Away From the Submarine

What do you think of when you see yellow? What emotions does it stir in you? I believe that color can have a strong, but often unnoticed impact on our moods and emotions. This is why I have chosen a few paragraphs from my favorite book, Astonishing Splashes of Colour, by Clare Morrall. This is the author’s first publication, and was a Man Booker Prize finalist in 2003. This novel (especially in the excerpt I have provided) offers a perfect sprinkling of symbolism by color, an awesome balance of description, key word choices to draw the audience in, and subtle hints of an analogy.
Allow me to introduce you to Kitty, a thirty-something reviewer of children’s books who is married, but fills her lonely days feeding her obsession to replace her lost son. In the opening of this book, Kitty is passively participating in the “quintessential act of motherhood,” as she sees it, which is the dismissal of children from a school. At the closing of this paragraph, we are introduced to yellow. The first sentence of the next paragraph clearly states that this color is used to symbolize optimism. At the end of the seventh paragraph, it is likened to vomit, symbolizing a distasteful situation. When describing the fat little boy, he is wearing yellow and black, like a bumblebee about to take flight, with red cheeks.
Colors are not the only adjectives used in these vivid descriptions. The picture in Kitty’s mind of breakfast in the kitchen creates a striking still frame with the wooden table, gingham curtains, firm round arms, tangled hair, Coco Pops and milk. This scene gains a quiet life when they “ask for chocolate biscuits in their lunchboxes.”
There is a subtle analogy between Kitty’s estrangement with the other parents, and even her own concepts of children and adults. She views a child as more of an individual, but the parents as an “all-embracing yellow mass.” They are yellow like “the” submarine. The yellow submarine that comes to my mind is the one depicted in the famous song by the Beatles in the 1960s. Compare the “all-embracing yellow mass” to the self contained, comrade-like environment of the crew on the underwater vessel, somewhere far away from the hometown (Kitty?). As the song goes; “We all live in a yellow submarine….Everyone of us is all we need/sky of blue/sea of green.”
In the second paragraph, the children are described with detail so that you can see them in you mind, yet the mums (note the plural form) are added almost as an afterthought in half a sentence. Again, in the fifth paragraph, the mother is allowed only half a sentence; the boy is given the other three and a half sentences. Even though she is considered an adult, Kitty’s brain functions in a child-like way. When she does mention the adults, it is with a certain sadness. The mums and dads are yellow like the sun, but it is a deception. The sun is not yellow, she insists. So then are the parents and their happiness also a deception?
This deception becomes even clearer in the last paragraph. The mother whom Kitty is talking to pretends not to mind and walks miserably away.
Also note how, for the most part, sentences in this excerpt with a happier emotion are composed longer than those conveying a sadder, more negative setting. For example; “There’s a picture in my mind of morning in a kitchen, the sun shining past yellow gingham curtains on to a wooden table, where children sit and eat breakfast,” as opposed to “I like the pointlessness of it all,” “She chose the wrong person,” or “The yellow is changing.”
Clare Morrall’s use of color adds a refreshing life to this story. As Kitty moves through time, you can almost see her advancing through shades of color as well. Rays of yellow surround, and out glow her. The author really draws you in without you realizing it. You almost can’t help feeling sorry for Kitty; a fragile woman trying to fulfill her need to be a mother by waiting for her absent child to come running out of the school with open arms. She is trying to avoid any more attachments or loss: “….the sense of going on indefinitely, without ever falling off.” She is afraid of losing something, she wants everything to be ok.