Fog was so dense, bird that had been disturbed went flat into a balustrade and slowly fell, dead, at her feet. There it lay and Miss Fellowes looked up to where that pall of fog was twenty foot above and out of which it had fallen, turning over once.
The novel’s opening line—and for anyone hoping that things get any clearer or straightforward from this point on, the news is bad. This is not a novel that is impossible to understand; the word choice is relatively simple. Green is not one of those writers who inserts words no one ever uses or—even worse—mixes those with completely made-up words. But he is a writer who uses straightforward words to create sentences that demand work. And, it goes without say, constructs paragraphs from those sentences which doesn’t make things easier through context. The fog, the dead bird and Miss Fellowes all play a part in the story. To one degree or another.
She stood out as though so much health, such abundance and happiness should have never clothes to hide it. Indeed she looked as though she were alone in the world she was so good, and so good that she looked mild, which she was not. She put out her tongue and carefully examined this.
Here’s the good news. Even those critics who hold Green in the highest esteem admit that his meaning is not easily penetrated. The author expressed throughout his career a fervent resistance to making it easy on the reader to interpret his meaning. His modus operandi is to force the reader to do the work; the reader must become the interpreter of the characters themselves because his narrator is not going to adopt the traditional role of the mediator. In other words, if a reader wants to figure out exactly what a phrase like she was so good, and so good that she looked mild, which she was not” then they had better buckle down and figure it out or be satisfied with the ambiguity of wonder.
“But this journey is being so long, isn't it? I think I'm going out for a minute.”
Some lines of dialogue seem to work on two levels. There is the literal level in which Angela complains about the wait and then steps into the corridor to consider the possibility of packing up and heading home. But on another level, Angela seems to be addressing the reader as if breaking through the fourth wall. The commentary here can easily be applied to the act of reading the novel which takes twice as long as it should (or longer) because so many sentences really need to be perused more closely. Which can be exhausting. Which calls for a break. During which some readers may consider leaving the book shut and packing it in.
"I'm afraid everything must seem very odd to you. I mean there seems to be so much going on, but you see we are all going on a party together abroad, and now here we are stuck in this hotel on account of fog."
Here is another example of how dialogue can be interpreted in a meta-textual way. Ostensibly, Alex is explaining his situation at that moment to a complete stranger so that he does not get the wrong impression about what’s going on. But on a level lurking just below that superficial literal level but not so shallow as the characters themselves is the interpretation that it is to the reader that Alex is commenting. So that the reader does not get the wrong impression about what’s going on.
