A Metaphorical Opening
The novel commences upon a metaphorical image of a woman picking her way through plants. In another story or perhaps at another time in this story, this imagery would be benign or even joyful. But not this story and this not time. Not this morning.
“Marie Ursule woke up this morning knowing what morning it was and that it might be her last.
She had gathered the poisons the way anyone else might gather flowers, the way on gathers scents or small wishes and fondnesses.”
Time’s Memory
The author not long after the opening considers Marie in terms of being cosmically out of sync through connecting her long-dead memory to the distant offspring of her offspring. The metaphor here is a poetically resonant in this implication of time itself having a memory:
“In another century without knowing of her, because centuries are forgetful places, Marie Ursule’s great-great-grandchildren would face the world too.”
Character Description
The use of metaphorical imagery as a shortcut to delineating character using an economic of language is especially well exhibited in the case of redemption-seeking drug trafficker Carlyle. The quick repetition of the components of compulsion not only enlightens his personality, but reflects the nature of obsession:
“So this need to test love, to probe love, to break it open, to see how far it would, to examine it like the line of the horizon until it disappeared, was Carlyle’s possession.”
Of Lust and Occupations
One really quite terrific paragraph devoted to the illicit desires in which everything “was forbidden, just like a secret” is especially effective in its use of metaphor. Notice the connections the author makes between what the objects of her lust do for a living and what she wants them to do to her:
“She wanted the man who fixed ice-cream freezers to set his tools down and cool her. She wanted the seamstress to take her around her waist.”
Ever Wonder What Great Writing Looks Like?
The author demonstrates a mastery of figurative language that veers from the simple but efficient to the grandly poetic. One remarkable sentence roughly in the middle of the narrative, however, stands out above all. The language conveys both character and place in a vividly described and precisely controlled extension of a single symbolic idea:
“This was the heart of the world, he thought, palpable and brutal, sucking in blood and pumping it out callously without thought, just instinct, that was its only mission and he was a like a vein in it, hungry and just as ruthless.”
Wonder no more. That is what great writing looks like.
