The Bad Guy
Imagery is used especially well to convey character in the novel. People are seen through the first-person narration of the protagonist so the additional element of perception is introduced. As is often the case, of course, perception can shift and alter as one learns additional information and contextual background about people:
“But the old man was the pick of the lot. He was sheer brain, icy, cool, calculating, as ruthless as a steam hammer. Now that my eyes were opened I wondered where I had seen the benevolence. His jaw was like chilled steel, and his eyes had the inhuman luminosity of a bird’s. I went on playing, and every second a greater hate welled up in my heart. It almost choked me, and I couldn’t answer when my partner spoke. Only a little longer could I endure their company.”
Anti-Semitism
The novel has faced charges of anti-Semitism, but this seems misplaced. True enough, there is a profoundly anti-Semitic character involved, but simply because the author has put words into a character’s mouth does not necessarily equate with holding those same opinions himself:
“For three hundred years they have been persecuted, and this is the return match for the pogroms. The Jew is everywhere, but you have to go far down the backstairs to find him…if you’re on the biggest kind of job and are bound to get to the real boss, ten to one you are brought up against a little white-faced Jew in a bath-chair with an eye like a rattlesnake. Yes, Sir, he is the man who is ruling the world just now, and he has his knife in the Empire of the Tzar, because his aunt was outraged and his father flogged in some one- horse location on the Volga.”
How to Fake Your Death
The narrator spins a yarn about how he faked his own death in order to explain some awkward details. The actual details would be even worse than the story of faking his death. One can glean from context just how awkward the truth must be:
“Then I got a corpse—you can always get a body in London if you know where to go for it. I fetched it back in a trunk on the top of a four-wheeler, and I had to be assisted up- stairs to my room. You see I had to pile up some evidence for the inquest. I went to bed and got my man to mix me a sleeping-draught, and then told him to clear out. He wanted to fetch a doctor, but I swore some and said I couldn’t abide leeches. When I was left alone I started in to fake up that corpse. He was my size, and I judged had perished from too much alcohol, so I put some spirits handy about the place. The jaw was the weak point in the likeness, so I blew it away with a revolver.”
British...a Little Too British
The key imagery in the entire book—more so than even the steps themselves—is that describing the goings-in in a typical English coastal village. Everything is exactly as it should be. Nothing is so out of sync that it could possibly raise suspicion. And that is exactly what makes the narrator so suspicious:
“Presently a third figure arrived, a young man on a bicycle, with a bag of golf- clubs slung on his back. He strolled round to the tennis lawn and was welcomed riotously by the players. Evidently they were chaffing him, and their chaff sounded horribly English. Then the plump man, mopping his brow with a silk handkerchief, announced that he must have a tub. I heard his very words—‘I’ve got into a proper lather,’ he said. ‘This will bring down my weight and my handicap, Bob. I’ll take you on tomorrow and give you a stroke a hole.’ You couldn’t find anything much more English than that.”
