Christopher Moore is one of Americas funniest novelists and his new book, Sacr Bleu, a novel subtitled A Comedy dArt, makes the case for him also being one of the smartest and most inventive. Arguably his best work, the book is set in the Belle Epoque era and involves the impressionist and post-impressionist painters who lived primarily in the Montmartre district of Paris. Starring Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, who is so colorful and entertaining a character that its hard to believe that Moore didnt create him, its a strange and fascinating novel that is about, among other things, the color blue.
Moore is fascinated by what made the impressionists so radical that they created unconventional work and lived in unconventional ways. If this novel is less laugh out loud than some of his previous books, its because Moore is trying for a different tone. While there are plenty of hilarious moments try looking at a Renoir after reading this without cracking a smile the book details the murder of Vincent Van Gogh and how his friends try to discover what really happened. Along the way youll learn the best way to test a baguette, how color is made, and learn a lot about art (although admittedly, some of what we learn is fictional). Moore is currently on book tour and we spoke to him about his just-released novel.
ALEX DUEBEN: I feel I should ask at the outset, have any art historians been harmed in the making of this novel?
CHRISTOPHER MOORE: Not yet, but there may be a few cardiac incidents once the book is out. I took some liberties.
AD: You mentioned at the end of the book that you set out to write a novel about the color blue. Why blue? And why not, say, vermilion?
CM: To be honest, I just don't remember. It just came to me, like, out of thewell, you know.
AD: This feels in some ways like a book that could have taken longer to research than to actually write. How much research was involved and how long did it take to craft this book?
CM: From the time I started working on it to the time I delivered it was four years. I was still doing research as I was writing it, but the actually writing time was about 18 months.
AD: I am forced to admit that I have never given thought to how to create color and after reading how they did in your book, I'm a little amazed that anyone went through such trouble.
CM: When you consider that humans have been harvesting color and using it to make art for nearly 100,000 years, it's not surprising that we moderns would take it for granted. The Australian aborigines, which, in spots, retained a stone-age culture well into the last century, actually have sacred color mines where their ochers are dug, and the colors were traded between bands all over the Australian continent, since you could only use a certain color for a certain type of painting. Color and religion are tied. Color is part of creation. I think color is so ingrained as part of human culture that now we don't think of it as having a source, any more than we associate the food we eat or the clothes we wear with the plants and animals from which they come.
AD: You spoke a little about the impressionists in the end but I was wondering if you could just talk briefly about what you love about them and find so fascinating about their work.
CM: I think I was first drawn to the Impressionists work as a respite from modern life, which is somewhat ironic, I suppose, since one of their goals was to portray modern life as they saw it. When I was on book tour I would go to museums to get out of the pace and patter of self-promotion, have an experience that wasn't about me or my books at all, and looking at Impressionists' paintings gave me that break. Later, when I learned about their lives, and about what they were trying to do as artists, and how unconventional it was at the time, I gained a whole new level of respect for them, as people as well as painters. They all had the ability to work within the conventions of art at the time and make a living, but they did something that broke with convention, in a counter-survival way. Creative courage is impressive, and inspiring.
AD: Who was Henri Toulouse-Lautrec and what made him the perfect character for a Christopher Moore novel? Was he really that colorful in real life?
CM: Toulouse-Lautrec was the Count de Toulouse-Lautrec Monfa, he was royalty, and was heir to a substantial fortune -- he didn't have to make art to survive. He was injured as a child in a riding accident, and his legs never healed properly, and he also had a genetic bone disorder (probably because his parents were first cousins) that cause him to be very short of stature. He discovered, early on, that he was very good at drawing, and as his athletic activities were limited by his disability, he got a lot of practice. When he came of age, he went off to Paris to learn to paint, and attended drawing classes with Vincent Van Gogh, Emile Bernard, and other budding artists of the day. In addition to being an extraordinary painter and printmaker, he was a bon vivant, a notorious drunk, who lived much of his life in brothels and cabarets, and recorded life there in his drawings and paintings. It's the combination of his being an artist and a bit of a madman that made him the perfect character for one of my books. Since I decided to open the book with the murder of Vincent Van Gogh, having a diminutive detective who was his friend, try to solve the murder, was irresistible.
AD: How important was it to spend time in Paris researching the novel?
CM: I don't think I could have written the book if I hadn't spent time in Paris. Much of Paris as it stands today, was built in the 1850s, so it hasn't really changed that much, so being there gave dimension to the scenes, plus, there are huge collections of the art that I was writing about, and living around where it was painting, gave me a perspective I wouldn't have had otherwise.
AD: What is the challenge of writing a historical novel that's set in the more recent past, as opposed to Fool or Lamb?
CM: Mainly there was just more to work with -- almost too much. In the case of Lamb, for instance, they didn't even know where Jesus was for 30 years of his life, and Fool was constructed around Shakespeare's King Lear, which had so many anachronisms in the original play, that I had to make up a mythical time in which to set itin other words, I was able to work with huge holes in history. With the Impressionists, they more or less knew what each of them had for breakfast every day of his life, plus, each was more or less recording moments of his or her life on canvas. It was a huge body of knowledge, and the challenge was how to pare it down and tell a story with a pace that would satisfy a modern reader.
AD: Why did you want to include so many paintings throughout the book?
CM: I didn't want to assume that my reader had seen the art I was talking about. I have only seen a lot of it in the last few years, and yet so much of the story depends on understanding what the art looks like. I thought it would give readers who might have come to my work through the vampire books or the Pine Cove books a door into this new world I was writing about.
AD: Do you fear that Renoir will be best known by his new catch phrase: I like big butts?
CM: I can only hope. I just couldn't resist writing a scene where he says that. In his biography he more or less says that a lot, I just sort of used a phrase we've heard before. Sometimes you just have to swing at a comedy slow-pitch, like when Manet sees Whistler at an art exhibition and the first thing he asks is, How's your mother?
AD: Is hitting someone upside the head in fact the best way to test whether the baguette has been properly made?
CM: I have no idea, I just thought that would be funny. Parisian society seems to sort of revolve around the baguette, even today, and I thought it would be funny if every morning you saw bakers smacking their kids in the head with a loaf to test the crust.
AD: Is there a chance we might someday see a pseudo-sequel featuring Toulouse-Lautrec and the Art Nouveau movement?
CM: I don't know. I really like the art from that period, but it's not nearly as rich or influential as the Impressionists.It was really more decorative and design, like Art Deco, than revolutionary, like, for instance, Cubism or Surrealism. I love the period and the characters of the time, but if I were to revisit Paris, I think I'd have to tell the story around something a little more universalmaybe just use Belle Epoch Paris as the setting. Everyone was there, just everyone, so there's a wealth of historical material to launch from.
Moore is fascinated by what made the impressionists so radical that they created unconventional work and lived in unconventional ways. If this novel is less laugh out loud than some of his previous books, its because Moore is trying for a different tone. While there are plenty of hilarious moments try looking at a Renoir after reading this without cracking a smile the book details the murder of Vincent Van Gogh and how his friends try to discover what really happened. Along the way youll learn the best way to test a baguette, how color is made, and learn a lot about art (although admittedly, some of what we learn is fictional). Moore is currently on book tour and we spoke to him about his just-released novel.
ALEX DUEBEN: I feel I should ask at the outset, have any art historians been harmed in the making of this novel?
CHRISTOPHER MOORE: Not yet, but there may be a few cardiac incidents once the book is out. I took some liberties.
AD: You mentioned at the end of the book that you set out to write a novel about the color blue. Why blue? And why not, say, vermilion?
CM: To be honest, I just don't remember. It just came to me, like, out of thewell, you know.
AD: This feels in some ways like a book that could have taken longer to research than to actually write. How much research was involved and how long did it take to craft this book?
CM: From the time I started working on it to the time I delivered it was four years. I was still doing research as I was writing it, but the actually writing time was about 18 months.
AD: I am forced to admit that I have never given thought to how to create color and after reading how they did in your book, I'm a little amazed that anyone went through such trouble.
CM: When you consider that humans have been harvesting color and using it to make art for nearly 100,000 years, it's not surprising that we moderns would take it for granted. The Australian aborigines, which, in spots, retained a stone-age culture well into the last century, actually have sacred color mines where their ochers are dug, and the colors were traded between bands all over the Australian continent, since you could only use a certain color for a certain type of painting. Color and religion are tied. Color is part of creation. I think color is so ingrained as part of human culture that now we don't think of it as having a source, any more than we associate the food we eat or the clothes we wear with the plants and animals from which they come.
AD: You spoke a little about the impressionists in the end but I was wondering if you could just talk briefly about what you love about them and find so fascinating about their work.
CM: I think I was first drawn to the Impressionists work as a respite from modern life, which is somewhat ironic, I suppose, since one of their goals was to portray modern life as they saw it. When I was on book tour I would go to museums to get out of the pace and patter of self-promotion, have an experience that wasn't about me or my books at all, and looking at Impressionists' paintings gave me that break. Later, when I learned about their lives, and about what they were trying to do as artists, and how unconventional it was at the time, I gained a whole new level of respect for them, as people as well as painters. They all had the ability to work within the conventions of art at the time and make a living, but they did something that broke with convention, in a counter-survival way. Creative courage is impressive, and inspiring.
AD: Who was Henri Toulouse-Lautrec and what made him the perfect character for a Christopher Moore novel? Was he really that colorful in real life?
CM: Toulouse-Lautrec was the Count de Toulouse-Lautrec Monfa, he was royalty, and was heir to a substantial fortune -- he didn't have to make art to survive. He was injured as a child in a riding accident, and his legs never healed properly, and he also had a genetic bone disorder (probably because his parents were first cousins) that cause him to be very short of stature. He discovered, early on, that he was very good at drawing, and as his athletic activities were limited by his disability, he got a lot of practice. When he came of age, he went off to Paris to learn to paint, and attended drawing classes with Vincent Van Gogh, Emile Bernard, and other budding artists of the day. In addition to being an extraordinary painter and printmaker, he was a bon vivant, a notorious drunk, who lived much of his life in brothels and cabarets, and recorded life there in his drawings and paintings. It's the combination of his being an artist and a bit of a madman that made him the perfect character for one of my books. Since I decided to open the book with the murder of Vincent Van Gogh, having a diminutive detective who was his friend, try to solve the murder, was irresistible.
AD: How important was it to spend time in Paris researching the novel?
CM: I don't think I could have written the book if I hadn't spent time in Paris. Much of Paris as it stands today, was built in the 1850s, so it hasn't really changed that much, so being there gave dimension to the scenes, plus, there are huge collections of the art that I was writing about, and living around where it was painting, gave me a perspective I wouldn't have had otherwise.
AD: What is the challenge of writing a historical novel that's set in the more recent past, as opposed to Fool or Lamb?
CM: Mainly there was just more to work with -- almost too much. In the case of Lamb, for instance, they didn't even know where Jesus was for 30 years of his life, and Fool was constructed around Shakespeare's King Lear, which had so many anachronisms in the original play, that I had to make up a mythical time in which to set itin other words, I was able to work with huge holes in history. With the Impressionists, they more or less knew what each of them had for breakfast every day of his life, plus, each was more or less recording moments of his or her life on canvas. It was a huge body of knowledge, and the challenge was how to pare it down and tell a story with a pace that would satisfy a modern reader.
AD: Why did you want to include so many paintings throughout the book?
CM: I didn't want to assume that my reader had seen the art I was talking about. I have only seen a lot of it in the last few years, and yet so much of the story depends on understanding what the art looks like. I thought it would give readers who might have come to my work through the vampire books or the Pine Cove books a door into this new world I was writing about.
AD: Do you fear that Renoir will be best known by his new catch phrase: I like big butts?
CM: I can only hope. I just couldn't resist writing a scene where he says that. In his biography he more or less says that a lot, I just sort of used a phrase we've heard before. Sometimes you just have to swing at a comedy slow-pitch, like when Manet sees Whistler at an art exhibition and the first thing he asks is, How's your mother?
AD: Is hitting someone upside the head in fact the best way to test whether the baguette has been properly made?
CM: I have no idea, I just thought that would be funny. Parisian society seems to sort of revolve around the baguette, even today, and I thought it would be funny if every morning you saw bakers smacking their kids in the head with a loaf to test the crust.
AD: Is there a chance we might someday see a pseudo-sequel featuring Toulouse-Lautrec and the Art Nouveau movement?
CM: I don't know. I really like the art from that period, but it's not nearly as rich or influential as the Impressionists.It was really more decorative and design, like Art Deco, than revolutionary, like, for instance, Cubism or Surrealism. I love the period and the characters of the time, but if I were to revisit Paris, I think I'd have to tell the story around something a little more universalmaybe just use Belle Epoch Paris as the setting. Everyone was there, just everyone, so there's a wealth of historical material to launch from.