Animal to Human Comparisons
One of the recurring types of imagery in the novel is the comparison of humans to animals. This is the opposite of personification in which human attributes are given to non-humans and it makes a lot of sense considering the topic is human interference in the natural world of creatures around us.
“She was in that moment reduced to an animal, nothing more, and her focus was an animal’s focus, her mind stripped of everything but that barrel and its contents, and she never felt the fragmented stone of the path digging into her feet or the weight of the sun crushing her shoulders, never thought of who might be watching her in her nakedness or what that might mean, till she reached it and plunged her face into its depths and drank till she could feel the cool silk thread coming back up again.”
Action Scenes
Boyle is not really known as an action writer. Not in the sense of writing stories that driven by action rather than thought or theme or character. And yet he has long proven himself capable of rising to the occasions whenever the story demands it. Imagery really brings to vivid tangibility the sheer horror of what is happening in the action surrounding this passage:
“He was a blotch of yellow in a world stripped of color, there one moment and gone the next, a big breaching wave flinging him back against the cabin door and pouring half an ocean into the rictus of the engine well. Till snatched a look at her then, his face drained and hopeless. Warren, the figure of Warren, flailing limbs and gasping mouth, slammed at the window and rose impossibly out of the foam, the slicker twisted back from his shoulders—inadequate, ridiculous, a child’s jacket, a doll’s”
Tactile Response
The tactile qualities of heat and cold are engaged to create a portrait of waking up on a beach. It should be noted, of course, that this is not merely a case of falling asleep while seeking a golden tan, but of arriving at the beach after a desperate bid for survival. Such conditions intensify the conditions of tactile response:
“She’d been in the shadows all this time, huddled on her perch, tucked away from the tidal wash and the sun too, but now the sun had moved out into the channel and the heat of it touched her and roused her. For a long while she sat there, absorbing the warmth, and if she was sunburned it didn’t matter a whit because she’d rather be burned than frozen, burned anytime, scorched and roasted till she peeled, because anything was better than the cold locked up inside her, a numbness so deeply immured in her she might as well have been a corpse.”
Elementary Deduction
Sherlock Holmes uses imagery. He observes and detects and deduces and concludes based on his sensory input. Deduction becomes a matter of using all the available and necessary senses for this process of observation. The result is something very close to what a character who is not Sherlock does here:
“The empty cans...lay at her feet. She sank down on the cot, pulling the rough blanket tight round her throat, and saw…that the walls were papered over with full sheets torn from magazines, from Life and Look and the Sunday rotogravure. Pinups gazed back at her, men perched on tanks, Barbara Stanwyck astride a horse. A man lived here, she decided, a man lived here alone. A hermit. A fisherman. Someone shy of women, with whiskers like in the old photos of her grandfather’s time.”
