White is a dangerous colour. It’s the colour of nothing, of new beginnings, of annihilation, effacement and absolute potential. It comes at a cost, as Captain Ahab knew, and pursuit of it can become a damaging obsession. Edmund de Waal is sensible to its strange charms. Known for his immaculately restrained porcelain pots (as well as his bestselling 2010 memoir, The Hare With Amber Eyes
There is something both baffled and ardent about this statement and it strikes me that a similar motivation is at work in this beguilingly odd book, which declares itself to be “a pilgrimage of sorts” and is unusually keen to lay bare the process of its construction and to fret musically over its direction. The White Road is nominally an account of a quest to discover the origins of porcelain, the purest white of earthly materials. Yet, as de Waal travels from China to Dresden, from Cornwall to Carolina, it becomes increasingly clear that what he is bent on uncovering is not so much the history of a process, fascinating as that may be, as an understanding of creation, of what it means to make a desirable something where there was nothing before.
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