Sound
The opening chapter—just a few pages in—the author flings the reader fully into the world of sound imagery to intensity the dramatic situation. Although the scene includes a naked man lying beside a pool so motionless it is possible he’s dead, the description is serene; a dragonfly buzzing around a garden outside a villa all self-contained within a private enclosure. Into this dreamlike setting arrives the blare of the real world and is through auditory imagery that the author delineates this intrusion:
“The drowsy luxurious silence of early afternoon was broken by the sound of a car coming down the road…the tinny clang of a car door being slammed and the car drove on. The door bell rang twice. The naked man beside the swimming pool did not move, but, at the noise of the bell and of the departing car, his eyes had for an instant opened very wide…noises were identified…small cruel lips opened in a wide jaw-breaking yawn which brought saliva into the mouth. The man spat the saliva into the grass and waited.”
Smell
By Chapter Nine, the sensory imagery has moved from what can be heard to what can be smelled. The imagery commences immediately and is so intensely focused that it actually draws attention to itself. Before the reader really gets much of a chance to question this decision, however, the answer is forthcoming. The imagery is purposely dense and highlighted because it leads inexorably to a singular purpose:
“Outside the anonymous, cream painted door, Tatiana already smelled the inside of the room. When the voice told her curtly to come in, and she opened the door, it was the smell that filled her mind…It was the smell of the Metro on a hot evening—cheap scent concealing animal odors. People in Russia soak themselves in scent, whether they have had a bath or not, but mostly when they have not, and healthy, clean girls like Tatiana always walk home from the office…to avoid the stench in the trains and the Metro. Now Tatiana was in a bath of the smell. Her nostrils twitched with disgust. It was her disgust and her contempt for a person who could live in the middle of such a smell that helped her to look down into the yellowish eyes that stared at her through the square glass panes.”
Feeling
The novel draws to a close on perhaps the second most shocking scene in the entire Bond canon: 007 in his death throes following a shocking assassination attempt. The final imagery of the novel depends heavily upon conveying the sense of feeling or, to be more precise, the draining away of that sense ability:
“Numbness was creeping up Bond's body. He felt very cold. He lifted his hand to brush back the comma of hair over his right eyebrow. There was no feeling in his fingers. They seemed as big as cucumbers. His hand fell heavily to his side. Breathing became difficult. Bond sighed to the depth of his lungs. He clenched his jaws and half closed his eyes, as people do when they want to hide their drunkenness…Now he had to gasp for breath. Again his hand moved up towards his cold face…Bond felt his knees begin to buckle.”
Imagery as Foreshadow
As opposed to the extensive extended imagery described above, one particularly important use of the technique has a more specific focus and is purposely not lingered upon. Possessions belonging to the naked man by the pool in the opening scene take make up the bulk of the fourth paragraph: money clip, lighter, gold cigarette case and a novel by P.G. Wodehouse. Half the paragraph, however, is given to describing in a more detailed manner one more item: a Girard-Perregaux wristwatch which tells not just the time, but the month, day and even the phase of the moon on that date. It is the last feature that transforms the wristwatch from mere description into significant imagery though the full extent of that significance will not be made clear for some time.
