Astonishing
Splashes of Colour
By Clare Morrall
British
author, Clare Morrall, is already a Booker Prize finalist due to
her extraordinary and gripping debut novel, Astonishing Splashes
of Colour. The protagonist, Kitty, is a woman who is suffering
and grieving from a miscarriage and resulting infertility. Kitty
lives next door in a flat to her husband, James. Obviously, this
is an unusual arrangement that a husband and wife live next door
to each other and that they are “neighbors” of sorts,
rather than having a typical husband-and-wife relationship and sharing
one domestic home. However, James has his own issues – he
has a limp, he fears unfamiliar places, and he is obsessively neat.
Kitty,
on the other hand, leads a rather cluttered existence in her own
flat and cannot relate to James’ compulsive neatness. Although
they love each other, they each feel that they need their own space
and they lead separate lives, to a certain extent. Clearly, James
was “around” when Kitty had her miscarriage, and both
the spouses are grieving, but they are grieving in different ways.
James appears to have “moved on” from the tragedy, so
to speak, and Kitty’s daily existence is impacted by the loss
of her baby and she sees life differently than other people. Indeed,
Kitty experiences and interprets her life through colors that others
cannot see. For example, she will wait outside of a schoolyard and
watch mothers and nannies gather their children after school, and
Kitty sees all the various people as “yellow,” a color
that represents optimism.
In
addition to the personal loss of her baby and infertility, Kitty
comes from a dysfunctional family comprised of four brothers, an
eccentric father and artist, and Kitty had a motherless childhood.
Kitty’s brothers are much older than she is and they are secondary
father figures of sorts. They keep an eye on Kitty as she moves
through her day-to-day life, which largely is without structure,
and Kitty falls into a deeper depression and a fugue state. James
is next door, of course, but Kitty and James respect each other’s
privacy and Kitty can freely create her own schedule – which
is not necessarily a positive thing, as Kitty is hanging onto reality
by a thin thread, at best.
The
plot gradually but surely progresses in intricate layers and the
reader is engrossed from the first chapter. This book is deep but
it is highly “readable.” There are shocking and interesting
plot twists that develop that shine light on Kitty’s distressed
state, which encompass issues of her identity and her family, and
not only the loss of her baby and her infertility. With Astonishing
Splashes of Colour, Morrall has written an impressive debut
novel that is highly recommended to fans of literary fiction and
this reviewer looks forward to reading Morrall’s next release.
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The
Reviewer |
Shannon I. Bigham |
2005 |
NOTE:
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