The Disappeared
The Prologue of this novel promises that it will be about those who disappear. The opening lines remind the reader that every single day somebody somewhere just seems to vanish off the face of the earth. Metaphor-rich examples are included:
“Young girls run away from home. Young children stray from their parents and are never seen again. Housewives reach the end or their tether and take the grocery money and a taxi to the station. International financiers change their names and vanish into the smoke of imported cigars.”
Pop Culture
For a thousand years or more, literature used metaphor based on allusions to ancient myth. For the past hundred years—give or take—those mythic figures have slowly but aggressively been replaced by modern myth. Otherwise known as pop culture references:
“The vicar leaned close, speaking out of the side of his mouth like a gangster in an American film.”
The Library
Of significance is a library found in a Franciscan monastery. It is an impressive sight. And the quality of that impression is conveyed through metaphorical imagery:
“Overall, the library held a hushed exultation, as though the cherished volumes were all singing soundlessly within their covers.”
Narration
The use of metaphor in first-person narratives is a tricky thing. If the imagery gets a little too poetic, it may undermine the believability of a less than poetic narrator. In this case, that problem does not really apply:
“Despair dragged at me like an anchor, pulling me down. I closed my eyes and retreated to some dim place within, where there was nothing but an aching grey blankness, and where the sound of Murtagh's voice, still arguing, was no more than a faint yapping.”
Setting
The simile is the go-to form of figurative language for describing setting. At least, it certainly seems that way. And it most definitely is that way in this novel:
“Snow fell the next day. Only a light fall, enough to dust the ground with a white like the flour on the millhouse floor, but it worried me.”
