FictionKitty has more than her share of problems. The youngest in a family of four sons who were almost grown before she was born, all of whom are dominated by a shouting, screaming artist father and the ghost of a mother that died and appears to have vanished, she also has to contend with an absent older sister.
Then there is her most recent loss, her baby son and that she can have no further children.
The facts are tragic, and the reality also includes marriage to James, himself a bit of an oddity. They appear a curiously united, if physically detached couple - they live in adjoining flats. This unconventional flourish nearly makes sense, after all James is neurotically tidy and Kitty is not.
Clare Morrall allows Kitty to tell her own story, in her way, detailed, self absorbed, naive and oddly likeable. The oddness is important. It brings its own set of complications: after all, she is clearly disturbed and attends therapy. As the novel opens she is staking out her favourite beat, the local school where children gather and play and are all eventually collected, by their parents.
From the very beginning, the story is firmly set in the world of obsessions. Loss is Morrall's theme and her variation of the various forms of innocence and truth acts as a path that leads on to notions of justice and individual rights. Kitty seems to have been lost all her life in a family of equally lost and peculiarly remote individuals.
There is a difference: whereas Kitty relentlessly pursues her version of the truth and is constantly seeking answers, her father and her brothers prefer to keep reality at a distance.
The narrative has a lopsided clarity, developing as it does through the intense and chaotic perceptions of a narrator who is overwhelmed by events and propelled by her righteous sense of logic and justice.
Kitty starts out as a sympathetic character and quickly becomes a rather terrifying one. Morrall makes clear that her narrator, though past 30, remains trapped in a childhood that never ended. It seems Kitty's only hope of escaping her perennial childhood lay in having a child. Her job as a publisher's reader and reviewer of children's fiction compounds this and one of her brothers is an established children's author.
Astonishing Splashes of Colour almost succeeds through its narrator's intense and very human chaos.
As a narrative it is not particularly confessional; Kitty is more engaged with trying to make sense, or at least sufficient sense of things, that will help her on her way. She wants a mother, she could want a sister, she thinks she needs a child.
The darker implications of much of the book could set a multitude of alarm bells running in many minds. Kitty is both harmless and dangerous. She is not a victim, merely someone who happened to be in a particular place for much of her life before adult realities and medical misfortune took over. Morrall sustains Kitty's voice and with it a sequence of improbable behaviour.
One of the best set-pieces occurs when Kitty decides to confront Suzy, her career-minded sister-in-law about a pregnancy she may or may not be having. It spins between the absurd and the tragic. Even more skilful is the episode in which James and Kitty almost travel by air to New York only to discover on being seated that James has never dealt with his fear of flying.
Throughout the novel, Kitty sees life as a sequence of colours and contrasts. Her mother's story shifts from the romance of myth to the squalor of reality.
Two of the major plot twists will be spotted from early on in the book and when Kitty finally steals a baby, the effort is so half-hearted as to be almost comic. When it comes to taking a child, Kitty is instead taken by a child.
References to children's literature are frequent and Morrall makes effective use of J.M.Barrie's classic, Peter Pan, for more than the title: Kitty's angry father and brothers are repeatedly seen as lost boys.
On many levels, Astonishing Splashes of Colour is a study in the way childhood is both sanctuary and prison. The novel possesses blunt intelligence and candour to make it read as an Iris Murdoch novel without the intellectual pretension, fey sexuality and overwriting. Kitty is both sane and crazy, her hurts and losses make her perceive everything through a chaotic clarity.
Ultimately, it is this chaotic clarity that makes the book readable. True, it is too long and the use of the pyromaniac child leaves the narrative floundering between a child's adventure tale and a conventional narrative.
Perhaps Morrall intentionally presents Kitty and James as a dysfunctional Babes in the Wood? But this proves more a weakness than clever device. The clumsy juxtaposing of children and adults, the child's viewpoint with that of a disturbed adult, is not fully pursued.
Perhaps Kitty is not quite crazy enough, perhaps she thinks too clearly. This blurring of the lines is not as convincing as it could have been. Still, the flashes of humour and the very human mess Morrall has created draws the reader along.
Here is a very unEnglish English novel. But for once, class and society is irrelevant. Instead, it is the territory of individual nightmares and the spoken dialogue effectively conveys the volumes left unsaid. A group of characters simply try to survive and in order to do so, truth is bent to suit respective needs.
Much has been made of Clare Morrall's first published novel - she has already written four that were rejected - making the Booker shortlist. Also there is the irritating media presentation of her as "a 51-year-old Birmingham music teacher", as if her writing a novel should be viewed as a novelty.
This is a good, solid performance as well as an interesting exploration of exactly how frightening someone else's fears and needs can become.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Astonishing Splashes of Colour By Clare Morrall Tindal Street Press, 327pp, £7.99
