10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 s TeFanie F ricKe Deconstructing the Gold Rush Adventure: Rose Tremain’s The Colour (2003) and Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (2013) On 27 February 1865, an uncommonly large shipment of gold entered the port of Nelson on the South Island of New Zealand, setting off a gold rush to the island’s West Coast: 1 Nelson […] echoed with oaths as goldseekers fought to buy tickets on ships lading with all haste for Hokitika� […] Wellington across the strait seemed to empty itself of its young men and boys. […] Fistfights broke out among fretful diggers vying for berths on ships weighing anchor in Otago Harbour� (Eldred-Grigg 133-136) 2 Hemmed in by vast mountains and with no established roads, the new goldfields were hard to reach: “Diggers sometimes fell over cliffs, starved to death, or were buried alive by snow� A digger would take weeks to walk all the way from Christchurch to the West Coast” (142)� The journey by ship was hardly less arduous for these were perilous waters and many ships vanished either during the journey or were wrecked on the bars of the West Coast (137-142)� But the lust for gold was stronger than the obstacles, and at Christmas 1865 the newly established and fast-growing port town of Hokitika, the gateway to the goldfields, already sported as many as 72 hotels. “At the peak of the rush, in 1867, there were probably about 29,000 people on the West Coast - around 12 % of New Zealand’s European population at the time” (Walrond n� p�)� A gold rush is the perfect background for adventure stories, as narratives by Jack London, Mark Twain, and others show� Thousands of men setting out to find riches and a better life, pitting themselves against unforgiving nature and the lawless society of the goldfields, make for an exciting read. This essay will analyse how this setting is used in two Neo-Victorian novels, Rose Tremain’s The Colour (2003) and Eleanor Catton’s Booker-Prize-winning The Luminaries (2013), which are both set during the West Coast Gold Rush� 1 On the history of the West Coast Gold Rush, see Eldred-Grigg 123-157� 2 Otago, a region located in the southern half of the South Island of New Zealand, had been the site of a previous gold rush, but the fields there, as well as in Victoria, Australia, seemed exhausted, and accordingly many diggers left Otago to try their luck on the West Coast� 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 172 s TeFanie F ricKe 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 Focussing on the lesser-known gold rush in New Zealand adds a layer of exoticism to a setting more familiar from North America: New Zealand had only become a separate British colony in 1841 (before that, it was part of the Australian colony of New South Wales) and was not made self-governing until 1852� An island like Britain but situated at the other end of the earth and full of wild and alien nature, it appeared strange and uncivilised to the Victorians (Bright 14-16)� Rose Tremain similarly states: “It seems to me that a huge landscape like New Zealand is very promising: it’s a wilderness where anything can happen and where human frailty is very extreme, and where everyone believes that they can change their lives and become something else” (Page 30)� In true adventure-fashion, both Tremain and Catton have their characters “overcom[e] obstacles and dangers and accomplish […] some important […] mission” (Cawelti 39)� Their gold seekers leave Britain to travel into wild and open spaces beyond the strict confines of everyday routines and face the wilderness of the New Zealand landscape as well as the arduousness of the goldfields during exciting quests. As will become apparent, however, both authors also deconstruct key elements of (gold rush) adventure stories, for example by inverting the hyper-masculinity of the protagonists, or by denying to narrate the gold rush adventure in the first place, thereby creating something new out of traditional plot patterns� The Female Quest Romance: Rose Tremain’s The Colour (2003) Tremain’s novel is set in 1864 / 65 and tells the story of Harriet and Joseph Blackstone from Norfolk who have come to the South Island of New Zealand with Joseph’s mother Lilian to start a new life� 3 Their marriage is not based on love, but on the wish to escape England: Harriet is sick of her life as a governess, while Joseph is responsible for the death of his lover Rebecca, a crime he tries to leave behind by travelling to the other end of the earth� They purchase a piece of land near Christchurch and Joseph builds a humble house out of cob� Their endeavours to turn their land into a prosperous farm, however, prove harder than Joseph had imagined. One day he finds a few grains of gold in a creek and immediately becomes obsessed by ‘the colour’, as gold is termed. He starts prospecting but finds only very little. Frustrated 3 According to Tremain, she was inspired to write her novel by the physical remains of the gold rush: “there’s a little museum with the artefacts of the gold rush in Arrowtown - the tools, the hobnailed boots, the pans� I was really moved by the idea that people set out to change their lives with these very basic tools” (Rustin)� Deconstructing the Gold Rush Adventure 173 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 by his failure, he decides to leave Harriet and Lilian to try his luck on the new goldfields on the West Coast. Unlike many other Neo-Victorian novels, The Colour is not a pastiche of Victorian texts, trying to recreate nineteenth-century language� It does, however, draw on popular Victorian genres such as the adventure novel and especially the late nineteenth-century imperial romance or (male) quest romance as epitomised in the novels of H� Rider Haggard� 4 These stories depict thrilling adventures in far-away places, sometimes including a confrontation with supernatural elements and / or the discovery of some sort of treasure� An important topic is the construction and assertion of masculinity which is threatened and ultimately re-affirmed through the encounter with various dangers. This genre is often seen as a reaction to various contemporary (male) anxieties, for example regarding the feared demise of the British Empire, degeneration, moral corruption, and the deterioration of traditional gender roles� The imperial romances themselves, which were frequently addressed to a young audience, were perceived as a possible remedy against these developments, instilling in their readers a positive view of imperial ventures and traditional gender roles (Arata 79, 89)� 5 Consequently, the alien landscapes depicted in these novels are constructed as a contrast to civilised and prosaic Britain, a space in which men can be ‘real’ men� 6 British women hardly feature in these stories and do not seem to be eager to participate in the men’s ventures abroad� They are left at home in the domestic, familiar sphere, which is contrasted with the setting 4 Other terms used for these texts are novels of empire and imperial gothic. For this genre, see Fraser and Brantlinger� These are, however, not the only Victorian intertextual connections of Tremain’s novel� Chialant points out similarities of The Colour to Victorian novels focused on the development of female characters: “A further category I would add [to Neo-Victorian fiction] is works which attempt neither a parody of Victorian narrative models nor a reworking of earlier classics, but which focus on the compulsion towards self-realization and fulfilment undertaken by Victorian women - a realist convention adopted in Jane Eyre, The Mill on the Floss and Tess of the D’Urbervilles - and portray female characters that embody the self-made woman, but develop their sexuality in more explicit terms� Consider, for example, Jane Rogers’s Mr Wroe’s Virgins (1991) and Rose Tremain’s The Colour (2003)” (43)� James, on the other hand, draws attention to similarities between Tremain’s landscape descriptions and those of Thomas Hardy (7-9)� 5 See also Eldridge 56-58, 70, 77; Fraser 2� 6 A prime example of this is Sir Henry Curtis, one of the heroes in H� Rider Haggard’s bestsellers King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and its sequel Allan Quatermain (1887)� For him, travelling to Africa not only means a chance for adventure and financial advancement, but for realizing his true ‘manly’ self� Only there can he can pit his male prowess against wild animals, deadly natural conditions, and warlike natives� At the end of Allan Quatermain, Sir Henry remains forever in Africa and becomes the king of the fantastic country of Zu-Vendis� 174 s TeFanie F ricKe 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 of the adventure proper, and the relationship to them is replaced by a strong homosocial bond between the male adventurers (Fraser 3)� In Tremain’s The Colour, a ‘typical’ hero of the traditional male quest romance is introduced in the figure of Toby Orchard, a prosperous sheep farmer and neighbour to Harriet and Joseph: “Toby Orchard was a big man who had always felt confined and hot and unhappy in his job in the City of London. A voice inside had called to Toby night and day: Set me free, set me free, set me free� […] He longed to ride strong, unbreakable horses and shoot guns and shout at dogs under a monumental sky” (36, italics in original)� 7 As it turns out, however, Toby Orchard is only a minor character who has already accomplished his goal of self-realisation in his new surroundings� More narrative focus is given to Joseph, the Englishman who embarks to New Zealand to pursue a career in farming and later departs even further into the wilderness on his search for gold� Again, however, traditional expectations are thwarted� Joseph neither thrives in his new, adventurous surroundings nor does he manage (or even want) to establish strong homosocial bonds with his fellow adventurers. Most importantly, however, he also does not find any gold. Instead, in a reversal of gender roles, it is his wife Harriet who becomes the real heroine of Tremain’s take on the imperial romance� That Harriet is better suited than Joseph for their ‘adventure’ already becomes apparent in their different reasons for “travel[ing] across the world” (3) and different ways of responding to the strangeness and opportunities that New Zealand represents� Joseph primarily sees New Zealand as a refuge from his crime as well as a space in which he can achieve financial success and social advancement� But he fails with all his plans and, even worse, also finds that bringing as much geographical distance as possible between him and England does not mean that he can leave his past and guilt behind� At the end of the novel, Joseph decides to go back to England for “it was as though nothing could cheer him now, nothing in New Zealand, nothing that Nature or Man could contrive here� All he wanted was to sail away” (325)� For him, the adventure of emigration, as well as of gold prospecting, only leads to failure and pain� Whereas Joseph sees in New Zealand the possibility for escape and a prosperous future, for Harriet it offers a chance to realise her true nature� She is “a woman who longed for the unfamiliar and strange� As a child, she’d seen it waiting for her, in dreams or in the colossal darkness of the sky: some wild world which lay outside the realm of everything she knew” (5)� Just as for the traditional male heroes of the imperial romance, these dreams cannot be 7 All following quotes from the novel will be given with only the page numbers� Deconstructing the Gold Rush Adventure 175 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 realised at home in Britain, where “in her thirty-four years of life she had never been tried or tested, never gone beyond the boundaries society had set for her” (6), but only far away� And so, when Joseph proposed marriage and emigration, she took this chance although she did not love him� Arriving in New Zealand, she finds ‘civilised’ Christchurch too familiar and consequently boring� Instead, she longs to be in the true wilderness and to face the strangeness of this alien country: “In Christchurch, I do not feel as though I have yet arrived� Where Joseph is, there will I encounter the true Aotearoa, there will I feel the extraordinary difference of things. There will I see flightless birds and glaciers shining in the sun” (10)� In her reaction to New Zealand, Harriet is not only contrasted with her husband but also with her mother-in-law, Lilian� Lilian did not want to leave England at all but was forced by her financial situation to join her son and his wife� She represents the traditional femininity that Harriet eschews and perceives the open, wild, and lonely place where her son is building his farm as a “godforsaken” (24) “desert of grass” (28)� For Harriet, in contrast, the landscape cannot be lonely enough� She does not dream of domestic bliss with her husband but instead wants to directly engage with the wilderness on her own: “And the further away from her they moved, the more exhilarated Harriet became. To be alone here, alone with a strong horse in all this magnificent vastness! Alone and alone and alone, with no one guiding or leading� Alone in a desert of hills that lay between the mountains and the sea …” (52)� 8 Harriet’s dreams of adventure and her longing for freedom would seem commonplace in the conventional male hero of adventure fiction but are unusual for a female character of the late nineteenth century� Accordingly, even in New Zealand, where societal norms do not seem to be as strict as in Norfolk, Harriet’s thirst for adventure can only be quenched by disregarding Victorian gender roles and by clashing with the expectations of her husband� When they arrive in New Zealand, Harriet is eager to immediately take to the wilderness and help Joseph build their house, but he orders her to stay in Christchurch to look after his mother� On their farm, he similarly wants her to spend more time indoors with his mother to fulfil the gendered activity of care work. While Harriet is contrasted with her mother-in-law, she finds a fellow-spirit in her neighbour Dorothy Orchard� Following Dorothy’s lead, who proclaims “What a nuisance long hair is in this country! ” (42), Harriet cuts off her hair, feeling that by doing so she is preparing herself for new, less gendered adventures (94)� Joseph, however, only sees that she has made herself “ugly” (271) and does not approve� 8 See also also Tremain 60, 92-93� 176 s TeFanie F ricKe 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 But Harriet’s greatest transgression - which also ultimately enables her to realise her true, adventurous nature - comes when she sets out towards the goldfields. After Joseph has been gone for a while, his mother dies and their house is destroyed by the elements� Harriet, in true adventure-hero fashion, decides not to stay with her neighbours but rather wants to follow Joseph to the West Coast� When she endeavours to cross the mountains, she invades the male sphere for only men undertake the arduous journey to the goldfields, and her presence on the road is met with disbelief� As soon as Harriet arrives in Hokitika, however, Joseph tries to re-establish ‘proper’ gender rules and power relations and refuses to take her with him to the goldfields for “[t]here are no women on the gold-diggings” (255)� 9 Finally, however, he relents, and Harriet consequently becomes “a curiosity: a woman at Kokatahi - just as she’d been a curiosity on the dray road to the Hurunui” (263)� On the goldfields, Joseph again at first wants to relegate her back to performing stereotypically female tasks such as washing, “as though he didn’t trust her to search for gold: he just wanted her to make things clean again” (265). But in contrast to Joseph, Harriet soon finds gold further up the river, and this gives her the opportunity to leave her husband and to prospect on her own: “with a tent, and with the gun Joseph had given her, and with Lady [her dog] by her side and with some rudimentary supplies, she would be able to go where she liked” (258)� Her new-found riches also make it possible to imagine a life without Joseph: “I am dreaming of a new house by our old creek, a house made of wood, not cob, and situated out of reach of the winds� But I do not see Joseph in this house� I see only myself” (303)� Just like in some imperial romances, at the end of the adventures the hero finds riches which would be unimaginable in England� But in Tremain’s novel it is not Joseph, the white Anglo-Saxon male, but Harriet, a figure usually marginalised in Victorian society and especially in the genre of the imperial romance, whose endeavours are rewarded with gold� Harriet, however, not only finds gold and thus financial independence on the goldfields but also sexual fulfilment with her new lover, the Chinese Chen Pao Yi� Pao Yi is another usually marginalised character 10 and makes visible the increasing Chinese immigration to New Zealand at that time� Outsiders because of their appearance, language, dress, and also the use of opium, they faced daily prejudices and mostly lived in their own settlements (Walrond n� p�)� Again, Harriet’s transgressive romantic relationship with the Chinese 9 See also also Tremain 256� 10 For a more detailed analysis of the role of the Chinese in Tremain’s novel see Franchi, “Neo-Victorian Chinese Diaspora”� Deconstructing the Gold Rush Adventure 177 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 Other fits into the imperial romance scheme for it is a gender-reversed version of similar plot structures in those novels where the male white hero enters into a relationship with an inappropriate but alluring native / exotic woman (see, for example, Captain Good and the native girl Foulata in Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines)� In nineteenth-century imperial romances, these affairs are doomed from the beginning and so is Harriet’s relationship with Pao Yi� After a flash flood destroys the gold diggers’ camp, Harriet and Pao Yi spend the winter together cut off from society in his hut in the mountains, but they know that their transgressive relationship has no future. When they find even more gold in a cave they retreat to for their most intense sexual encounter, this signals the inevitable end of their affair, for to get at the gold means destroying their cave and sanctuary� Additionally, the gold also makes it possible for Pao Yi to return home to China a rich man, thereby fulfilling his obligations to his wife and son, but at the same time separating him from Harriet, who lets him go without telling him about her pregnancy� This pregnancy constitutes another difference from these kinds of relationships in traditional imperial romances� While there, the danger of miscegenation is averted, for example by the death of the woman (again, see Foulata in King Solomon’s Mines), Harriet is happy to be pregnant with Pao Yi’s child and imagines him as a boy who resembles his Chinese father, so that while she had to give up her lover, “in this boy’s sweet face she would see the face of her lover, and the child would never leave her” (358)� The role of Pao Yi, as well as the fact that Harriet’s child will be half-Chinese, also challenges traditional accounts of the white, Anglo-Saxon colonisation of modern New Zealand (Franchi, “Neo-Victorian Chinese Diaspora” 93-96, 105)� Harriet’s child, who symbolises the future generation which will stay in New Zealand and profit from the gold rush, is a hybrid character but, interestingly, one in which English and Chinese immigrants are combined, excluding the Maori population� Much has been written about the connection between adventure fiction in general and the imperial romance specifically and British imperialism: “the writing and reading of adventures and other novels, both in Europe and in the colonies themselves, were part of the process of (ideological and material) colonialism� Adventures constructed an imaginative space in which colonisation could take place, and sometimes mapped the course of that colonisation” (Phillips 68)� 11 Neo-Victorian fiction, by contrast, is often seen as critically engaging with imperial ideologies from a modern point of view, drawing attention to the dark aspects of British imperialism and giving a voice and 11 See also Green 3� 178 s TeFanie F ricKe 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 representation to marginalised groups (Ho 11)� 12 Yet, The Colour in this regard seems to adhere closer to the traditional imperial romances for here the reality of British conquest is hardly problematised� The fact that land is given to and transformed by British settlers is not presented as negative, and the fate of the Maori and their conflict with the Pākehā, the white settlers, is hardly touched upon� The Maori are nevertheless present in the novel in the character Pare, the former nurse of the Orchard’s son Edwin, and in their relationship a utopian alternative of mutual understanding and affection is presented: ever since he was a baby, Edwin and Pare seem to have shared some mythic connection, and Pare comes to see him from time to time in secret and shares with him her songs and stories� But this relationship has no future, at least at that moment in history, and seems ultimately even injurious to Edwin� Being somehow supernaturally connected to Pare, who gets injured, falls ill, and dies, Edwin, too, is affected by her deterioration and finally dies. A further connection with the Maori is never arrived at nor attempted� While Tremain’s handling of the colonial background to her story seems rather traditional, her use of the quest structure prevalent in most adventure fiction and imperial romance is more interesting and again defies readers’ expectations. Just as in traditional imperial romances and adventure fiction, the characters in The Colour undergo a number of quests which test their resolve and in some cases bring on personal development. These may be difficult journeys in which the characters face a number of obstacles, or just the attempt to fulfil or achieve a certain goal. Interestingly, however, in The Colour most of these quests fail: “To an unusual degree, Tremain’s story is taken up with failure, and so bitter is its taste that you feel yourself in the hands of a connoisseur” (Smee 64)� For Joseph, his goal in departing for New Zealand was to leave behind his guilt and build a new, prosperous life� But he never manages to quieten his bad conscience, and the farm he tries to establish also fails� This is symbolised in the fate of the Cob House that he constructs with his own hands� In spite of the advice of his local helpers, he builds it on an elevated position which is in the pathway of the winds. While Joseph is at first proud of his humble house, he realises soon that it was a grave mistake to construct it on such an exposed spot� Similarly, his plans for making the surrounding landscape more ‘English’ by planting European trees and building a pond also fail� Finally, the Cob House itself is slowly destroyed by the merciless New Zealand weather, first turning to dust by drought and hot winds, then into mud when the rains 12 On Neo-Victorianism and Empire, see Ho� Deconstructing the Gold Rush Adventure 179 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 come� Its demise thus becomes not only a symbol of the cruelty of New Zealand’s nature but also for Joseph’s failure to create a permanent home and new life in New Zealand� Failing his first ‘quest’, to create a prosperous farm, Joseph eagerly turns to the new “adventure” (131) of becoming a successful gold prospector� For him, this means again a new beginning, a chance to finally remake himself: “Now, he would make his fortune� Now, he would dig himself a new future” (186, italics in original)� Moreover, having failed in leaving the past and his guilt behind, he now sees gold also as a means to at least atone for his crime: 13 “He thought he would send money to Rebecca’s family� […] And then I will be free from guilt. Then I will have made amends. Then I will have done enough” (120, italics in original)� 14 For Joseph, the successful quest for gold is furthermore a test of his bravery and manliness, and he imagines that through gold “[h] e would become the kind of man who inspired envy in other men and longing in women” (130)� Conversely, he is also afraid of being outperformed by other, less educated men just because they might find gold. Leaving the farm to travel to Hokitika moreover removes Joseph from the female sphere of his home, where he feels that the presence of Harriet and Lilian hampers his secret prospecting for more gold, to a predominantly male one� Once Joseph arrives at the West Coast, however, he is also loath to join the company of the other diggers and tries to stay away from them as much as possible� At the same time, he is not able to bear the loneliness and starts a sexual relationship with a young boy, Will, who is a prostitute to the gold diggers and who reminds him of his dead lover Rebecca: “he thought […] how satisfying it might become to impose upon Will Sefton the tasks of a housewife� In the coming chaos, Will would keep the tent ship-shape and purchase supplies and cook trout from the river on fires that he’d made with his small hands. He would do the washing” (180-181)� 15 His dreams of all-male domestic bliss, however, fail when he does not find gold and cannot pay Will for his sexual services. In the end, Joseph never succeeds as a prospector and because of that indirectly also fails to prove his masculinity� Tellingly, it is only because he takes some of the gold found by his wife that he can embark on his final quest, to 13 From the beginning, gold for Joseph is connected to memories of his dead lover Rebecca: Joseph finds the first bit of gold just after thinking about her, and later he realises that “this drift [of his mind] towards gold had somehow opened a door on to the past, a door he had thought was closed for ever, but was not” (Tremain 121)� 14 See also also Tremain 285� 15 In this, as well as in Joseph’s failure to enjoy ‘manly endeavours’ and his later occupation building an intricate doll house, one could also argue that Joseph seems to adhere to gay clichés. For a discussion of gender fluidity and homosocial bonding in American gold rush literature, see Stoneley� 180 s TeFanie F ricKe 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 return home to England, confess his crime, and give the gold to Rebecca’s family, so that “now the damage was going to cease” (288)� When he arrives in Norfolk, however, he never manages to confess his guilt, nor does he give the gold away. Instead, the only consolation he finds is in constructing an intricate dolls’ house� While the house he had built in New Zealand crumbled after just one year, “The doll’s house was his - his house - and it would be the place where he would take refuge from the world” (363, italics in original)� The motif of the house, and of making a home in the wilderness, is central to Tremain’s novel� In New Zealand, where nature is cruel and alien, to create a physical as well as emotional home is absolutely necessary for survival, as Harriet’s neighbour Dorothy Orchard states: “Nature is grand here� But too grand� To survive in New Zealand, we all have to re-create, if not the past exactly, then something very like it, something homely” (46)� While Joseph literally fails in building a home and therefore a future in New Zealand, it is strongly implied that Harriet will succeed� Again taking over the predominantly male roles of the successfully returning hero, house builder, and provider, Harriet at the end of the novel returns to her land a rich woman intending to make a good life for the child she carries and to construct a new, permanent house: “She would site it lower down the flats […] where it would be sheltered from the wind� It would have a wide verandah, Harriet decided, and a tiled roof. There would be five or six rooms with floors of totara pine and bright colours on the walls” (365)� In contrast to Joseph, Harriet thus achieves her overall goals, to build a new life in New Zealand, to escape from the confines of Victorian femininity, and to realise her dreams of adventure and autonomy� She fails, however, in an important other quest: Edwin, the neighbours’ young son, asks her to look for his Maori nursemaid Pare, who herself had been on a quest to find greenstone on the West Coast� Because of their seemingly magical connection, Edwin knows that Pare is injured, stranded in the mountains, and needs help� Harriet agrees to take on this quest and intends to follow Pare across the mountains, which are also called “the stairway of hell” (47), via the terrifying Hurunui Gorge� But she has no accurate idea of it and believes that the way will be hard but manageable� When she arrives at the gorge, however, and realises that she cannot take her horse with her on the steep descent, she decides to turn back� Harriet does not overcome this obstacle and does not prove the male gold diggers wrong, who doubt “that a woman could do it” (198)� Here, the novel runs counter to the traditional adventure plot and also disappoints readers who would have Harriet undertake the adventurous voyage into the threatening gorge� When Harriet returns to Orchard Run, however, Toby Orchard Deconstructing the Gold Rush Adventure 181 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 provides her and the readers with an alternative - if less adventurous - interpretation: “Of course it was brave […] but it was also lunacy� It was suicide� […] I’m all for women showing your kind of spirit� But we all have to learn the difference between what is brave and what is foolhardy� You showed great courage by turning back” (221-222)� No matter how one interprets this turning away, as failure or reason, it means that “[s]he’d failed in her mission to find Pare” (223). Harriet does not want to give up, though, and when she goes to the West Coast by the sea route, she still intends to “embark on the quest with which Edwin Orchard had entrusted her: she would go in search of Pare” (258)� 16 It is while she is looking for Pare that she finds her first nugget. But ultimately, with her prospecting for gold and the arrival of the flush, Harriet is no longer able to continue the search� Pare, who also fails in her quest for greenstone, sickens more and more and finally dies, which occasions the death of the boy Edwin as well� Readers’ expectations of a successfully completed quest and a happy end for Pare and Edwin are thwarted in a rather cruel way� Denying Adventure: Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries Denying and thwarting readers’ expectations is also characteristic for Eleanor Catton’s 2013 Booker Prize-winning novel The Luminaries, which uses the same historical and geographical background as Rose Tremain’s but to a rather different effect� The Luminaries is a sprawling, extremely complex story, which starts in January 1866 when a young Scot called Walter Moody arrives in the gold rush town of Hokitika� 17 By coincidence, Walter stumbles into the secret gathering of twelve local men, a very heterogeneous group representing a cross-section of the town’s society, including a shipping agent, a chaplain, a chemist, and a newspaperman but also a Maori scout and two Chinese� The group has come together to discuss three strange events that occurred two weeks earlier, on 14 January 1866: the death of the old hermit Crosby Wells in whose cabin a fortune in gold has been found; the disappearance of Emery Staines, a young and extremely wealthy prospector; and the attempted suicide by opium of Anna Wetherell, a local prostitute� All twelve characters are somehow connected to these incidents and they present their versions of events in order to determine what actually happened� Moody is let in on their stories and in the 16 See also also Tremain 257, 265� 17 With 832 pages, The Luminaries is the longest novel ever to win the Booker Prize, and Catton, age 28, the youngest author (Brown n� p�)� 182 s TeFanie F ricKe 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 following weeks and months becomes ever more involved in occurrences that are not only determined by the recent past but also by what occurred one year ago in Dunedin, thirteen years ago in Sidney, and decades ago in China� 18 According to Catton, she was inspired by mystery and adventure novels for children and young adults such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) and Philip Pullman’s Sally-Lockhart trilogy (1985-1990) (“How She Wrote The Luminaries” n� p�)� She also states that she “wanted to write an adventure mystery of some kind […]� The west coast gold rush of the middle 1860s presented itself quite naturally: the west coast is a part of New Zealand I know fairly well, and a gold rush seemed a fine theatre in which to play out an adventure story” (ibid.). The finished novel indeed uses the setting of an adventure story - the gold rush town society at the edge of civilisation - and presents a great number of characters who, just as in The Colour, have come to New Zealand to start a new life� Only the Maori Te Rau Tauwhare and the banker Charlie Frost seem to be born in New Zealand; all others are emigrants from Australia, the British Isles, China, Germany, Norway, and France� It is from the perspective of the latest immigrant, the 27-year-old Walter Moody, that the readers are introduced to Hokitika and New Zealand as a whole� For him, New Zealand is an odd mixture of familiarity and strangeness, of wilderness and civilization� He has a dim sense […] that the colony was somehow the shadow of the British Isles, the unformed, savage obverse of the Empire’s seat and heart� He had been surprised […] to see mansions on the hill, quays, streets, and plotted gardens - and he was surprised, now, to observe a well-dressed gentleman passing his lucifers to a Chinaman, and then leaning across him to retrieve his glass� (Catton, The Luminaries 11) 19 The trappings of Englishness are transplanted to and maintained in New Zealand, but at the same time old structures and certainties are called into question, and Moody experiences a feeling of disorientation on his arrival in New Zealand: [H]e had cast his gaze skyward, and had felt for the first time the strangeness of where he was� The skies were inverted, the patterns unfamiliar, the Pole Star beneath his feet, quite swallowed. At first he searched for it, stupidly, wanting to 18 In terms of its temporal structure, the novel describes a circle: from the beginning until page 713, the story is set in the time between 27 January 1866 and 27 April 1866, with people referring to the past in their memories or narrations� Starting with page 625 and 27 April 1865, the more recent past is also depicted chronologically in detail until the novel finally ends on 14 January 1866, the beginning of the narrative. 19 All further quotes from the novel will be given with only the page numbers� Deconstructing the Gold Rush Adventure 183 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 measure his present latitude from the incline of his rigid arm, as he had done as a boy, on the other side of the earth� (342-343) Like many other immigrants, Moody has come to New Zealand to leave family and money trouble behind, “to make his fortune” (502), preferably by finding a lot of gold, and thereby also to ‘remake’ himself: “But yours is the way of the goldfields, is it not? Reinvention! Dare I say - revolution! That a man might make new - might make himself anew - truly, now! ” (29-30, italics in original)� As in The Colour, gold motivates most of the action, which revolves around an elaborate intrigue built upon a stolen bonanza which is used to blackmail a politician, sewn into women’s dresses, lost, and found again� But unlike Tremain’s novel, which vividly describes the obsession with gold, the arduous and dirty quest for it as well as the final moment of its discovery, Catton’s novel contains hardly any actual prospecting for gold� Set about a year later than The Colour, to embark on the search for gold here seems already rather clichéd: an over-familiar dream of adventure, sudden riches, and social advancement which, in reality, turns out to be rather uncomfortable� This is shown again and again in the fates of several characters, Moody being a prime example� He intends to become a prospector more because of a lack of alternatives than because of real enthusiasm, and his knowledge of the realities of gold-seeking is scant and stereotypical� After having purchased all the necessary clothes and implements, he is very reluctant to actually start digging. When he finally does, he stakes “a claim close enough to Hokitika to permit his continued board at the Crown Hotel� This arrangement cut into his weekly earnings rather severely, but he preferred it to sleeping in a tent beneath the open sky, something he had attempted only once, to his great discomfort” (523)� As it turns out, Moody is also not a particularly skilful prospector, and his claim yields hardly any gold� It is only at the end of the 1866 plot line that Moody fully commits to being a prospector and leaves Hokitika to try a different, more promising area further north� But we, as readers, never learn if he is ever successful� Moody is only one example of a number of characters who find that the realities of a digger’s life do not agree with them� The Norwegian Harald Nilssen had only attempted to prospect for the colour once, and found it miserable work - lugging pails of water to and from the river to sluice the stones, slapping at the sandflies that crept up his jacket until he was mad enough to dance. Afterwards his back ached and his fingers stung and his feet stayed spongy and swollen for days� […] Nilssen did not try his luck again (125)� 184 s TeFanie F ricKe 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 Another one, Charlie Frost, has “in the seven months since he had crossed the Hokitika bar, […] never once ventured inland” (209) and, when finally faced with the reality of the diggers’ camp at Kaniere, knows “that his spirit was not well suited to adventure” (ibid�)� Emery Staines, the young and extremely wealthy prospector whose disappearance is one of the central mysteries of the plot, also started out with romantic notions: “Having long been enamoured of the idea of the prospector’s life, which he conceived of in terms quixotic and alchemical” (733), on his twenty-first birthday he decides to try his hand at prospecting. Once in New Zealand, however, he finds that reality does not meet his romantic notions: He far preferred to sleep and dine in the society of others than to do so alone in his tent beneath the stars, the romance of which did not endure, he discovered, past the first experience. He had not been prepared for the bitterness of the West Canterbury winter, and was very frequently driven indoors by the rain (759)� Catton here ironically undermines adventurous narratives of the arduous but ultimately successful search for gold and the stereotypical depiction of manly and hardy gold seekers. Her potential prospectors all find that a gold digger’s life does not really suit them and try to avoid it as much as possible, much preferring the comforts of civilisation to braving the hard life of the goldfields. 20 But readers’ expectations are yet further thwarted� For even if a character’s endeavours are finally rewarded by finding gold, this is not narrated in Catton’s novel. When Emery Staines takes his first nugget to the bank, it is not actually his but one found by another man who asks him to bank it on his behalf� This is the beginning of Staines’ famous luck, which eventually makes him the richest man in Hokitika, owner of more than a dozen claims� But, apart from the story of the nugget which was not his own, we, as readers, never learn how he actually got so rich� Catton thus sets up everything for a traditional gold rush adventure tale but deconstructs it by having her characters refuse the adventure of prospecting and also by refusing to narrate the stereotypical gold diggers’ adventure stories of those few characters who actually engage with it� This also applies to various other characters that made a fortune on the goldfields. Of the twelve men we meet at the beginning, Dick Mannering and Thomas Balfour successfully prospected on goldfields in California and Otago, but, again, this is only mentioned in passing� At the time of the story, 20 The only character who is depicted as actually working as a prospector is the Chinese Quee Long� But he is indentured to a duffer claim which does not yield anything� The only gold he ‘finds’ in the course of the action is the one secretly sewn into the dresses of the prostitute Anna� Deconstructing the Gold Rush Adventure 185 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 these men have long moved on because now, the real money is no longer made by digging for gold but “[a]t the hotels� At the shanties� Mates spend the stuff as soon as they find it” (42). Consequently, most of the characters earn their living not as prospectors but as bankers, justice clerks, hoteliers, chemists, and so on� This also shows that Hokitika, the “gold-town […] new-built between jungle and surf at the southernmost edge of the civilized world” (6), is actually more civilised than readers might have expected� While the sea-journey and Hokitika bar are as dangerous as in The Colour, the town is “growing faster than San Francisco” (32) and sports over 60 hotels, a courthouse, a newly-built prison, and a local newspaper� According to George Shepard, the governor of the Hokitika goal, the town stands between savage digger’s law and civilised legal control, between the disorganised individual efforts of the diggers and a corporate future in which these have given way “to dams and dredges and company mines” (133)� 21 In the course of the story, the newly formed electoral district of Westland receives a seat in parliament and it is implied that the ongoing development of infrastructure will make Hokitika more accessible in the future� This is no longer an uncivilised, unregulated frontier town but actually a space in which people’s lives are very much controlled by increasingly diversified commerce, laws, and legal procedures. While Hokitika seems fairly civilised, the diggers’ canvas settlement inland at Kaniere conforms more to expectations of diggers’ squalor and adventure� But, as stated before, the characters do not actually do much prospecting (and the little which is done is not given much narrative attention), and the story is hardly ever set at Kaniere� The reality of the diggers’ life does not play a role in the novel at all� Consequently, the characters in Catton’s story are not in danger because of the forces of nature (which play a much less prominent role than in Tremain’s novel) or the dangerous diggers’ life but because of intrigues and the shadow of the law. Significantly, for Walter Moody, the character who develops the most over the course of the story, the real test and chance to show his worth comes not in the form of a conventional adventure but when he agrees to act as Emery Staines’ and Anna Wetherell’s solicitor� He trained for this back in England but came to New Zealand partly because “I have no real love for the law� I could not stomach it� I sailed for New Zealand instead” (28)� It is his legal knowledge and eloquence, however, and not any manly prowess, that is needed now� 21 See also Dalley 470� 186 s TeFanie F ricKe 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 One of the reasons for the omnipresence of the law, as well as the lack of adventure in the conventional sense, are the genre affiliations of The Luminaries� For while there are ironic references to traditional gold rush adventure stories, this novel is also very much modelled on the hugely popular sensation novel of the 1860s, the decade in which The Luminaries is set� Just as the bestsellers by Wilkie Collins and the like, The Luminaries sports elaborate intrigues and an obsession with crime and detection and puts much emphasis on topics such as illegitimacy, stolen identity, the importance of legal documents, and forgery� 22 In Lydia Wells, a ruthless self-made woman who challenges gender roles with her ‘male’ assertiveness and pitiless actions (Franchi, “Written in the Stars” 135-138), it also sports a character reminiscent of the dangerous and transgressive femme fatales of Victorian sensation fiction (Pykett 6-7). Yet there is one crucial difference with regard to setting: One of the most shocking and thrilling aspects of sensation fiction, as far as its first readers and reviewers were concerned, was the fact that the action of these fast novels of crime and passion usually occurred in the otherwise prosaic, everyday, domestic setting of a modern middle-class or aristocratic English household� (Pykett 6) In The Luminaries, by contrast, the adventure story is situated not at the centre but at the periphery� According to Catton, “we don’t have a tradition of these kinds of 19 th -century-style novels in New Zealand, and I felt like I was writing New Zealand into this tradition” (Lyall n� p�)� 23 Setting her sensation novel in the landscape of the New Zealand gold rush also again emphasises the fact that the West Coast is a space in transition “between the old world and the new” (135), no longer just providing the perfect setting for traditional adventure stories but also for the more elaborate narrative structures, legal machinations, and domestic intrigues of the sensation novel� Catton’s refusal to focus on the stereotypical gold rush adventure story thus also could be read as a way to civilise New Zealand and to write it into the more sophisticated literary tradition of the sensation novel� This generic transition from gold rush adventure story to sensation novel is also embodied in the trajectory of the major female character, the prostitute Anna Wetherell� For Shephard, the governor of the local goal, she is an affront, an impediment to his civilising mission: “We must do away with the old […]� I will not suffer whores, and I will not suffer those who frequent 22 For Victorian sensation fiction, see Pykett and Radford. 23 Erin Mercer notes, however, that this is not true: “[Margaret] Bullock’s Utu: A Story of Love, Hate and Revenge (1894) and [Gilbert] Rock’s By Passion Driven: A Story of a Wasted Life (1889) are examples of a local Victorian sensation tradition […]” (301)� Deconstructing the Gold Rush Adventure 187 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 them” (135)� Fitzpatrick similarly states about the prostitute in the California gold rush: Because her presence symbolized lawlessness, efforts to establish social order after the rush required the expulsion of the prostitute through moral reform, local legislation, and vigilante violence� To complete the process of conquering the West the prostitute was cast out to make room for stable family structures and stable frontier communities� (164) Starting out as a symbol of lawlessness, Anna in the course of the story first refuses to go on working as a prostitute and at the end is established as the future wife of Emery Staines, transforming herself and by implication Hokitika from moral duplicity into a paragon of Victorian domesticity and pillar of a civilised society� Following the conventions of the sensation novel, the narrative satisfaction of The Luminaries depends to a great extent on the gradual uncovering of the central secret(s)� To this end the most effective sensation writers developed techniques of narrative concealment and delay or deferral� Collins, for example, developed the split or shared narrative which used a variety of first-person narrators, none of whom was in possession of the whole story� Braddon and Wood have recourse to a kind of narratorial coyness, declining […] to disclose crucial items of information, or having key events occur offstage (so to speak) and only revealing their occurrence at the denouement (Pykett 5)� Catton uses both these methods to very slowly uncover the diverse mysteries at the centre of her plot� From Wilkie Collins’ novels - i� e� The Woman in White (1859-60) and The Moonstone (1868) - Catton adopted multi-perspective narration (which here, however, is presided over by an authorial ‘we’) so that the story is pieced together laboriously by following the narrations and thoughts of various characters� Accordingly, as it turns out, the overarching quest here is neither for gold, nor for self-realisation, but for ‘the truth’� The readers, as well as some of the characters, therefore begin to feel “like a detective” (201), and the search for the truth, just like in a detective novel, becomes an adventure in itself� 24 However, as with the gold rush adventure plot, expectations are thwarted, and this quest can only be fulfilled to some degree. 24 According to Birns, the characters of Catton’s novel are reminiscent of G� K� Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) and Agatha Christie’s The Seven Dials Mystery (1929) (227)� 188 s TeFanie F ricKe 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 This is, first of all, due to the fragmented and subjective nature of the characters’ knowledge and narration� As Moody notes: “I only wished to remark that one should never take another man’s truth for one’s own� […] I trust that you have given me the truth, and nothing but the truth� But your perspectives are very many, and you will forgive me if I do not take your tale for something whole” (282)� 25 The novel itself draws attention to the problem of representing the ‘truth’ - or simply telling a story - time and again� 26 For the characters, it is ultimately impossible to find out what really happened for not only are reports subjective, fragmentary because of lack of knowledge and potentially unreliable due to the characters’ own agenda and/ or the consumption of opium, but neither do all characters disclose everything they know� 27 Another problem arises in the communication with the two Chinese characters because they speak little English and the Westerners speak no Chinese at all� Consequently, crucial information is either lost in translation or not conveyed in the first place. At the trial of Anna Wetherell and Emery Staines at the end of the 1866 plot line, an official attempt is made to discover the ‘truth’, and Moody, who is defending them, presents a version of events that is convincing to the public� We, as readers, know, however, that it is not the ‘truth’ at all but a narrative construct made up of reality and blatant lies� One reason for this is that there seems to be a strong supernatural element to the story which is never explained and which would not hold in a court of law, 28 the other reason being that Moody and his friends want to thwart the machinations of Lydia Wells and Francis Carver, the two antagonists in this story� When, after the trial, we meet Moody for the last time, he is walking north and is asked by his travel companion to entertain him with a story� Moody comments on the impossibility of telling the ‘truth’: “I am trying to decide between the whole truth, and nothing but the truth […]� I am afraid my history is such that I can’t manage both at once”� He receives an answer which can also be read as a comment on the events and ultimately the novel itself: “‘Hi - no need for the truth at all,’ said Paddy Ryan� ‘Who said anything about the truth? You’re a free man in 25 See also also Catton, The Luminaries 281, 351� 26 This ambivalence can however also be found in Victorian multi-perspective sensation novels such as Collins’ The Moonstone (see Meifert-Menhard 177-189)� 27 For example when Moody does not tell the others that the dead prospector Crosbie was the politician Lauderback’s bastard-brother� 28 It seems that Anna and Emery - because of their love and their sharing of the same birthday - are connected to each other in a supernatural way, so that when Anna accidentally shoots herself, the bullet wounds Emery and not her� Furthermore, Emery becomes suddenly addicted to opium while Anna does no longer need it, the illiterate Anna can suddenly read, write, and sign with Emery’s signature, and Emery is kept alive by the food Anna eats� Deconstructing the Gold Rush Adventure 189 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 this country, Walter Moody� You tell me any old rubbish you like, and if you string it out until we reach the junction at Kumara, then I shall count it as a very fine tale’” (713). We, as readers, know much more than the characters because we have read all the narratives, are given additional information and insight into the minds of the characters by the authorial narrator, and also know the stories of the Chinese� But even for us there is no convincing ‘truth’ because not only are the individual reports subjective, biased, and sometimes contradictory, but many crucial parts of the story are ultimately not or not fully depicted� 29 The narration - which is otherwise so abundant - refuses to reveal these final secrets. Moreover, all information we get is filtered through the authorial narrator who freely admits that he has changed and edited the accounts: The interruptions were too tiresome, and Balfour’s approach too digressive, to deserve a full and faithful record in the men’s own words� We shall here excise their imperfections, and impose a regimental order upon the impatient chronicle of the shipping agent’s roving mind; we shall apply our own mortar to the cracks and chinks of earthly recollection, and resurrect as new the edifice that, in solitary memory, exists only as a ruin� (44) Thus, the novel at the same time tries to present a ‘realist’ gold rush adventure / sensation story while drawing the readers’ attention to the constructedness and artificiality of each narrative, the novel itself included. As Stead states: “it doesn’t allow me to forget, even for a moment, that this is fiction - the novel as game” (n� p�, italics in original)� This metafictional quality is further strengthened by the structural principle to which the novel adheres for Catton’s story is based on the movements of planets and other heavenly bodies during the historical setting of the story and how this would have influenced the characters in an astrological sense: I found a programme online that could track the movement of the planets through the constellations of the zodiac� I typed in the co-ordinates of the Hokitika gold fields, dialled the clock back to 1864, when gold was first discovered in the region, and began to watch the skies revolve. Over the next four years (of goldfields time), I tracked the movements of the seven bodies visible to the naked eye over Hokitika’s skies, wondering how I could turn the archetypes of the zodiac into human characters and a sequence of horoscopes into a story� (Catton, “How She Wrote The Luminaries”) 29 It is, for example, heavily implied but not spelled out that Carver is killed by Te Rau Tauwhare; we do not know how exactly Carver kills Crosbie; and we never find out how Anna lost her baby� 190 s TeFanie F ricKe 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 Each chapter is preceded by an astrological chart, and each character is associated with a heavenly body or sign of the zodiac, his or her actions influenced by the movements of the stars� So Dick Mannering, who ‘owns’ the prostitute Anne Wetherell, represents Leo: “I thought, OK, well, Leo’s the fifth house of the zodiac, it’s associated with games and competitions, and it’s called the house of pleasure, so I’ll make him a whoremonger” (Cochrane n� p�)� Accordingly, characters might seem to behave realistically, but their actions and relationships are in fact predetermined by astrological principles: 30 “Astrology thus functions as a source of ironic distance� Characters believe themselves to possess self-understanding and agency, but readers - better informed of how the characters’ world operates - see their confidence is misplaced” (Dalley 472)� This determinism also again runs counter to the expectations for an adventure story, which is very much founded on the free will and agency of its characters� The artificiality of the story is further foregrounded by the structure and print layout of the novel: it is composed of twelve parts (just as there are twelve men at the beginning), each half the length of the previous one so that the novel itself wanes like the moon. The first part has twelve chapters, the last only one� At the end of the story, the ever-decreasing length of the chapters and the increasingly fragmentary nature of their content give a new narrative speed and urgency to the content� In the last chapters, the importance and length of the old-fashioned narrative chapter headings also increase until they are as long as the text proper. The heading of the last chapter finally sums up what happened on that fatal 14 January 1866 and seems to reveal (or at least to give some hints at) the final secrets. So while for much of the story the novel poses as a mixture of adventure and sensation novel, at the end “the writing style strips its ornateness, transforming Victorian realism into something far more contemporary” (Mercer 305)� Both The Colour and The Luminaries use the traditional adventure setting of the New Zealand West Coast Gold Rush and narrative elements taken from adventure fiction but ultimately deconstruct the gold rush adventure and subvert readers’ expectations: in Rose Tremain’s novel, the hypermasculine hero of gold rush adventure stories as well as imperial romances is inverted, and it is the female, not the male protagonist who takes pleasure in peril, successfully prospects for gold, has a transgressive relationship with the racial other, 30 There might, however, also be an ironic twist here for, as Birns points out, this astrological system is based on the Northern Hemisphere sky and seasons, and thus its application to New Zealand and to characters not only from Europe but also to Chinese and Maori is inherently questionable� Deconstructing the Gold Rush Adventure 191 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 and is ultimately able to build a new life and home in New Zealand� Here, the structures of the male quest romance, which originally created a space specifically for the affirmation of traditional male identity, serve to make the self-realisation of an uncommon heroine possible� At the same time, this novel presents a number of failed quests which frustrate readers and ultimately also lead to the death of the two characters who stand for a possible successful understanding between Maori and white settlers� In contrast to The Colour, which, while subverting the tradition of the imperial romance, still depicts an adventurous story, Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries denies its readers all adventures usually connected to its gold rush setting� Instead, it ironically presents prospectors reluctant to enter the harsh life of the goldfields and shows a town which has moved on from the chaos of an uncivilised gold rush settlement and is now turning into an example of nineteenth-century capitalism controlled by the strict forces of the law� This is mirrored in the genre of the novel itself: the adventure story gives way to the more sophisticated sensational novel, which was originally set in domestic middleand upper-class England but is now adapted for a colonial setting� At the same time, while The Luminaries adheres to many characteristics of the sensation novel, it refuses its characters as well as readers the successful completion of their quest for truth, just as it denied the exciting adventures readers might expect from the gold rush setting� Instead, meta-structures of astrology and mathematical structuring of chapters emphasise the constructedness of this novel and imply that its characters are not free agents but mere puppets of fate, or at least the author� Works Cited Arata, Stephen� Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siecle� 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