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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.

The Book

Harper Collins
October 1, 2004
Hardcover
0060734450
Fiction / Literary fiction
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Excerpt

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The Reviewer

Shannon I. Bigham
2005
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