What happens when you let a comedian loose in the Musée d'Orsay with a bag of ultramarine pigment and zero reverence for art history? You get Sacré Bleu, and honestly, I'm still not sure if Christopher Moore loves the Impressionists or wants to pants them in front of the entire Western canon.
I finished this one during a Saturday morning walk along the lakefront with Denise, and she kept asking why I was laughing out loud and then immediately going quiet. That's the rhythm of this book - Moore hits you with something absurd (Toulouse-Lautrec as a tiny, debauched detective figure investigating Van Gogh's death), and then he pulls back into these stretches about the nature of artistic obsession that are genuinely... well, I almost said the banned word. They're good. They're sneakily good.
When Toulouse-Lautrec Becomes Your Favorite Detective
Here's the thing about Moore's version of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec: he's simultaneously ridiculous and heartbreaking. The premise - a young baker-painter named Lucien Lessard teams up with Toulouse-Lautrec to investigate what really happened to Van Gogh - sounds like it should be pure farce. And sometimes it is. Moore writes Toulouse-Lautrec as this hard-drinking, brothel-haunting provocateur who delivers lines with the confidence of a man twice his height. But Moore also understands something about these artists that a lot of historical fiction misses: they were weird, broke, passionate people making things nobody wanted yet. The comedy doesn't undercut that. It reveals it.
Compare this to, say, Girl with a Pearl Earring or Lust for Life - those books approach art history with a kind of hushed museum reverence. Moore walks in eating a croissant and talking too loud, but he's looked at the paintings just as closely. Maybe more closely. There's a running thread about the color blue - sacred blue, ultramarine, the pigment that drove men mad and bankrupt - and Moore turns it into both a supernatural mystery and a meditation on what artists sacrifice for their work. My students would hate this. I love it.
The plot itself? Part mystery, part supernatural romance, part art history lecture delivered by your most unhinged friend. There's a shadowy figure called The Colorman who's been supplying painters with a mystical blue pigment for centuries, and a muse named Bleu who is... complicated. Moore jumps between time periods - from the caves of Lascaux to 1890s Montmartre - and it can feel scattered. I'll be honest: around the four-hour mark, I lost the thread of who was being manipulated by whom. The story's architecture is more Gaudi than Bauhaus - wild curves, unexpected angles, and you just have to trust it's load-bearing.
Euan Morton Walks Into a Parisian Café
Euan Morton's narration is the right call for this material, and I want to be specific about why. Moore's dialogue bounces between working-class Parisians, aristocratic painters, and ancient supernatural beings, and Morton handles the tonal shifts with a light touch. He doesn't do broad caricature voices - his Toulouse-Lautrec and his Lucien are distinguished more by rhythm and energy than by accent gymnastics. Toulouse-Lautrec gets this slightly clipped, amused delivery, while Lucien sounds more earnest, a half-beat slower. It's the kind of differentiation that rewards you for paying attention rather than hitting you over the head.
His comedic timing is genuinely strong. Moore writes jokes that depend on the pause before the punchline, and Morton gets that. The narrator understands that pause is punctuation. There's a listener quote floating around that says Morton was "one of the only reasons I did not give up on this story," and I understand the sentiment - during the middle section where the plot tangles, it's Morton's energy that carries you through.
What he doesn't do is bring much vocal heat to the emotional peaks. The love story between Lucien and Bleu has real stakes buried under the comedy, and Morton plays it at the same wry register as everything else. I wanted a gear shift that never quite came.
Who Gets an Invitation to Montmartre
If you loved Lamb or Fool, you already know Moore's formula: take something sacred, add irreverence and genuine research in equal measure, shake vigorously. Sacré Bleu is that formula applied to Impressionism, and it mostly works. If you're the kind of listener who likes your history served with a wink - think Bryson but fictional - this is your speed.
Skip it if plot clarity matters more to you than voice. This book meanders. It doubles back. It stops to explain pigment chemistry and then makes a bawdy joke about Renoir. That's either delightful or maddening depending on your temperament. I had a similar reckoning with Summer Place: A Novel, which also prioritizes atmosphere and voice over plot efficiency and rewards you for surrendering to it rather than fighting the pacing.
At 1.0x and nearly twelve hours, the prose deserves to be savored, but I'd understand someone bumping to 1.15x during the middle act without guilt.
Worth Pausing the Faculty Meeting For
This reminds me of what Hemingway said about writing - that the dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth being above water. Moore's iceberg is wearing a beret and telling dirty jokes, but there's real depth underneath if you're willing to swim down. Not his tightest book, not his funniest, but possibly his most ambitious. And Morton's narration keeps the whole rickety, beautiful thing from tipping over.
Principal Martinez, I was definitely not listening to this during the curriculum alignment meeting. (I was. It was the Lascaux chapter. No regrets.)
