Against the longest of odds, hope wins out
-All The Colours of The Dark- Chris Whitaker
I have read the best book of 2024. The absolute best. This book will rank in the top three of the greatest novels of all time. Few places are better than a good story into which we can escape; I can think of none right now, matter of fact there may be none and in today’s world, when we are constantly grasping for light to drive out darkness, this book fulfils that need. This is a great story, a flawlessly enthralling read. It will leave you touched by the depths of love incredible characters can convey when written sublimely and these characters are simply sublime. Flaw and all, especially in their most flawed moments.
Oh! what a book, what a story, what a gift it is to us all and an honour that we get to live in the same space and time as Chris Whitaker having penned this tome. For, it is a tome!
Let’s take it from the top, shall we? The year is 1975, in the town of Monta Clare, Missouri a pirate and a beekeeper are the best of friends, you see one, you see the other. They see the world in unison, in that uncanny way friends are able to paint their own realities. Patch has known a hard life all his life, but Saint is something of his saviour from the rigours of those hard knocks. Name really is destiny here. A series of kidnaps has left the town on edge, and one day Patch intervenes to stop the abduction of another girl but then he ends up getting abducted in the process. Saint sets off on a journey to find and bring her best friend home and through her efforts, he does come back home, but his return changes things irrevocably between the two of them. Over the decades that follow, that event would set the course of their lives, upending it, and the lives of loved ones in their orbit. It will also inextricably link them to the girl he saved, and the girl with whom he was in captivity.
Although he returns home safe, Patch never truly leaves the place the kidnapper held him, and in that sense, mentally, he returns to the place he was before Saint came into his life. He was held in captivity with a girl whose words give him respite; Grace. As I said, name truly is destiny in this story and the weight of that destiny is delivered so subtly yet deftly by Whitaker in his writing, as if in comfort to the reader, an acknowledgement of our fraught emotions. Grace’s words become a guiding light for all his life, a light that creates a bond so strong, she becomes his north star. A saving Grace that usurps the lives of the best friends, and tests the limits of their friendship; she is the cop who shoots and captures him, and he in turn avenges her hurt suffered at the hands of another. Stories of missing girls, the art they evoke from Patch, and a kidnapper who has remained elusive becomes a lifelong obsession for both. Especially when, after Patch’s rescue, all traces of Grace disappears, regressing him further into his mind. All this whilst Saint also mourns the loss of Patch’s formative years and the stolen promises of their young lives. Patch may have returned to her, but Saint knows, that part of her best friend into which only she was privy, was stolen away from them along with the remains of his innocence when he was abducted. That part she still fights so hard to bring to the light from the depths of the darkness into which he let it descend.
Patch grows into a man obsessed with the young girl whom he shared the darkest days of his life with. He is trapped in the mind of the boy he was with her. The girl whose face he never saw, but knows exactly what she looks like, whose voice is rooted in his mind; one that spurs him on. He carries with him the vision of the home she painted for him with her words, as she swept them away from the darkness that engulfed them. The home he is then able to paint from the memory of those words of comfort, spoken in the dark, the place he knows and sees only in his mind, entrenched in their world. Her home. Their union.
In its genre bending form, this story is also about justice for a stolen childhood, the search for a serial killer, and the fight for that uniquely incredible bond of friendship, that veers into a deep and abiding love, sometimes unfairly weighted. The uniqueness of that bond brought on by that love, and the lengths to which one would go to protect that love. Oh! this story is as captivating as it is infinitely tender. As fulfilling as it is heartbreaking. An Odyssean feat. The depth runs deep in plot and character, scene and dialogue. It merits every single one of the six-hundred pages it is written in, five hundred and seventy-six pages to be precise, every single one os it. But I would have gone on for six hundred, seven hundred, a thousand even, however long Whitaker wanted to keep this journey going, I would have been along for the ride, gladly. It carries a weight that defies our imaginations as readers and takes us on an epic ride through too many emotions, and in so doing, it takes us back to our formative years in childhood and those murky adolescent ones before adulthood. It examines the poignancy of love and loss and sacrifice, the dalliance between darkness and light where the best and worst of humanity is embedded, and it gives credence to the emotions trapped within. It is a beautiful story of love, borne of light. Even in its darker moments, love finds a way through, and yet it leaves us with an appreciation for the quietness of the dark, the colours it brings to the fore and the gift of life’s beauty when we find our way into light.
An enduring love.
An ode to friendship.
A childhood interrupted.
A love hard won.
And when you add in the wider cast and the community, Sammy, my second favourite because Saint and Patch are joint first, Charlotte, Chief Nix, Saint’s grandmother… their busyness with each other’s lives and the nuances in their interactions, at its core it is about the fullness of love. Love in all its facets through grief, through loss, through good, through bad. It is an ode to the utter completeness of love. Chris Whitaker fills every single crack of this story with love, even when selfishly given.
Robust in its prose as it is bombastic in its landscape, audacious in its story telling, and a beautiful simplicity that can often get lost in a book of this magnitude, but we are not lost, we remain captivated with every scene and every word, right down to the last moments of the book when we simply never want it to end. Love, crime, suspense, mystery, thriller… it is all in there. My heart, my heart, Saint and Patch have my entire heart. We should all be so lucky to experience such friendship and the love that comes forth from it, that enduringly beloved kind of love.
Chris Whitaker writes in a way that is deeply connected, deeply moving, deeply evocative… we are trapped in a story that never really leaves us long after we have turned the last page. And, If I died having not read this book, I’d have fought to come back to life simply to read it and I would return to the dead happily because this story will keep me at peace. I would have the words of Patch and Saint for company. I would get to be with the Beekeeper and the Pirate for all time. This one is truly for the ages.
As an aside: if you are not a subscriber to Jordy’s Book Club, on substack and not following him on instagram, do yourself a favour and fix both, this was a recommendation from him. Best ever.