7/7/2023 0 Comments The colour rose tremain review![]() ![]() Material has been culled from a wide variety of sources to make a definitive record and practically every page yields the bones of a fascinating plotline for a historical fiction.īut I’m not sure that Eldred-Grigg himself has managed always to dress those bones with sufficient narrative flesh to make them come to life. Whatever else may be said about it, this book, in part produced under one of the generous CLL Writers’ Awards, seems unlikely to be eclipsed as a historical compendium. Well, if writers of imaginative fiction have been held back because they lacked a single, compact, authoritative source of historical detail, they no longer have that excuse. Noting “skilful” exceptions, from Elsie Locke’s The Runaway Settlers in the 1960s to Rose Tremain’s The Colour in 2003, Eldred-Grigg remarks that Stevens’ words are “true to this day”. ![]() ![]() In the closing pages of this comprehensive, even magisterial, historical survey, the author quotes the observation by Joan Stevens in The New Zealand Novel (1966) that novelists had “not yet made fine literature out of the diggings”. Diggers, Hatters and Whores: The Story of the New Zealand Gold Rushes ![]()
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