A Hard Knock Life
The father of the protagonist, Jim, is kept at arm’s length by the son because he possesses a certain sort of savagery. Jim’s father in one of those “in my day” kinds of older people who isn’t shy about confessing the details of his hard life:
“I was sent out to work at age ten by my old man. Put to the plough like a bloody animal.”
This is Brackish?
At one point, the author provides a description of brackish water with a poetry that this usually foul-smelling mixture of salt and fresh water doesn’t usually deserve:
“Sometimes, when Ashley Crowther had a party of friends down for the weekend…Jim would take them out in a flat-bottomed boat…over brackish water, its depths the color of brewed tea, its surface a layer of drowned pollen inches thick in places, a burnished gold.”
Distance Between Father and Son
The tension between father and son is partially explained through the use of a simile when it is revealed that Jim”
“resented the cowardly acceptance of defeat that made his father feel this changes in his fortune as a personal affront.”
The Book
The great pleasure in Jim’s early life is watching birds and recording each name in what he calls the Book. Taking this accounting quite seriously, he believes that:
“giving the creature, through its name, a permanent place in the world.”
The War
What will eventually come to be known as World War I is only a few days, not long enough for Jim to have even considered enlisting until it was brought up by someone else. Already, at that point, suffers a strange dislocation in time and geometry and in a state of panic sees clearly what is coming:
“It was as if the ground before him, that had only minutes ago stretched away to a clear future, had suddenly tilted in the direction of Europe, in the direction of events, and they were all now on a dangerous slope.”
