Written Accounts
Central to the book in many ways that reach across many characters and subplot is a text called The Book of Records. It is important not just literally, but thematically. Which is to say, the idea of keeping a book that is a written account of history. The aged bookstore owner puts the idea that written accounts are not always necessary in to poetic imagery:
“The things you experience are written on your cells as memories and patterns, which are reprinted again on the next generation. And even if you never lift a shovel or plant a cabbage, every day of your life something is written upon you. And when you die, the entirety of that written record returns to the earth. All we have on this earth, all we are, is a record. Maybe the only things that persist are not the evildoers and demons (though, admittedly, they do have a certain longevity) but copies of things. The original has long since passed away from this universe, but on and on we copy. I have devoted my minuscule life to the act of copying.”
Descriptive Imagery
Not all memorable uses of imagery in the book is put to such philosophical purposes and intent. In fact, a good deal of the most effective use of this particular literary technique is put to the simple service of describing action. Description with a flair, that is:
“The sky was so white, as if all colours had been sheared away, there were paper flowers in the trees and on the ground, on the coats of everyone around them, and the air smelled not of dust but of a rich and mouth-watering broth. Along the road, families were sitting down to lunch. Faced with this immovable congestion, Sparrow finally dismounted and they began walking, conspicuously, against the flow of the crowd. She and her father were completely out of tune with the moment.”
The Freedom of Sound
Music is so essential to this novel that it comes with a playlist recommended by the author. It is not merely music that is of interest to the author, however. Music is merely vibration; just different sounds strung together in a pleas order. It is sound itself that is the real focus of the attention to imagery:
"Inside Sparrow, sounds accumulated. Bells, birds and the uneven cracking of the trees, loud and quiet insects, songs that spilled from people even if they never intended to make a noise. He suspected he was doing the same...The hiss of small, soldering devices crackled in his ears, the same tired jokes, the same clanking and capacitors, resistors and minuscule shunts, the high-pitched pain in his hands, the sly meetings and self-criticism sessions, the repeated slogans like a knife sharpened to dullness: sound was alive and disturbing and outside of any individual’s control. Sound had a freedom that no thought could equal because a sound made no absolute claim on meaning.”
Sight and Sound
So deeply does the focus on sound penetrate into the very fabric of the narrative that it even inspires philosophical thoughts about sight. Sparrow, as the above example shows, is a character especially attentive to the nature of sound and thus especially subject to hearing it ways that move beyond the real of mere listening pleasure:
“He’d been thinking about the quality of sunshine, that is, how daylight wipes away the stars and the planets, making them invisible to human eyes. If one needed the darkness in order to see the heavens, might daylight be a form of blindness? Could it be that sound was also be a form of deafness? If so, what was silence?”
