CS Richardson's All the Colour In the World shows a passion for art's ability to endure — read an excerpt now
All the Colour in the World is on the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize shortlist
All the Colour In the World is a story of a young boy named Henry who discovers a passion for art which carries him through the many misadventures of his life in the 20th century. From his first set of colouring pencils he is gifted at his grandmother's place to the worlds of academia, war and sweeping romance, Henry's art stays alongside his enduring story.
CS Richardson is a Toronto-based writer and award-winning book designer. His previous novels include The End of the Alphabet which won the 2008 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book and The Emperor of Paris which was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2012.
All the Colour In the World is shortlisted for the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize. The $100,000 prize is the richest in Canadian fiction.
The Scotiabank Giller Prize awards $100,000 annually to recognize the best in Canadian fiction. Toronto businessman Jack Rabinovitch founded the prize in honour of his late wife, literary journalist Doris Giller, in 1994. Rabinovitch died in 2017 at the age of 87.
Read an excerpt of All the Colour In the World below.
1.
Employing zuihitsu, a Japanese writing style characterized by both linked essays and disparate ideas, Sei Shōnagon considers her Pillow Book — a collection of anecdotes, musings about life as a courtier, favourite quotations, poetry, lists, daily affirmations — to be for her eyes only.
In Renaissance Italy such a personal almanac is known as a zibaldone: an informal miscellany containing everything from landscape sketches to currency exchange rates, medicinal recipes to family trees. The Florentine politician and merchant Giovanni Rucellai likens his to "a salad of many herbs."
Such salads might fill otherwise blank scrap albums, pocket journals, or composition books. One could just as easily find them straining the bindings of pre-existing books, a time-worn university text, perhaps.
2.
Consider your beginning.
Father in ill-fitting tweeds, waiting for an eastbound streetcar, worrying the coins in his pocket. Mother clinging to his remaining arm, her best cotton dress (generous with the letting out) billowing in the heat rising from the pavement. She carries low, a month early, knees buckling six minutes on the tick.
The morning editions, brash with their 60-points, predict another dog day, the hottest of the summer.
The indifferent vise of contraction tightens. Five minutes now.
You could set your watch.
3.
The streetcar is nowhere to be seen. In your parents' rising panic, the thought of giving birth in a stifling walk-up in the Shoreview Mansions grips each in a private nightmare.
Mother pictures herself flat on her back, a beached whale gasping on the parlour floor. Curses loud and blue, legs splayed for all to see, mysterious fluids ruining the rug. One floor below, her mother-in-law (soon enough Gran) dimples her ceiling with a broom handle, trying to silence the frankly unnecessary language coming from above.
Father remembers other leavings of the human body: the thick red violence of it all, no matter that present (if pressing) circumstances might be considered more an affirmation, less a taking, of life.
Teetering at the curb, Mother's fingers claw at her husband's sleeve. She loses count, starts again. One Piccadilly, two Piccadilly.
Father's tweeds: a mix of russet and umber. Mother's dress: cerulean. The sky: murky, Turneresque, awash with Indian yellow.
4.
The Dutch East Indies, spring 1815. On the island of Sumbawa, Mount Tambora erupts. The resulting cloud of ash, ten times the debris that buried Pompeii, circles the globe, creating a variety of optical phenomena. Prolonged sunsets colour European skies throughout the summer and fall. Abnormal twilights glow orange and red near the horizon, ethereal purple and pink above. Daylight skies appear muddy, as though skim-coated with yellow. Temperatures cool, triggering extreme fluctuations in weather. 1816 becomes the Year Without a Summer.
1816 becomes the Year Without a Summer.
Meanwhile the artist J.M.W. Turner works his way through another sketching book — he will eventually fill 290 such volumes with pencilled scribbles, hasty watercolour impressions, and detailed notations concerning the play of light and colour in the natural world. This particular sketchbook concentrates on the optics of the English sky, including the colour anomalies caused by the Tambora eruption.
In finished paintings such as Chichester Canal (1828), Turner will move easily from sketch to canvas, putting the vermilions, the chrome oranges, the Indian yellows of his observations to characteristically evocative use.
5.
Mother's pregnancy is her first: a natural (one might argue predictable) denouement to an evening that occurs eight months earlier; an evening prologued by a day spent on a station platform pacing holes in her best stockings, at last to see a mirage of Brasso'd buttons and hollowed cheeks, pressed khaki and sunken eyes, step lively from a third-class carriage.
Excerpted from ALL THE COLOUR IN THE WORLD. Copyright © 2023 by Dravot & Carnehan Inc. Excerpted by permission of Knopf Canada and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
