The sky is never anything but blue — more like cyan, Egyptian, azure or teal — and the sea is rarely calm in CS Richardson’s most recent novel, All the color in the world. Henry, its protagonist, receives a penknife when he is still very young. However, it is not to fight, but rather to sharpen his colored pencils, the main weapons he will have at his disposal to resist this life of mourning and trauma.
Orphaned too soon, he is taken care of by his grandmother, who offers precious advice: “Open your eyes, good prince. You’ll never find anything in the dark. » Life passes in a breeze in this minimalist novel, and soon he is at the gates of the university, where he is rejected by the arts faculty. “Meticulous, but without originality”, we will say of his work. He then turned to art history.
A professor, married to one of his students – Alice – his happiness is once again taken away by an accident. Widowed, dazed and distraught, he enlisted in the army to join the Canadian war effort in Sicily, where the Allies were trying to repel the Axis powers. The drama that awaits him threatens the color of his world: “No bright pastel distracts your attention; the comforting hues are gone. Everything is nothing more than a blinding brilliance, a disturbing shadow. »
He returns home in one piece, but the war is a minefield that he drags with him. Everyday life subjects him to new battles where, thanks to art, he tries to sublimate death and despair to find the path to his healing.
A polychrome life
The plot of the story is economical, but dense, covering around forty years from Henry’s birth in 1918. The structure is rigorous – it even seems rigid on certain occasions: one page, one chapter. Narrated in the second person, the fiction operates in a crossover with factual detours on history, painting and major currents of thought.
We usually expect an incipit to draw us into the world of the book. Rather, the writer here makes a rational and not very exciting choice by offering us a key to reading his work, which he compares to the Bedside Notes by Sei Shōnagon: “ [U]n collection of anecdotes, reflections on life as a companion, favorite quotes, poems, lists and daily affirmations. »
The writing is rhythmic, but the structure short-circuits the story, sometimes giving the impression of disguised footnotes. The connections between fiction and non-fiction are sometimes flattened, until Alice’s death, halfway through, where everything goes haywire and becomes enjoyable. The boundaries fall between death, life and art, justifying this slow – even laborious – installation. The formalism gives a new meaning to the whole and we no longer regret anything, we dance with the side steps of the text and we salute the audacity.
All it took was a little patience to grasp the scope of this mosaic work, and a little perspective, for All the color in the world finally grabs us. Verdict? Meticulous and resolutely original.