The Helper
Jeff Haggard is the Director of Programmed Planning for the BBC during World War II. An official title for Haggard might be crisis intervention director. His experience makes him the go-to guy to handle personnel difficulties. Also integral is his personality which finally brings him to the point of musing to himself that “Helping other people is a drug so dangerous that there is no cure short of total abstention.” This metaphorical representation of certain benevolent outward-directed tendencies illuminates how altruistic motives often originate as self-directed urges. The comparison of altruistic actions to drug use is an insight into how Haggard’s abilities to help others may be more elfish than it seems.
The Seraglio
An essential use of metaphor in the novel is the description of the central workplace in the story. “Inside Broadcasting House, the Department of Recorded Pro-grammes was sometimes called the Seraglio, because its Director found that he could work better when surrounded by young women.” A seraglio was the name given to the separate living quarters of the concubines and wives in the palace of an Ottoman sultan. The comparison here is ironic because a seraglio is by definition integrally related to sexual relationships whereas here it refers merely to one man working with many female assistants in a professional milieu.
The Helped
The character who benefits the most from Haggard’s seemingly incurable need to help others is the “sultan” in this seraglio. Sam Brooks is the Recorded Programmed Director and Haggard is both his immediate boss and personal crisis director. Their relationship so deeply defined Haggard’s interventions that Sam “continued like a sleepwalker, who never knows what obstacles are removed, and by what hands, from his path.” The metaphorical vision of Sam as a somnambulist focusing intensely on the task at hand without even the awareness of his own conscious detachment from his surroundings is a powerful image that effectively defines Sam’s reactive character.
Truth
As a strategy for covering the war, the BBC has adopted the guiding principle that telling the truth, no matter how harsh and demoralizing, takes precedence over consoling the nation. The narrator observes that “As an institution that could not tell a lie, they were unique in the contrivances of gods and men since the Oracle of Delphi.” The allusion made here is to the intermediary between the ancient gods and mortals which conveyed divinations of the future that were not always clear but always proved true. Metaphorical imagery is being used to suggest that telling the truth is always preferable to manipulation because the outcome is never known for sure, whether one lies for consolation or not.
The New Girl
The story is about what happens when the newest girl in the seraglio falls in love with Sam. Like him, Annie seems to be something of a savant when it comes to the precision of sound overlooked by most. Her talent was sharpened as a young girl by helping her father in his very detailed work as a piano tuner. “Sometimes the felts needed loosening, or even taken right off, to be damped and ironed in the kitchen or the church vestry. They smelled like wet sheep under the iron, and lying all together on the board they looked like green or red sheep.” This metaphorical language is effectively used as imagery to subtly connect the maturity of her tasks and the immaturity of her age.
