All The Colour In The World

All the Colour in the World by C.S. Richardson

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


*** Possible Spoilers ***

Let’s start with the good news. This book is short, so you won’t lose too much of your life should you make the mistake of reading it. The audio version is better than print because you can do other things while the narrators rambles on.

This book was nominated for the Giller prize thereby confirming my belief those on literary judging and selection panels are the polar opposite of myself. In this book there is precious little plot and no ending. The author merely stopped writing at some point which, I suppose, was a mercy. On the other hand, had this been a long book I’d likely have DNFed it.

The protagonist, Henry is not likeable. He’s frankly nuts, or, to use the more politically correct term, neurodivergent. His story is told in tiny vignettes frequently interspersed with random tidbits about the use of colour in art. The latter were uninteresting but still better than the Henry thread.

The story is told in the present tense, something I dislike, and voiced using second person, something I loathe. Evidently the author is attempting to convey the impression to the literary elite that he, C. S. Richardson, is an erudite fellow, sensitive and caring, willing to explore the deep psychological depths of the human psyche. To me, the impression conveyed was that of a self-indulgent, pretentious prat. I have to concede, however, this style of writing is becoming increasingly common as legions of creative writing professors in universities work to eliminate any form of actual storytelling from modern fiction.

Who might like this work? The ideal reader doesn’t care about, or actively dislikes plot. He, or she, wants to delve into the innermost secrets of the human heart. They want to empathize with characters who are broken, brought low by fate, forced to struggle against overwhelming odds in a callous unfeeling world. They like literary fads like present tense and second person. Such an individual might enjoy this book.

A note to writers: If it is your objective to win literary awards this book provides a textbook example of how to proceed.
1. Minimize the plot or leave it out altogether.
2. Write in present tense and voice in second person.
3. Create for your character a memoir of sorts. Just select a bunch of incidents from your own life, the lives of your friends, parents or anyone you know. Use news stories if you run short. This author put them into chronological order but you can randomize them and the judges will love it if you do.
4. Go to Wikipedia. In the top left corner click on the little box. Select ‘Random Article’. Make a few notes from whatever you find and set them aside. Repeat until you have almost as many notes as incidents related to your character. The author chose to limit these to the world of art, widening the scope to include anything will probably appeal more to the judges.
5. Merge the memoir incidents and random notes.
6. Feed these to your favorite AI tool and ask it to turn them into a narrative. If you use ChatGPT you’ll have to do this in bits and pieces because its input and output size is limited. As a result, you will probably lose continuity but that will not be a problem.

Follow the above six steps and you will have something resembling a dog’s breakfast that will titillate the effete literary narcissism of any judges who evaluate your work.

Not surprisingly, I do not recommend this book to anyone.





View all my reviews