Setting
Imagery is effectively used throughout to bring a visceral quality to the setting. In a novel, setting is especially important to bring to life in order create an overall sensory awareness of the environment in which the story plays out. Perhaps paradoxically, it can often be even more important to use imagery effectively in the more mundane descriptions of setting than in the otherworldly:
“It began to snow. The low clouds made a grey ceiling for the city; the snow muffled the noise of the cars until it became almost rhythmical; a steady, shushing noise, like the sound of tides beating endlessly on marble walls.”
The Otherworldly
And this example effectively demonstrates the why of the above assertion. Long before the description gets to a city in the snow, imagery has been put to use describing things that are definitely not mundane. The juxtaposition of the mundane with the strange becomes clear and the reader isn’t made to feel comfortable traversing the mundane, it becomes easy to simply get lost in the weird:
“I climbed up the Western Wall until I reached the Statue of a Woman carrying a Beehive, fifteen metres above the Pavement. The Woman is two or three times my own height and the Beehive is covered with marble Bees the size of my thumb. One Bee – this always gives me a slight sensation of queasiness – crawls over her left Eye.”
Dreamworld
In a narrative in which much of the text seems to be describing a dream, it can be kind of a shock to the system to actually have a dream described. And in a book like this, if imagery is used to describe a dream, then it had darn well better stand out from the dreamlike imagery used to describe the non-dreaming parts:
“Last night I dreamt that I was standing in the fifth northern hall facing the statue of the gorilla. The gorilla dismounted from his plinth and came towards me with his slow knuckle-walk. He was grey-white in the moonlight; and I flung my arms around his massive neck and told him how happy I was to be home.”
The Labyrinth
References to a rather ambiguous concept called the labyrinth recur throughout the novel. This recurrence of imagery describing the labyrinth is the closest the reader ever gets to a straight up explication of its reality. The imagery is, itself, like a kind of maze that must be followed with breadcrumbs at the ready:
“…the labyrinth plays tricks on the mind. It makes people forget things. If you’re not careful it can unpick your entire personality…You never forget anything about the labyrinth…If you ever see someone in the labyrinth – someone you don’t know – I want you to promise me that you won’t try to speak to them. Instead you must hide. Keep out of their way. Don’t let them see you.”
