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October 17, 2004
REVIEW: Are we all only half sane?
ASTONISHING Splashes of Colour by Clare Morrall is a different book. It does not deal with the usual topics of culture and history, thrill and mystery or romance and love. Rather, it attempts to address the conscious and subconscious mind to which we are all slaves. It is a sinister reminder of how, whether or not we admit it, we walk on the precipice between sanity and madness. It is about obsessions and compulsions and events which happen in people’s lives which pre-ordain their reactions. It is also, paradoxically, about control and helpless acceptance. Be prepared to take a thought provoking walk through the twisting alleys of the mind in an obstacle race of emotions, guilt, intense feelings and irrational behaviour.
The title takes its cue from Peter Pan’s “Neverland”. For Kitty, the protagonist, all her emotions are translated into colours, a symptom of synaesthesia. She sees children as yellow, her immaculately clean husband as white and her emotional artist father as red. She also has flashes of a psychedelic van that took her sister away. After the death of her only child she impulsively travels through her own world of colours as she tries to come to terms with her loss and searches for her lack of identity. She has no memory of her dead mother, her brothers are elusive, her sister is missing and her father is non-communicative. This distant nature of her family relations remains the foundation throughout of Kitty’s deep sense of insecurity and her longing for love and caring.
For much of the novel, we don’t know what has happened to Kitty, but we are immediately drawn to her. In the beginning she comes off as a crazy Birmingham woman who refuses to follow normal timetables. She roams around on buses for hours on end without a thought of any destination. Yet she is an intelligent woman who reviews children’s books and she is in great demand. All her actions are tinted by a strange obsession with children and her lack of memory about any appealing aspect of her own childhood. Like a child, her reactions to all situations and to people is instinctive and un-superimposed by pre-meditation. “I don’t feel grown up anymore. Somehow, since my move, my marriage, my loss, I seem to have gone backwards. I feel as if I’m the pet again, little, without forward drive.”
Yet, the backbone of this novel is the imposing personality of Kitty. She relates her story haphazardly while we follow her mood swings from the deepest depression to childlike joy. At times she is distant, while at others, too close for comfort. Yet one is much less angry with her than drawn to her. That is because she absorbs you so completely that it would be an absolute lie to deny your identification with her.
Without knowing her past Kitty cannot reconcile herself to the present. It seems her life has always been on hold. As a baby, even naming her was delayed for three years until the family cat died and she was named after her. No wonder Kitty has always been in a semi-detached relationship with the rest of the family. As the story unfolds, we realize, that although she is psychologically marred by her past and the death of her child, she is far from wrong about the psychological dysfunction of the rest of the family. “I’ve identified the emptiness inside me: I don’t know the smell of my mother I don’t think I’ve grown up. I don’t feel important enough I’m lost and nobody can guide me back to the right place, because there’s nobody who can give me what I most want,” Kitty is emotionally lonely.
Having said all that Astonishing Splashes of Colour is not a depressing novel. It is light-hearted while being an eye opener. While Kitty herself is enslaved in her trap of depression, the novel is not one of desperation. It is a valid search for the truth, even at the cost of re-opening old wounds which were never allowed to heal in the first place. Inspite of all the enveloping darkness, a certain childish innocence alleviates the gloom. Surely, it is this play between maturity and childishness which we suppress, but it is this that makes Kitty lovable and the reader compassionate towards her. So what if all the plots are not wrapped up nicely. Whoever said life could be outlined in neat packages!
Astonishing Splashes of Colour
By Clare Morrall
Tindal Street Press Ltd
ISBN 0954130324
327pp. £7.99
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