daubed with life (Astonishing Splashes of Colour - Clare Morrall)

Member Name: melee679

Product:	Astonishing Splashes of Colour - Clare Morrall
Date:	31/03/04 (74 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: beautiful writing

Disadvantages: being lost in a reading frenzy for days: very antisocial

Astonishing is a good word isn?t it. It sounds open mouthed and breathless with wonder. Which makes it quite a good one to have emblazoned along the top of your debut novel.

Clare Morrall?s book is a colourful, breathtakingly simple work that infuses you to the core. Her writing style is eloquent, perfect in it?s pitch, and I?m not surprised for a second that this is (another) Booker shortlist nomination.

The story itself is a fairly basic one, but don't be fooled by that, it's the very simplicity of plot which lends it so well to such character development, and layers of emotion to be revealed.
Kitty Wellington is our narrator throughout, a scatty woman in her early thirties, the youngest of six children. I think first person narratives can sometimes be very weak, but not so here. Kitty?s mother and older sister Dinah have long since gone, leaving Kitty and her four brothers to be brought up by their painter father in a rambling old house in Birmingham. But for all this family around her, Kitty?s life is concerned with the holes. She is a ?lost child?, missing a mother, unable to be one herself. This deep seated grief that has not been dealt with pushes her into a stark depression, where she tries to fill in some of the gaps in her present life by making her past more solid, trying to construct a picture of the mother she doesn?t remember. Her quest is saddening, it?s clear that she is being told half truths, but what are the secrets being harboured in the dusty old house, to what pains has her father gone to paint a new life for everyone? Which of these secrets is it that leads to her feeling so isolated? It is the publication of Adrian?s novel, based on their family history, that starts to unwind some of the strands of the complicated web of lies that explain Kitty?s existance.

The sketches of the brothers, Adrian, Jake, Martin and Paul, are nicely done, we know only what Kitty knows. They all differ hugely in their motivat
ions, and characters, offering four different perspectives on the family and their dead mother. These are our ?lost boys? to complement the title of the book, taken from J M Barrie?s ?Peter Pan?.
It is Kitty?s relationship with Adrian?s wife and children that begins to uncover some of her hurt. Through this painful little episode near the start of the book we see inside her. After this point she spirals downwards, and her childless obsession grows, but she is never alone, even in the maddest of moments the unconventional relationship she has with her husband James is enviable, despite their inability to talk over their shared grief. Infact, all the characters are incredibly well drawn, their quirky natures shown to us in the most gentle of ways, never mocking, Morrall daubs them all with life.

Even at the most distressing points in this novel, where emotions are raw, Morrall has not succumbed to any false sentimentality, the prose pulls us through the inexplicable and the painful course of Kitty?s actions, but she is never belittled or judged. And even at her lowest points she remains human. The writing avoids being depressing or overly upsetting in part by the author?s fantastic use of colour in her words. Everything is described in colour, right down to emotions. It makes the words and the story shimmer off the page at you.

There are a lot of little twists and turns sewn into the novel, and once you get to them they seem obvious, but you only begin to guess them a few sentences before the truths are unveiled. Morrall has taken a simple story of family dynamics, the traditional fare of dark family secrets, and imbued it with such vividness, such thoroughly likeable characters, that the entire book grips you fervently. I read this in two evenings, oblivious to anything going on around me. I?m quite loathe to give you a thorough run through of the plot, because it would be so easy to ruin it, all I can say is that is it a beautiful work, rich a
nd completely absorbing, which makes it ridiculously easy to read. In parts sad, others funny and bewildering. Morrall makes you want the answers as much as Kitty.

Buy it. Read it. 100% recommended*


?Astonishing Splashes of Colour? by Clare Morrall RRP £7.99


*Booker judges, what do they know?!

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