All the Colours of the Dark - Chris Whitaker

Looking back at children growing up in a more innocent time half a century ago (how quickly things change!), it's hard not to draw comparisons, at least initially, between All the Colours of the Dark and works like Stand by Me or even Stranger Things without the dark fantasy and horror. Chris Whitaker certainly captures something of the warmth and magic of childhood around this mid-seventies period, a time when the world felt grander, was more diverse, exciting and unknown, where imagination replaced Instagram. But it's not an idealised depiction by any means, nor is it steeped in nostalgia. There is nothing innocent about what happens in the lives of a number of children growing up around this time in Monta Clare, Missouri.

In fact, All the Colours of the Dark opens with hope dying. On a morning in 1975 the day that her bees went missing, 13-year-old Saint finds out that her friend Joseph 'Patch' Macauley has been stabbed, abducted and, as time passes, is now in all likelihood dead. The young boy, with pretensions of being a pirate on account of having been born with a bad eye and living up to the hand dealt by fate by wearing an eye-patch with some measure of swagger, had run to the rescue of Misty Meyer, the daughter of a wealthy family, who was being attacked in a clearing by a man wearing a balaclava. Misty escaped, but Patch has disappeared, leaving only a bloody T-shirt behind. And soon after than, another girl disappears.

The impact on the small town is immense. Despite not exactly being a popular kid, more than a little strange by all accounts and belonging to a poor family, the news of the disappearance strikes deep in the community, not least with Saint, who was really Patch's only friend. While the rest of the world moves on or falls apart, Saint isn't going to rest until she finds what has happened to her friend, following the trail of other girls who have disappeared in the region. 

But this is only the beginning of an epic story of stolen youth and lost innocence, All the Colours of the Dark taking in the decades that pass and the impact it has on survivors and those damaged by the experience, considering the void that is left and how it leaves something that burns through the years. It's also a journey into an interior world, of experiencing feelings that no one else can understand, experiences that change and define your life. The author explores that in remarkable depth and at length, but there is not one unnecessary scene or exchange in the book. It's a wonderful celebration of humanity, of life, or facing challenges, of finding a purpose and something worth living for. It's deeply romantic in the classic sense; of noble intentions and the determination to live with integrity, of heroism and the belief in holding to an ideal despite incredible challenges.

But All the Colours of the Dark does not exist in a bubble of nostalgia for a lost time. It's also rooted in the real world in terms of how those youthful ideas cope in a world that is progressively changing for the worse. As much as some try to cling on to the unrealistic dreams of holding onto the past, the novel in passing reports on wars and lone gunmen in schools, on the natural disasters that occur with increasing frequency. The years pass and the writing sometime takes elliptical jumps that leave you momentary unmoored - an effect that is surely intentional - but there is one constant running through the book that never lets up in intensity, and in a long book that can be agonising as much as gripping. What isn't in doubt however is that this is an extraordinary and powerful book, a wild romantic adventure of youthful ideals running up against the harsh reality of troubled times.

Reading notes: All the Colours of the Dark by Chris Whitaker is published in hardcover today, 16th July 2024 by Orion. It has already been available on Kindle for a week or two. My thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the eBook review copy.