Natural Flights of the Human Mind
By Clare Morrall
Sceptre
***

Reviewed by Manreet Sodhi Someshwar

Clare Morrall’s debut novel, Astonishing Splashes of Colour, made its way to the 2003 Man Booker Prize shortlist. While that was a spectacular feat, what caused a greater stir was the intriguing story behind it: Over a twenty-year writing period Ms. Morrall was rejected by 33 agents before her novel was picked up by a tiny Birmingham publisher. The novel told the story of an outlier, a lost girl-woman, negotiating the terrain of rejection and grief. Perhaps, this preoccupation with an ‘outsider’ figure comes naturally to Ms. Morrall. In her second novel, Natural Flights of the Human Mind, she takes up once again the lives of people who exist on the fringes – two misfits in perennial flight from their past are the protagonists in this curious love story.

Peter Straker is a recluse who lives in a decommissioned lighthouse situated on the eroding edge of a cliff in North Devon. His daily routine consists of jogging up and down the steps of the lighthouse, tempting death by balancing on the crumbling cliff edge, eating stale doughnuts and holding conversations with seventy-eight dead people.  Imogen Doody is an embittered school caretaker who comes into an inheritance that grants her a rundown cottage in Straker’s village. Her natural demeanour is one of hostility and she uses rudeness as a weapon in her daily battles with the world. Ms. Morrall deftly etches the initial encounter between the two as a crouching-on-her–rooftop-Doody is startled by the presence of a curious Straker. Incensed by the intruder who stands mute to her high-pitched interrogation, she hollers him out of her garden, tripping in the undergrowth during the chase, where she lies trapped until Straker retraces his footsteps to clinically examine her condition and laugh noiselessly while she, unable to break free, shouts, “idiot, fool, imbecile.”

Straker and Doody become unlikely partners in the renovation of the decaying cottage. In the process, Straker, who is known in the village as the man who “never talks” begins to hesitantly employ his vocal chords to hold succinct conversations and Doody, who “first discovered serious anger… with its life-giving intensity” starts to gradually abdicate her weapon of choice. A series of flashbacks serve to fill the gaps in the stories of the two and also hint at a possible link in the past.

The title of the novel is derived from a Samuel Johnson quote. And indeed ‘Flight’ is a leitmotif that runs parallelly through the lives of the two protagonists until the eventual dovetail in the last pages. A youthful, drunk Straker piloting his plane, on a foolish wager had attempted a dangerous dive and crashed into an oncoming train. His rich father, hounded by the media, sequestered him in the lighthouse where for twenty-five years Straker has been attempting a daily tabula rasa. Doody, a Biggles fan, is struggling to write a novel whose hero is a pilot who, suspiciously, resembles the husband who abandoned Doody after a brief marriage. Ms. Morrall portrays the two protagonists on the lam, tentatively circling each other as they close inwards, with sufficient brio. She treats the train-crash victims, who keep popping up through Straker’s mind and into the narrative, with refreshing vigour as they harangue, chastise, joke with him. The grief of the families devastated by the crash, whom Straker has been anonymously contacting to alleviate his guilt, is well etched: “Straker imagines a pyramid of people… old and shrivelled at the top, babies at the base, squirming, crawling, all of them looking for someone, aware of an emptiness at the centre.”

However, the numerous threads in the novel, including flashbacks, are not delineated by any markers, except for some italics, which renders the narrative bumpy. Even director Steven Soderbergh, with his oeuvre of lucidly quirky movies, in his successful film Traffic colour codes the different narratives for easier shifting of tracks. The writing is also hampered by self-conscious literary interrupts such as Straker’s prime number permutations with the figure of seventy eight.

As the novel progresses Doody discovers a cobwebbed Tiger moth as another element in her inheritance (though the mystery of the inheritance is never answered) and gets fixated on repairing it and taking flight. Straker vehemently opposes the plan. Meanwhile, the families of the crash victims are regrouping via the internet and arranging to ferret him out. The bipolar plane eventually does take flight as Ms. Morrall attempts most ambitiously to interlock the numerous threads into a final closure. However, she crash-lands in a comic caper reminiscent of Hugh Grant & Friends’ scramble in the closing scenes of the film Notting Hill. Surely, for people who have made a life of skirting to suddenly dash on centre-stage for an all-limbed tangle seems far-fetched? The bravura finale sticks out like a peacock’s plume on a largely subtle yet piquant tale of loss and love.