Time Slowing Down
Ever notice how alcoholics seems to exist in this weird time reference that has nothing to do with your own? They are either moving at the speed of light without rhyme or reason or else seem to be stuck in the equivalent of perpetual and all-encompassing monosyllabic existence: speaking slowly and moving slowly and thinking slowly. The weird part is this is true even when their alcohol level is almost—briefly—down to non-existent. This time-slip effect is replicated through the imagery here. Notice how it seems to take the narrator forever to say almost nothing:
“You are sitting in the carriage. It is crowded. There is a newspaper on your lap. It is hot in here, stifling. Although the windows are open you can hardly breathe. The carriage is already full, but more people clamber in at each stop…You can smell them, taste them almost. You want to get to your feet and denounce them. For what? For the mud you see caking the sides of their eyes, the mud dried up in the corners of their mouths, the mud in the lines of their hands, under their nails, smeared under their clothes; the mud seeping out from their armpits and crotches. You are breathing mud.”
Coming Home
The novel opens with a memory by the narrator of childhood. Imagery is used in abundance as he recalls—referring to himself in the second-person as “you”—the experiences and sensations of leaving his home and then returning. The return home becomes almost a mystical experience akin to returning from an odyssey:
“When the car stopped you scrambled out. Your parents got the shopping from the boot, quite unaware of the miracle happening around them: you had left and had now returned to the very same place. Everything you knew about yourself was once more affirmed: your pleasure at making the unoiled gate screech; your fear of the dog in the next garden; your anticipation of going soon to gather the hens’ eggs. In returning you home, your father had again restored you to yourself. You looked at the familiar surroundings, silently greeting each aspect of them in turn, then gazed at him in wonder and gratitude.”
[Boot, by the way, is the British term for a car’s trunk.]
Drink Like a Fish
Ever stop to seriously contemplate the meaning of that idiomatic expression “drink like a fish” without driving yourself crazy by finally admitting it is a really, really stupid thing to say? What does it mean? That you drink from your toilet? Well, sure, it has to mean that. But try this imagery on for size, expand your head and finally get at least one clear sense of how it just might actually make sense after all:
“At first you wanted to drink the ocean dry, but as you did so all manner of horrors – both living and dead – were exposed. These creatures groped sightlessly towards you. The more horrific they were, the more you drank – as though trying to swallow them, to remove them from sight. You don’t drink to forget – it doesn’t happen that way any more – instead, the ocean has become everything that has ever happened to you, and when you drink you can swim effortlessly wherever the mood suggests. You do drink like a fish, for drink allows you to breathe underwater.”
Death, Darkness, and Drinking
Everything is novels about alcoholics ultimately becomes about drinking. Give a degenerate drunk a metaphor and just sit back and count the minutes until it becomes a metaphor about drinking. Add literal death and the metaphor of the modern age—darkness—and one need only wait for the three-D convergence:
“Since then, however, you have felt demons inside you, dancing to the boom-boom music. They lead you down a narrowing lane. Death, they tell you, is simply a failure to see far enough into the darkness. Recently their tempo has quickened. You have tried to keep pace with them, learning that Time is a straight line only to those needing to prove themselves sober. Each moment has become the sound of Sandra’s voice pitched between anger and compassion; it is the quickening rhythm of the boom-boom music. For you, there is the fear of immortality in the pause between drinks.”
