Whats the sea as a metaphor and part of the plot development?

The opening line of the novel is a metaphor:

“The sea has many voices.”

And it doesn’t end there. The opening line is just the stage-setter. The first three paragraphs—relatively short, but no one-sentence wonders here—move on from that opening to become a veritable flood of metaphor-laden imagery. The effect of pouring this much poetry into the opening page of a novel can mean only two things: the rest of the book will be almost completely metaphor-free or that opening is a foreshadowing of much more to come.