Storytelling
Chapter One ends on with a paragraph of pure metaphorical poetry. The imagery captures the intensity of emotions within a major character while also giving insight into his psyche as a direct result of the metaphorical images.
“All the events of his life, all that he had told and not told, and more, much more, now that it had begun to stir and movie, which he was just beginning to recall, had been curled up in him like an old-man carpet snake. It was awake now. Lifting its blind head it was emerging coil on coil into the sun.”
Character Description, by George
Metaphor is a powerful tool for the writer when it comes to character description. A perfectly constructed simile or even a direct metaphor with a clarity of meaning can succeed in conveying what otherwise might take an entire paragraph or even a whole page to get across without the power of comparison. Take Sir George, for instance:
“Being escorted into a little western town of nine pubs and a butcher shop, by a party of two hundred stockmen, he seems himself riding in the company of attendant centaurs. Analogy is his drug. He finds it everywhere.”
Racism
Racism is, of course, a rampant theme throughout the narrative of the conflict between European settlers and indigenous Australian aborigines. One of the most interesting conceptualizations of the idea of racism is a metaphor used by outright racist Ned to describe Gemmy:
“He was a parody of a white man. If you gave im a word for a thing, he could, after a good deal of huffing and blowing, repeat it, but the next time roun you had to teach him all over again.”
Setting
Just as metaphor is a useful tool for describing character, so it is an efficient means of conveying setting. This can prove to be especially useful when a story is highly dependent upon being set in a specific rather than a story that could take place pretty much anywhere if not necessarily any time:
“Trees should out ribbons of tattered bar, and the smooth skin under it was palest green, streaked orange like a sunset, or it had the powdery redness of blood.”
Mrs. Hutchence
Mrs. Hutchence is one of those frontier women who seems to be just one thing, but reveals herself to have layers of complexity. That’s the signpost of a believable character which is satisfying for the reader, but maybe not so much all the time for the other characters:
“Though she had too much of the domestic about her to be a source of mystery, he could see quite well that she might present a puzzle.”
