Opening Lines
With the exception of a short prefatory section, the opening lines of the story take the form of the final entry in the logbook of the character of Marian Graves. Marian was a rival to Amelia Earhart who had the back luck to become the second famous aviatrix to go missing on her last flight:
“I was born to be a wanderer. I was shaped to the earth like a seabird to a wave. Some birds fly until they die. I have made a promise to myself: My last descent won’t be the tumbling helpless kind but a sharp gannet plunge—a dive with intent, aimed at something deep in the sea.”
In the North Atlantic
Unlike the previous example, most of Marian’s story in the book is told through a third-person objective narrative perspective. And the result is a far more literary utilization of the tool of imagery to lend a more vivid and visceral sense of experience to the story. This example occurs aboard a ship in the North Atlantic just World War I is breaking out in 1914:
“Josephina Eterna...A jeweled brooch on black satin. A solitary crystal on the wall of a dark cave. A stately comet in an empty sky. Below her lights and honeycombed cabins, below the men toiling in red heat and black dust, below her barnacled keel, a school of cod passed, a dense pack of flexing bodies in the darkness, eyes bulging wide though there was nothing to see. Below the fish: cold and pressure, empty black miles, a few strange, luminescent creatures drifting after flecks of food. Then the sandy bottom, blank except for faint trails left by hardy shrimp, blind worms, creatures who would never know such a thing as light existed.”
Walking in L.A.
The story of modern-day movie starlet Hadley Baxter, on the other hand, is conveyed through the first-person narration of the actress herself. Her sections of the story provide a lot of insight into the world of modern-may moviemaking and living in L.A. For instance, the sounds of the city may well be why, as the song asserts, nobody walks in L.A.
“It’s pit bulls barking through chain-link and Chihuahuas yapping behind screen doors and poodles snoozing on terra-cotta tiles. It’s blenders and grinders and juicers and hissing steel espresso machines the size of submarines...and water, so precious, splashing into fountains and pools and hot tubs and tall glasses on shaded patios, burbling from hoses and geysering from broken pipes. And underneath, there’s the hum of traffic, always there, like the ocean that lives in seashells, like the cosmic whoosh of the expanding universe.”
The Majesty of Flight
Ever make the mistake of falling into a conversation with a weekend pilot? Only takes about two minutes before it’s nothing but “the majesty of flight” stuff and how being free like a bird offers a unique perspective on everything below that really makes you think about eternity and stuff, you know? Sadly, the soul-crushing predictability of such conversations rarely take the sharp left turn into the genuinely philosophical nature of the following imagery:
“At the pole, the stars hover against the black of the universe. Below, a frozen ocean is lit by starlight and the thinnest paring of moon, its platinum surface pushed up into broken dunes, shadow rippling in the trenches between. Where the tides have tugged rips in the ice, narrow channels of open water breathe fog as they freeze over...a landscape so suffused with hush, so monochromatic and devoid of life.”
