If my art history class had been anything like Christopher Moore’s Sacré Bleu, I would have had to switch majors to art. I love books were the fiction fits so neatly inside the boundaries of actual history. A significant part of the cast of this book comes straight from the pages of art history. Renoir, Manet, Monet, Pisarro, Toulous-Lautrec (pictured on the cover), and van Gogh all make appearances in this book. Not only to the artists show up, but their art work is the book, too–which saved me a lot of time running back and forth to Google images to look at the dozens of works referenced in this book. Oh, and the book is actually printed in a beautiful blue ink.
In the author’s note at the end, Moore says that he started out to write a book about the color blue. And as is usual with Moore, things get pretty weird pretty quickly. Sacré Bleustarts with an alternate version of van Gogh’s suicide in which the artist is murdered by the man who sells him his colors. It becomes readily apparent that something supernatural is going on, and that it has to do with a particular shade of blue (please do click the link, ultramarine is beautful) that the Colorman specializes in. And then there’s the Colorman’s companion, a woman named Bleu who appears to be the inspiration behind works of art like Manet’s Olympia, among many others.
The story bounced back and forth from the Colorman and Bleu to a Monmartre baker named Lucien Lessard and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Lessard and Toulouse-Lautrec, saddened by van Gogh’s death, become suspicious of the circumstances and start to investigate. As they learn more, they find that the colorman and a mysterious woman (Bleu) have already visited a number of their fellow painters, inspiring them to greatness and ruining their lives. To complicate matters, Bleu chooses Lessard as her new artist.
The book is filled with flashbacks to other artists and points in history, showing you just how long the Colorman and Bleu have been playing their games. And it also shows you just how talented Moore is about working within the constraints of history. This is something I like about Tim Powers, as well. They can take a welter of disparate facts, events, and unrelated oddities and create a story that can coherently and logically link them together (with a little help from the supernatural. Be warned though. This is Christopher Moore we’re talking about here. So in between all the sublime art and poetic descriptions of painting, there are enough knob gags to keep an entire class of seventh grade books giggling for years.
Even with all the sex jokes (and I’ll be the first to admit that I laughed a lot), I really enjoyed reading this book. I’d say Moore is maturing as a writer, but that’s entirely the wrong word. There will always be something boyish about Moore’s writing. But his last few books have show incredible depth. I have no idea what he’s going to come up with next, but I’m so going to be there.