Fantasy as Reality
Throughout the entire first half of the story, Eleanor is operating under a subconsciously constructed fantasy that she treats as entirely realistic. She is willing to recognize the unlikelihood of it all, but the delusion self-construction persistently eludes her ability to think things out logically. The authority over which this fantasy of Johnnie Lomond inevitably coming to rescue her from her life of loneliness and isolation exerts control over her ability to see things rationally:
“Why him? Why now? On Monday morning, waiting at the bus stop, I tried to work it out. It was a tricky one. Who can understand the workings of fate, after all? Far greater minds than mine had tried, and failed, to arrive at a conclusion. There he was, a gift from the gods—handsome, elegant and talented.”
Talking to Polly
Those who feel self-conscious about talking to themselves are often stimulated to get a pet. After all, talking to animal carries none of the question of mental instability associated with people who talk to themselves. Eleanor doesn’t have a pet bird, but she’s got a Congo cockatoo plant named Polly. This puts her somewhere in the middle of the spectrum:
“When the silence and the aloneness press down and around me, crushing me, carving through me like ice, I need to speak aloud sometimes, if only for proof of life.”
The Fire
There is a half-explained trauma from Eleanor’s path lurking like a shadow as the narrative tracks her movement across the pages. The fire consumed his younger sister as well as half of Eleanor’s face and most of her heart and soul:
“Even the circus freak side of my face—my damaged half—was better than the alternative, which would have meant death by fire. I didn’t burn to ashes. I emerged from the flames like a little phoenix.”
The Poet and the Arse
That fantasy of Johnnie Lomond is all the more tragic because he doesn’t deserve her. Which, though he will know it, she finally discovers in a heartbreaking scene of fantasy crumbling and then rebuilding. He doesn’t deserve her because though he is the songwriter, she has the soul of the poet as demonstrated here when she stealthily stands out just outside the door of his apartment, that soul stimulated by the sound of his singing voice as moved to poetic thoughts:
“I pictured a sky. It was blue black, soft and dense as fur. Across and over the expanse of night, into the velvet depths of it, light was scattered, enough for a thousand darknesses. Patterns revealed themselves; the eye, exquisitely dazzled, sought out snail-shell whorls and shattered pearls, gods and beasts and planets.”
Mummy Dearest
The conversations between Mummy and Eleanor are exercises in sado-masochistic depravity. That’s clear enough from a first reading. But this is a book that mandates a second look, a re-reading in which everything is reformed and re-interpreted by information a reader does not possess the first time. The following metaphor, for instance, seems like it could not possibly be more any horrific and yet, it actually is:
“Oh wait, Mummy—hang on a second. You said there were two things—what was the second thing you were thinking about?”
“It was just that I wanted to tell you that you’re a pointless waste of human tissue. That was all. Bye then, darling!” she said, bright as a knife.”
