Fromans Folio: Astonishing Splashes of Colour

Astonishing Splashes of Colour
By: Clare Morrall
Published by: McClelland & Stewart

One of the great joys I've encountered over the past couple of months is that I have been able to start reading books again on a regular basis.

I've been drawn lately to memoirs and books on health, but Astonishing Splashes of Colour by Claire Morrall is a fictional romp through and through and I enjoyed it immensely.

As shallow as it sounds, I was initially taken with the cover of this book. I've shown it here but it's actually not the cover on the current edition. It was also a bargain at $3.99 and given that it was a nominee for the 2003 Man Booker prize, that was all the convincing I needed to pick it up.

I was at this time, however, deluding myself with the notion that if I purchased books they would somehow get read. Heh! This one languished on my shelf for a couple of years before taken with the notion for a good story, I picked it up.

The story centers on Kitty Wellington who has the condition Synaesthesia, which gives her the ability to see emotions as colours. Kitty lives and breathes the artistry of her own life, labelling periods of time as when she was "yellow" or "red". It's the loss of her child that tips her out of reality altogether and into a life of colours and characters that makes sense only to herself.

As breakdown approaches, she valiantly struggles to understand what is happening to her while at the same time trying to grapple with the fact that she is the square peg in the round hole of her family dynamics. It's only towards the end of the book that you find out why.

Astonishing Splashes of Colour is what I refer to as a "breadcrumb book." You get a trail of ideas and incidents, characters and conflict, a little here, a little there, and things gradually come together to create the entire picture. This creates a wonderful sense of momentum. At times, even though I was tired I simply couldn't put the book down until I'd read at least one more chapter.

I so enjoyed the descriptions of Kitty's family [her father in particular is a character custom made for Jim Broadbent if a movie version is ever made] and there are also wonderful interludes between Kitty and her husband James, a couple deeply in love but who live in separate apartments in the same building.

This book accomplishes the impossible: it makes you fall in love with a trainwreck. Even though you know Kitty is ultimately her own worst enemy, you still can't help but root for her and hope that somehow, she'll be saved from herself.

This is Clare Morrall's first published book. She'd actually been submitting for years before this book was picked up by a small publisher in her hometown. I'll definitely be looking forward to reading her other works.