All the Colours of the Dark: Chris Whitaker

In All the Colours of the Dark by Chris Whitaker we have three central characters – Patch, a one-eyed boy who imagines himself as a pirate and who gets kidnapped in the early pages of the book; Saint, his only friend; Misty, the richest girl in town who is saved from abduction by Patch and falls in love with him; and Grace, about whom little can be said without spoilers.

There are also a wealth of extraneous characters – Patch’s alcoholic mother who is never more than a cliched cypher and deserved more from the author, Saint’s grandmother who also verges on alcoholism, the local police chief, the local doctor, and a drunken, chauvinistic art gallery owner.
During Patch’s time in captivity, he is held in complete darkness along with an unseen companion called Grace, who he falls in love with. He is rescued by Saint who, in turn, is in love with Patch. It takes quite a few chapters of this very long book to get to this point because Whitaker is nothing if not wordy. Quite a few of his characters are given to dishing out homespun wisdom and, at times, the pace of the story suffers because of this.
Moving on. As an adult, after his return to freedom, Patch devotes his life to finding Grace, who disappeared on the night of his rescue. Initially, he does this by roaming America, searching for information about missing girls, any of whom could be Grace. He funds these excursions by robbing banks, donating most of the money to organisations that search for missing girls and keeping only enough to live on. This section of the book is interminable, as the author describes Patch’s meetings with parent after parent, empathising with them. Did I mention he was also a talented artist, who gifted the parents portraits of their missing daughters?
In the meantime, Saint has become a police officer and also devotes all her spare time in trying to find Grace. She eventually is the one who arrests Patch and he goes to prison. Saint becomes an FBI officer, purely to expedite her search for Grace, marries a man she doesn’t love and wrecks her own marriage.
At this point, we are about one third of the way through the book and there is a mind-boggling plot to chomp through before the conclusion of the story.
I started off loving this book, not minding the excessive verbiage, as Whitaker laid down the characters. Initially, they all tug at the heartstrings, portrayed as flawed but fundamentally decent folk who have been caught up in a drama not of their making. The interim section was so-so, largely given over to Patch’s windmill tilting, but it was the second half of the book that nearly drove me to deleting it in frustration. The characters became caricatures and very unrealistic ones, at that. I couldn’t find the foul-mouthed, womanising art dealer either funny or endearing, as I guess I was supposed to. Neither was I entranced by a pre-teenager who was also foul-mouthed and rude to everyone. I stuck with it – audiobooks aren’t cheap – and prayed that, by some miracle, at least one of these selfish, self-obsessed people would take a breath and just consider the consequences of their actions. The end, when it finally limped into view, was better than any of them deserved.
What began as a full blown five star read stumbled its way to an ending that barely merited two stars.  
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