Now, if any of you are following me on Goodreads (What?You’re not? Well, go! I’ll wait here.), you may have noticed my love for
Christopher Moore. If you’ve never read his books, I highly recommend them. I
won’t lie and say that they’re, like, child appropriate… because they’re not.
But they’re funny as all hell. Irreverent, sometimes sacrilegious (Here’s
looking at you, Lamb.), and very well-written.
But today, I want to talk about another books entirely. The
black sheep of the Christopher Moore family of books.
Sacrè Bleu.
When this book came out, I was so fucking excited. Not only
was it Christopher Moore, it was Impressionist Era France. Monet, Morisot, Toulouse-Lautrec,
Cezanne, Pissarro, Manet. I was hooked before I even read a single word. And, although
we haven’t actually started the review yet, I’m going to spoil the ending – I
love it. It’s not my favorite Moore book, but it’s right up there (It would
take a lot to unseat Lamb from the top spot.).
Unfortunately, that’s not a popular opinion. Moore fans were
sort of unhappy with the book, in general. And admittedly, it’s aa departure
from his other books. It’s not just humor. It’s intellectualism. It’s
historical fantasy. But it apparently missed the mark for a lot of his
audience, which saddens me. This is a book I whip out for people to read all
the time. And since I just finished it again and it’s fresh in my mind… I
figured there wasn’t any better time to take a proper look at it. Maybe you’ll
decide that you love it, too.
The Good:
I can’t actually just say everything, as much as I’d like to. There’s a lot of
good in this book. It’s got Moore’s normal wit, it’s all about art and painting
and creating. That’s enough to sell me on it right there, but there’s also
romance. There’s debauchery. There’s historical aspects to it. And there’s
actual scans of famous Impressionist Era paintings. Not just the big ones,
either, which is a nice change of pace.
But more than that, even, the historical bits work into the
fantasy elements perfectly. It’s not easy to do even a few times, but he
manages to seamlessly fit some pretty powerful magic (Time travel, immortality,
that sort of thing) into the already strange world of art. Now, it’s more
complex than all this, but the basis of the magic is that ultramarine blue,
(The Sacrè Bleu of the title) can distort the flow of time. It’s used to
explain a lot of the oddities you see with artists, but my favorite is probably
with Claude Monet. When his first wife died, he painted her to capture the
color blue she was turning. Yeah. That part’s not fictional. You can see the
painting. Camille Monet on her deathbed.
But in the book, it’s a little less creepy, and more
desperate. He uses the blue. He tries to stop her from dying by painting, tries
to twist time with this magical blue paint so that she doesn’t have to die. And
both in real life and in the book, painting that tore him up.
It’s that kind of attention to detail, digging out those
things and putting them together, finding everything to do with blue in that
era and that location. The amount of work and devotion is staggering by itself,
but the fact that it works? That’s where the real magic comes from.
And, as much as I love ebooks, I have to say to get this one
in print. It’s a piece of art in itself. All the text is blue, which tickles
the shit out of me, and the pages are thick and ragged. To me, that heightens the
experience of reading the book.
The Bad:
There’s not much I can criticize in this book, but one thing does stand out, if
I’m being nitpicky. If you’re looking for a super-intense book, this isn’t the
one for you. It’s going to take its time, and there are going to be parts where
you could be okay putting it down. It’s not a thrilling ride. It’s a meander
through the Louvre, which is enjoyable in its own right.
The Ugly:
I had a really hard time coming up with anything
to put in the ugly category on this book. So this is a little bit of a stretch
to call it ugly. There’s a little bit of a disconnect between the first and
second halves. Really, it’s just about the marked difference between the plot
before and after the midpoint, but it can feel a little inconsistent. That’s
it. That’s all I’ve got. There’s literally nothing ugly in this entire book, in
spite of what some reviews might say. If you can find this book, grab it
quickly and love on it. It won’t do you wrong.
Voss
