The Opening
The opening scene of the novel is written with sensory input intended. The scene describes something which occurs often, giving us the sense of being there to witness just another normal thing day in the title figure’s life. But normalcy is soon to end: boy is coming down a flight of stairs.
“The passage is narrow and twists back on itself. He takes each step slowly, sliding himself along the wall, his boots meeting each tread with a thud. Near the bottom, he pauses for a moment, looking back the way he has come. Then, suddenly resolute, he leaps the final three stairs, as is his habit. He stumbles as he lands, falling to his knees on the flagstone floor.”
Country Girl Moves to the City
The woman known as Agnes—more famously known as Anne—is new to city life. Country living is the world she’s known. The differences seem minor, but this before city life becomes a death trap in the grip of epidemic:
"Here, in town, there are no fences to mend; there is no mud to clean off boots. Clothes do not acquire streaks of soil, hair, dung. No men return at midday, ravenous of appetite and cold of bone. There are no lambs to warm by the hearth, no beasts with colic or worm or foot-rot. There are no animals to feed, early in the morning...No sheep trying to escape through fences. No ravens or pigeons or woodcocks landing on the thatch and calling down the chimney."
The Sickness
Bubonic sickness is definitely not how you should hope to die. You would not wish such gruesomeness upon anyone but your worst enemy. And even such desires could wind up exiting revenge-filled minds upon actually seeing this sort of shelling off the mortal coil in person. Horrific stuff, indeed:
“He lurches upright, pulling the bedclothes with him, and makes two discoveries. His head is filled with pain, like a bowl brimful of scalding water. It is a strange, confusing kind of pain – it drives out all thought, all sense of action. It saturates his head, spreading itself to the muscles and focus of his eyes; it tinkers with the roots of his teeth, with the byways of his ears, the paths of his nose, the very shafts of his hair. It feels enormous, significant, bigger than him.”
Hamlet
The title sounds like Shakespeare’s most famous tragic figure for reason. Eventually, the Melancholy Dane does finally make an appearance in the story. But when he shows up, he is really nothing more than a foil for the wife of his creator, possibly invented solely for the purpose of driving her mad as the Lady married to the prickly Scot:
“…her attention is drawn by a boy walking on to the stage. A boy, she thinks, unknotting and reknotting her shawl. Then, no, a man. Then, no, a lad – halfway between man and boy. It is as if a whip has been snapped hard upon the skin. He has yellow hair which stands up at the brow, a tripping, buoyant tread, an impatient toss to his head…She fixes her gaze upon this boy; she stares and stares as if she may never look away from him. She feels the breath empty from her chest, feels the blood curdle in her veins.”
