Smell
Imagery is pervasive throughout the novel. In fact, one might also describe it as a story built upon the foundations of imagery. One ripe example is two paragraphs—one long, one short—that the narrative constructs as levels of imagery appealing to reader’s sense of smell:
“From beyond the front door my nose is twitching, I can smell her coming down the hall towards me. She is a perfumier of sandalwood and hops. I want to uncork her. I want to push my head against the open wall of her loins. She is firm and ripe, a dark compound of sweet cattle straw and Madonna of the Incense. She is frankincense and myrrh, bitter cousin smells of death and faith.
When she bleeds the smells I know change colour. There is iron in her soul on those days. She smells like a gun.”
Taste
A passage constructed upon imagery related to the sense of taste takes a slightly offbeat path. It is densely packed with associates of tasting, but not in the conventional sense. It is precisely this unconventional tweaking of taste imagery from which the narrative derives an understated power:
“The potatoes, the celery, the tomatoes, all had been under her hands. When I ate my own soup I strained to taste her skin. She had been here, there must be something of her left. I would find her in the oil and onions, detect her through the garlic. I knew that she spat in the frying pan to determine the readiness of the oil. It’s an old trick, every chef does it, or did. And so I knew when I asked her what was in the soup that she had deleted the essential ingredient. I will taste you if only through your cooking.”
Love in the Shadows
The excitement, boredom and paranoia of a forbidden love are all captured succinctly through the use of imagery. The path from awareness of prying eyes to the fate that connects them together are traced in a short series of punctuated impressions:
“We daren’t eat out, who knows whom we may meet? We must buy food in advance with the canniness of a Russian peasant. We must store it unto the day, chilled in the fridge, baked in the oven. Temperatures of hot and cold, fire and ice, the extremes under which we live.
We don’t take drugs, we’re drugged out on danger, where to meet, when to speak, what happens when we see each other publicly. We think no-one has noticed but there are always faces at the curtain, eyes on the road. There’s nothing to whisper about so they whisper about us.
Turn up the music. We’re dancing together tightly sealed like a pair of 50s homosexuals.”
Colors
Colors are always a popular source for imagery. The why should be rather obvious: there are plenty of the and when shades and hues and those made-up gradations found in the paint department of home stores, the writer is given an almost infinite number of possibilities:
“Those days have a crystalline clearness to me now. Whichever way I hold them up to the light they refract a different colour. Louise in her blue dress gathering fir cones in the skirt. Louise against the purple sky looking like a Pre-Raphaelite heroine. The young green of our life and the last yellow roses in November. The colours blur and I can only see her face. Then I hear her voice crisp and white. `I will never let you go.’”
