C.S. Richardson’s new novel ‘All The Colour In The World’ is a celebration of life

Toronto’s C.S. Richardson attracted readers worldwide with his debut book, 2007’s “The End of the Alphabet.” In particular, the unique existential plight of this effortlessly stylish novel’s hero (Ambrose Zephyr who is described as “on time, on budget, realistic, reasonable”) inspired an all-of-it-in-one-sitting response to Richardson’s delectable tale.

The unassuming protagonist of “All the Colour in the World,” Richardson’s third novel, is no less absorbing. Across the spare, elliptical, and supremely artful (and art-filled) chapters of “All the Colour in the World,” Richardson touches on the arduous decades of Henry. A lonely though creative child who becomes an art history scholar, he experiences loss and trauma in harrowing abundance.

In counterpoint to approximately 120 chapters that recount Henry’s decades (each chapter averaging a half-page in length), Richardson places equally economical musing on art and history. “To produce natural vermilion …,” begins one; another opens with, “Charon’s obol (from obolos, a denomination of ancient Greek coin) describes the money placed on, sometimes in, the mouth of a dead person before burial.” There are chapters on the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815, the invention of Crayola crayons (1902), and “Pacientia,” Sebald Beham’s copper engraving (which dates from 1540). Though brief, commentary on a subject — whether “The Wizard of Oz” or Picasso’s “Guernica” — manages to be bite-sized without becoming trivial.

As for how to approach this riot of eclecticism, Richardson offers clear guidance. “Colour”’s first chapter mentions Japanese zuihitsu (“a writing style characterized by both linked essays and disparate ideas”) and the zibaldone literary style of Renaissance Italy, defined as “a salad of many ideas” and “an informal miscellany containing everything from landscape sketches to currency exchange rates, medicinal recipes to family trees.”

Richardson’s “salad” feature no recipes or exchange rates, and its miscellany is formally restrained. An art history lecturer whose bible is Helen Gardner’s “Art Through the Ages” (1926), Henry pores over and finds comfort in the tome’s wealth of images, texts, and ideas; quite possibly, he supplements his personal copy with art-historical morsels that relate to or comment on his own circumstances in key ways. The pains (and well as joys) of his unsteady childhood, the pall of debilitating anguish at the death of his wife, and the enduring torment of his experiences as a soldier during the Second World War, then, are mediated by Henry’s educational pursuits.

From “31 August 1916. Happy birthday” (in chapter 13) to correspondence in the late 1960s (which terminates at the final chapter, which is exactly 15 words long) “Colour” studies a man buffeted — and buffeted again — by fateful circumstance. Richardson’s paean to Henry’s endurance doubles as a heady celebration of art, an act and form the author respects in all its facets.

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