Genre
Science Fiction / Conspiracy Thriller / Suspense
Setting and Context
Present-day in several locales including San Francisco, Arlington, Virginia, and Broken Hill, Australia.
Narrator and Point of View
Third-person point of view from the perspective of an omniscient speaker.
Tone and Mood
Offbeat, Dark, Suspenseful
Protagonist and Antagonist
Protagonist: Emily and Wil Antagonist: The poet named Virginia Woolf
Major Conflict
The conflict in the narrative is the persuasion wars that have already devastated a town in Australia. Both Wil and Emily are caught in this secretive world of mind control languages and the art of persuasion as their lives and destinies converge.
Climax
The climax of the novel occurs when Emily falls in love despite the rule in the school that forbids emotional attachment.
Foreshadowing
The fast-paced opening which involves Wil being kidnapped foreshadows the conspiracy and violence within the secret organization of poets.
Understatement
“I don’t know who you think I am, or why you stuck a . . . a thing in my eye, but I’m nobody. I promise you I’m nobody.”
Wil understates his significance to the poets yet he serves an integral role in the persuasion wars that he is still unaware of.
Allusions
The novel alludes to the Biblical story of The Tower of Babel in which God muddles the sole language by creating different languages to prevent the people from building the tower. Through new names that the poets adopt the narrative references famous literary figures such as T S Eliot, W B Yeats, Sylvia Plath, and Virginia Woolf.
Imagery
“She sat in a red leather armchair and watched a fish. The fish was in a tall hourglass, with water instead of sand. Every few seconds a drop fell from the top to the bottom with a plink she could hear only because the room was a mausoleum. The fish wandered around, ballooning as it approached the curved sides and shrinking away again as it neared the center.”
Paradox
“People resist a census, but give them a profile page and they'll spend all day telling you who they are.”
The narrative explores topics on privacy and data demonstrating the paradoxical nature of how humans live and engage with technology.
Parallelism
The narrator parallels Wil and Emily’s stories, as they are individually introduced in the world of ‘poets’ and their lives gradually intersects.
Metonymy and Synecdoche
N/A
Personification
In the myth about Tajura, the narrator tells the tale that personifies animals as they have the ability to speak and possess other human qualities.
“The animals lived in one tribe and spoke with one tongue, so they could understand one another. One day Tajura, the Rainbow Serpent, carved his name in the bark of a coolabah tree. He said to the other animals, “Look what I have done, I have written my name on this tree, so you must do what I say.”
