability, allowing the reader to understand these people in their flawed humanity. The colour, the gold, changes John, Harriet and Pao Yi intimately, each indelibly marked by this vast and awesome landscape. Luan Gaines/2003.
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