Love at First Sight
The title story is about a first love and the descriptive recollection by the narrator of a certain girl seems to suggest that it is also a story about love at first sight. After all, unless there is some sort of deeper emotion at work, how often does one recollect with such intense metaphorical imagery:
“Jackie was blonde and boyish and golden in those days. One day I had simply seen her, she was sitting on the school wall by the main door and I had thought she looked like she was surrounded with yellow light, like she had been gently burnt all over with a fine fire.”
Setting
Setting is important to a number of the stories throughout this collection. One particularly memorable example engages creates a vivid image of a tempest approaching over water:
“A storm was coming up off the sea, a wad of darkness overhead like the sky was wearing a black hood; the pier and the town had turned grey.”
To be in England
References to film, movies and the craft of cinema pervade the narratives. Even when the story or metaphorical reference isn’t really directly tied to a particular film—which is a circumstance repeated often—the imagery reflects upon the perceptual nature of filmmaking:
“This was a very different England from home, like a foreign country really. Even the weather felt like abroad or like it wasn’t real. Like a pretend place put for a film, all the buildings constructed so people could film a story about history or really rich people.”
Understatement
The story titled “The Unthinkable Happens to People Every Day” is a persistent exercise in ironic understatement. The title seems to promise something lurid or sinister—certainly at the very least something dramatic—but none of that actually applies. Even the introductory simile figuratively working as the introduction of one main character to another pursues this incessant them of downplaying things:
“Further down the beach a child was crouched like a frog on the stones, her hair hanging”
“A Story of Folding and Unfolding”
Technically speaking, in this story, women’s underwear is itself the controlling metaphor of this story. But there is a particularly elegant specific use of metaphor within the story that is worthy of attention and merit. It ranks as one of the most elegiac examples of simile in the entire collection:
“He pulls gently and a petticoat disarranges itself, coming away in his hand and knocking the underwear out of harmony as he takes it out and it falls away form his hand like liquid, like light.”
