Sophie Gee

It's very telling that he has that well-formed thought.

Before he had completed this thought, the peak of the mountain was flooded with thin rose color, too austere to be theatrical, but so vivid that its beauty was painful.

He felt that kind of impatience and disquietude.

that sudden beauty brings.

He could not stand and watch the flood of warmth flow down the flanks of the mountain, nor the intolerable transfiguration of the sky.

He rang the night bell and was admitted by the porter.

This passage struck me so vividly.

I mean, partly just because it's a very accurate description, I think, of what those magnificent New Zealand mountains and landscapes look like when the light first touches them and how they have this kind of,

We're almost in the world of deep time here.

We've sort of moved outside the timescape of settler colonialism, of the white imagination.

It's sublime, but it's more than sublime.

She's sort of getting at the idea that he's touching on something outside time.

And then the other thing I thought was amazing about this little scene is it's such a juxtaposition with the murder scene that we read before, Jonti, because she's using colour and she's using contrast and these kind of micro changes in the light to convey this scene that's kind of it's overwhelming.

It's frightening to Alan.

but it's frightening in a completely different way from the scene where we have the contrast of the blood and the fern and the champagne in the theater.

It's a sort of counterpoint to that tableau of color and change.

She completely does.

I actually want you to read a bit from that picnic episode because, well, first of all, because it's a picnic, per my brilliant comparison with Picnic at Hanging Rock.

And like Joan Lindsay, Marsh is obviously utterly captivated, more than captivated.

She's kind of spellbound, almost transfixed by the New Zealand landscape in the same way that Lindsay is.