Astonishing Splashes of Colour

Rating:
Summary: childhood/parenthood under scrutiny; a fine first novel...
Review: 'Astonishing Splashes of Colour' is a rather involved story of a young woman struggling to come to terms with her inability to have children, her own distorted childhood, and her strained relationship with her husband and her family. So yes, it covers a lot of ground. And as the story unravels it gets a bit ... melodramatic, unfortunately. Yet the book is anything but a disappointment. Clare Morrall's prose is fine, especially so for an inexperienced novelist. But it is her deep, compassionate characterization of the lead character that really salvages 'Astonishing Splashes of Colour'. The author's sincerity shines through.

Bottom line: a mature look at painful memories. Recommended.

Rating:
Summary: One of the best books I read in 2004
Review: ASTONISHING SPLASHES OF COLOUR by Clare Morrall
January 9, 2005

A favorite book of mine from 2004, ASTONISHING SPLASHES OF COLOUR was a great character study about a woman with Synesthesia who has a hard time coping with the world. She seems to have the mind of a child at times, although she lives in her own place (across the way from her husband), earns a living by writing book reviews for children's books, and seems at first glance to be a very normal and stable adult.

However, upon closer look, things look quite differently. Kitty Wellington seems to be on the verge of falling apart. She spends her days looking for her child Henry. She also seems to end up on the bus a lot, going nowhere, sometimes coming home early in the morning. Her need to be awake is sometimes so intense, for she fears her dreams.

She also has a deep need to find out more about her mother. Because her mother died when she was only 3 years old, she has very little memory of her, and what she does remember she believes are false memories. Her brothers won't help her, saying it's been too long ago for them to remember a thing. Even her father refuses to help her out.

While at first her behavior didn't seem too abnormal, it comes to a point where she begins to do things that are totally irresponsible. When she begins to behave erratically, such as taking a baby that doesn't belong to her, her family realizes that she needs help, fast.

ASTONISHING SPLASHES OF COLOUR was a truly fascinating look at a woman whose mental state is slowly deteriorating. It is difficult to like a character such as this, because often times the reader will not know whether to sympathize with her or be angry with her. What I do feel, though, is that this was a great reading experience and it is a book that I will not forget for a very long time. The Ratmammy gives this book 5 stars.

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Summary: We have to stop spinning occasionally - let the colours show
Review: Astonishing Splashes of Colour was short listed for the Booker Prize - somewhat unjustifiably, because it isn't that good. Clare Morall's writing is sometimes uneven and while her strength is in character development and dialogue, her narrative and sense of structure is often stilted and not as tight as it might be. However, having said this, the book is certainly a good read, and captures with a resounding force the universality of loss and the difficulties of non-communicative families. This is a story of heartbreak and loss, where secrets are maintained for years, and where life can often be a surreal and bizarre kaleidoscope of confusing colour.

Set in the city of Birmingham and using J. M. Barrie's Neverland as a framing device, the story centers on the unconventional Kitty and her disparate, rather eccentric family. From early on it becomes obvious that something terrible has happened to Kitty: we meet her as she waits at the school gates with all the other parents but it is readily clear that she has no child. The reader soon learns that her young son Henry died at birth three years ago and there's nothing but emptiness and barrenness in her life. A children's book critic, Kitty lives in a flat next door to her finicky obsessive-compulsive tidy husband James. They have a kind, decent marriage, but memories of her long lost mother constantly haunt Kitty, and her father and her brothers refuse to talk about her.

Part detective story and part journey of discovery, Astonishing splashes of Colour is about the connection between art, colour, and life. For Kitty, "daytime colour is just a façade, a coat of paint splashed on to fool us into thinking the world is genuine." It's as though Kitty's mother had died and taken everything of herself with her, as if she new in advance and sorted through her personal life, destroying all evidence of her existence. Kitty must uncover the truth about her mother, and also her long-lost sister Dinah, so that she can piece together these missing parts to make her life more whole again.

Kitty is such a complex and beautifully drawn character that readers will immediately emphasize with her plight. She aches to have a child but she only knows children in books, having adventures, discovering things, and thinking things. She likens herself to the lost boys in Peter Pan and because she grew up without a mother, she feels she's lost - "nobody can guide me back to the right place, because there's nobody who can give me what I want."

As the narrative progresses and the family skeletons are revealed, the colours of life begin to blur too fast, shattering Kitty's already rickety and shaky world. And while her father tries to tell her to be bold by putting all the colours in and mixing them up, "because colour is life," Kitty inevitably begins to fall apart and starts to act out bizarre and desperate behaviour resulting in chaos for all around her.

The novel is full of drama, heartache, and lots of surprises that most viewers will not see coming. And while, at times, the novel may read like a trumped up version of the Eastenders, Astonishing Splashes of Colour is still a compulsive and ultimately satisfying read, where the line between sanity, madness, world-weariness and childlike naivety is explored with great creative and literary skill. Mike Leonard February 05.


Rating:
Summary: Intensely Colored Emotions
Review: Astonishing Splashes of Colour, Clare Morrall's first published novel, takes its title from a description of Peter Pan's Neverland. It follows the life of an eccentric Birmingham woman who in a sense never has grown up. She is impulsive, doesn't follow conventional daily time tables and can be rather mischievous. But like a child she is someone you have an immediate affection for if only, for no other reason, the purity of her response to the world. It is revealed that Kitty reacts this way because of family tragedies that have impaired her ability to act rationally and develop a secure sense of self. She lives a kind of improvised life reviewing children's books, occasionally visiting her husband who lives in the apartment next door and fostering a strange obsession for her nieces as well as other children. The remote nature of her family relations makes it all too clear why this woman maintains a childish need for love and attention.

The great strength of this novel is the strong personality of the protagonist as she relates her tale in a barely chronological sequence (which suits her jumbled state of consciousness). We follow her mood swings which switch dramatically from joy to deep depression. These are illuminated by the way she views people that emanate certain colors in accordance with her emotions. She can be at one time horribly remote and at another time excruciatingly too personal. The plot quickly gains speed as the novel progresses revealing startling details about Kitty's past. It's to the author's credit that a seemingly innocent journey to the sea side can take on such dark undertones. We feel simultaneously sympathetic and horrified with Kitty for embarking on this impetuous journey. For all this novel's local flavor, it conveys universal truths about the bonds of family, the need for love and the subsistence of childhood innocence into adulthood.

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Summary: Growing Up Lost
Review: In a weird mood I decided to buy most of the books that were shortlisted for this year's Booker Prize. I read Vernon God Little right after it won, and thought that it was an interesting experiment. Then a couple of days ago I picked up Clare Morrall's Astonishing Splashes of Colour. Is it a better first novel than Vernon God Little? Should it have won the Booker instead? I can't believe how inconsequential the question now seems to me. "DBC Pierre"'s novel was more daring, but it's Clare Morrall's that will remain with me. It's not perfect, but it's astonishingly well written for a first novel (although since Ms Morrall has grown children, according to the blurb, one assumes she has a lifetime of well chosen, deeply embedded reading). There are a couple of plot twists that I should have been anticipating, but frankly I was simply too engrossed with reading the novel to think that far ahead. There are other plot elements toward the end that are not explained at all, although I personally think this may be a strength rather than a weakness: life cannot always be neatly wrapped up in plot denouements. The description in the British paperback I read (with a different, superior cover than the American edition, for what it's worth) describes the novel as a reflection of Morrall's "interest in the dynamics of motherless family life and in synaesthesia -- a condition in which emotions are seen as colours." That makes it all sound very clinical. What it's about is more simply families and children, and the heartbreak you feel when the narrator says four pages from the end, "I don't think I've grown up. I don't feel important enough." If you've ever been a "lost child," or lost a child, or a mother, or a brother, or a sister, read it and respect its hard-earned tears and minor victories.

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Summary: The Colors of a Collapsing World
Review: This first-person novel of a world disintegrating was rightfully short-listed for the 2003 Man Booker Prize. Author Clare Morrall has constructed an unforgettable novel of a woman desperately struggling to make sense of who she is. Kitty sees life in colors - the yellow of motherhood, the pink of her nieces, the blinding white of all colors mixed together in her husband - but these colors, even as they comfort her, remind her constantly that she has lost a child and her ability to have another. Her large family doesn't speak of tragedies and the past, and her husband James is even better at avoidance, as the two live in separate, side-by-side flats. Even though she is loved and protected by her family, she flails through her crisis by herself, with only her therapist to steady her in twenty minute appointments. It becomes apparent from the beginning that Kitty needs a child, and will do or say anything to maintain the illusion that she is a mother. Despite her tottering on the brink of insanity, Kitty's Birmingham, where most of the novel is set, is vivid and alive. Her actions are sometimes chilling and yet they acquire logic through her eyes.

Kitty's voice is consistently believable, and it provides the quiet, driving force of Morrall's novel. Here, insanity has the voice of reason. Even when the plot edges toward the melodramatic, Kitty's narration rescues it. The characterizations aren't always as distinct as they might be, with some of Kitty's brothers melting into each other despite the author's attempts at distinguishing them. Morrall writes, "None of them looked alike, but my memory produced a composite brother," and even this early in the book, it comes across as an excuse. Kitty's husband James is skillfully described through his flat, but when interacting with Kitty, he doesn't always have a shape. Still, the portrait of Kitty's father is sharply realized as are most of the women and girls, most notably the little arsonist Kitty befriends.

In a head-to-head contest with Vernon God Little, the eventual winner of the 2003 Man Booker, this book easily wins my vote. It probes the mind of an emotionally disturbed woman without being gloomy and suffocating and instead opens her world outward and forward. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Highly Recommended
Review: This is quite a charming book - - the characters are alive and practically jumped off the page, and every line is exceptionally well-written. A sure page turner!