The Opening Line
The very opening line of the novel is a metaphor:
“Clustered predators round a kill.”
The metaphor as misdirection. Gordimer is known as an African writer, although not one who writes about the continent’s savage bestial inhabitants. Nevertheless, the unconscious connection is likely made that African writer plus “clustered predators” equals lions or rhinos but not bears. In fact, these clustered predators are drivers expressing annoyance at the consequence of a car battery failing in a heavily trafficked spot. Worth mentioning: the story takes place several thousand miles from the nearest cluster of familiar African predatory beasts.
Sleepwalking to the Desert
Metaphors that reference the hypnotic effect of moving while under the influence of sleep is always an effective way to communicate mental and emotional states. The culture clash at the center of the narrative affords an extra layer of a sense of the off-kilter state in this case:
“She walked as a somnambulist slowly down the street to its end; the desert.”
Ramadan
Culture clash is also the impetus behind a metaphorical exemplification of the more mundane effects of an ancient religious ritual that remains a mystery to most of the world:
“Reaction to the span of the Ramadan day was exactly like the reaction” of jet lag upon the mind and body. Everything is familiar and not necessarily threatening, but nevertheless distorted and unsteady.
“A juggernaut thundering into the personality.”
This poetic turns of phrase is a metaphorical description of something more universally understood: the sudden overwhelming attraction between two people that has the power to lead to unwanted but hardly unavoidable consequences.
A Different World
Sophisticated western woman from an open society falls under the spell of sophisticated eastern man from a more rigorously patriarchal culture. Everything undergoes a change…for the woman. Subtly, the author critiques aspects of this authoritarian patriarchy through a scene at once touching and abhorrent:
“…she was amused to led, as across the road, like a child, to a shed with a door hanging hanging from one hinge. He stood outside with his back to her private need” which she conducts inside this new experience in simply going to the bathroom.
