Natural Flights of the Human Mind

Book Review

Clare Morrall

Clare Morrall's sophomore novel, Natural Flights of the Human Mind, explores the surprising connection between two eccentric strangers.

Peter Straker lives alone in a lighthouse on the Devon coast, a strange man who is plagued in his dreams and waking thoughts by seventy-eight mysterious voices. Imogen Doody is the cantankerous caretaker of a primary school some miles from the coast, a woman with few pleasures, the greatest of which is inciting anger in other people. Doody inherits a cottage in the Devon village near Straker's lighthouse.

Straker lives a routine existence, carefully crafted to require the least possible human contact. It is as if he needs all of his faculties to manage his omnipresent internal voices. On the day that Doody arrives in town and climbs onto the roof of her cottage to inspect her dubious roof tiles, Straker heads into town on his weekly trip for provisions. As fate would have it, just as Straker passes the cottage, Doody slips and falls from the roof in an undignified heap on the ground, twisting her ankle under a wayward tree root. Doody, of course, imperiously demands help from him, and is rewarded with uproarious laughter – probably the first audible sound Peter has uttered in weeks.

From this point on, Straker and Doody are inexplicably tied together, and craft and awkward sort of friendship. Doody forces Straker to communicate, and because Straker refuses to cooperate with Doody's repeated attempts to antagonize him, he earns her grudging respect. In time, Straker begins to help Doody repair her crumbling cottage.

As the novel progresses, we learn that Peter's voices are actually passengers on a train that crashed, something for which he feels personally responsible. Not only does he communicate with the dead, he also sends letters to the loved ones of the deceased, under various guises – completing a survey, writing a book to honour the dead, etc. We also learn of Doody's desire to be a novelist and of her obsession with old airplanes.

They make a strange pair, Straker and Doody, and yet they do form a strong bond as they haltingly learn how to become friends.

Clare Morrall proved her writing talent with her debut novel, Astonishing Splashes of Colour, and this novel is certainly accomplished. It appears that Morrall has avoided the dreaded sophomore slump. Morrall's writing is brisk and energetic, and her eccentric characters slowly endear themselves to the reader. It is an enjoyable novel, however it does not stand out in comparison with some of the brilliant new literary novels released in 2006.

“Doody first discovered serious anger at the age of eighteen, when it hit her like a surge of electricity and shocked her with its life-giving intensity. It had changed the nature of her existence. It had woken her up, made her think better. Now she has learned how to let it grow from a tiny pinpoint of light to a full-grown open fire, greedily hunting around for more fuel to burn. From the first moment when the spark ignites, a fierce excitement takes root inside her because she can feel something.

She knows that she irritates people by automatically taking the opposite view from them, but she is waiting for the moment of self-belief, the rush of adrenaline that tells her she's right and they're wrong, that she's indestructible. She doesn't drink and she's never taken drugs because she can't see the point. They give an artificial high. Why bother when you can have the real thing?”