The Color of Bee Larkham’s Murder by Sarah J. Harris

Touchstone, 368 pages, $26

Synesthesia has been the disability-du-jour for awhile now. It used to be Munchausen syndrome by proxy. I enjoyed the use of synesthesia in T. Jefferson Parker’s “The Fallen,” “Still Waters” by Nigel McCrery, “Wife of the Gods” by Kwei Quartey, and “Spark” by John Twelve Hawks of the books I have reviewed over the years. In “The Color of Bee Larkham’s Murder” it is coupled with autism and face blindness. Strangely enough, I just read another book in which prosopagnosia plays a big part, “Shutter Man” by Richard Montanari. Maybe that’s the new disability-du-jour.

“Bee Larkham” borders on being a young adult book, but there are difficult situations that propel it into the adult realm. Part of the reason the book sounds young is that the narrator is thirteen-year-old Jasper Wishart. He is the character endowed with synesthesia, hobbled by prosopagnosia, and agitated by autism. It must have been extremely difficult to write from the perspective of a character with such limits of expression. Everything is viewed through the lens of seeing colors when he hears sounds. Shapes also conjure colors, but it is the colors-sounds bond that is at the heart of the book.

Jasper doesn’t even recognize his father’s face. Ed Wishart has to announce that he is Jasper’s dad or that Jasper is his son. Jasper also recognizes the sound of his voice by its color (muddy ocher). His mom’s was cobalt blue, a color that resurrects her for him temporarily. She died a couple of years before this story begins, and he and his father have moved into a new neighborhood.

A couple of other people have also recently moved to the neighborhood: the eponymous Bee Larkham because her mother has just died and she must sort through her stuff before selling the house, and Ollie Watkins whose mother is terminally ill and who needs his care. The two mothers were friends and Bee (sky blue) and Ollie (custard yellow) grew up on the street. David Gilbert (red grainy) is another neighbor, but he is more a contemporary of their mothers than of Bee and Ollie. The other significant residents are the colorful — in more ways than one — wild parakeets that nest in Bee’s oak tree and eat the food Bee leaves out for them. They are loud and squawky and the provocation for contentious neighbor complaints, especially from David Gilbert. But they are the target of fascination for Jasper. He keeps numerous notebooks and paintings describing when he sees them and what colors their sounds evoke.

As a byproduct, Jasper notices other goings-on in the neighborhood while he is watching his beloved birds through his binoculars. He is right across the street from Bee and she often waves to him. His “spying” doesn’t seem to bother her, and soon she and Jasper have become friends, of a sort. She certainly isn’t friends with David Gilbert or Ollie Watkins.

One day Bee disappears. Jasper claims she is dead. Soon we realize he thinks he has murdered her. As a result, he meets Rusty Chrome Orange, aka DC Richard Chamberlain (“like the actor” — not that Jasper knows what that means). Although Jasper’s thinking is fairly linear, the storyline isn’t. We work back from the beginning scene in the police station to when Bee is alive and rebellious. Why does she do what she does? That’s the tangled mystery, isn’t it? And we get to see it unraveling through Jasper’s prismatic eyes.

A lot of the 386 pages of Sarah J. Harris’ book is repetition. We hear over and over about how Jasper does not recognize faces, that he is reliant on clothing and “voice colors.” We hear endlessly the colors of everything. I’m sure it reflects the redundancy of autism, but it doesn’t add to the literary value. Although I was quite enamored of her story, I disliked Harris’ excessive reiteration. I did lose my heart to Jasper, a vulnerable thirteen-year-old in a hostile environment at school and then, unfortunately, in his neighborhood. My heart twanged in response to Jasper’s attempt to keep his dead mother’s cobalt blue close to him, both in memory and in his compulsive paintings.