Opening Line
The novel commences with a metaphorical image. It is slight, subtly constructed and not overbearing, but at the same time it informs the reader ahead of time that this is to be a story that ties atmospheric and environmental conditions to the psyche of human beings:
“Towards the end of April a breath from the north blew cold down Milan platforms to meet the returning traveler.”
Bright with a Chance of Sun
The connections between character and climate, personality and environment and situation and atmosphere become a recurring motif, but the author is careful not to draw too much undue attention to it. Indeed, sometimes the effect is rendered with such subtlety as to likely escape notice entirely:
“Cecilia, strung-up, excited, not knowing where to begin, like a child at Christmas…garden sparrows were chittering…a cherry-tree was in bloom. There was a brightness over the air, but no sun.”
What seems like a perfectly mundane description of a character arriving home suddenly, with the metaphor at the end there, becomes something much more sinister in its foreshadowing.
Burning Miss Summers
Emmeline Summers has the reputation for being detached from emotional interaction. Capable of reading others’ emotions and even able to capitalize on her empathy in her job as a travel agent, she is ironically named for she is somewhat chilly. But chilly Miss Summers is about to grow hot:
“Her attitude even said, `Must I think at all?’ as though, most alive in the heat and shade of the trade, she were reprieved from the living…An intense sense of being each forced so close to the other as to be invisible, a fusion of both their senses in burning shadow obscured the two, as they sat here”
The Darkness
The 20th century writer’s go-to metaphor is abundantly on display throughout the narrative. The darkness roars into the story like a lion; a metaphor rich in the promise of mystery and the unknown:
“As that chill stole up the valley…evening announced itself by a whisper, receded in darkness and mystery”
More than two-hundred pages later—and less than ten pages from the conclusion—it creeps away like a lamb with imagery suggesting a metaphorical soft landing from the dark questions of the unknown future:
“A sense of standstill, a hush pervaded this half-seen country. Friendly darkness, as over a pillow, and silence in which a clock striking still pinned her to time hung trancelike over this early halt in their journey.”
Final Depature
The entire story—the romance between Emmeline and Markie at any rate—leads inexorably and inevitably to a single moment in time; a point at which the travel agent becomes the traveler. Not through distance as much as through the geography of the emotional psyche. Loaded with meaning, the metaphorical tipping point—the literal tipping point expressed through metaphor—arrives:
“Blind with new light she was like somebody suddenly not blind, or, after a miracle, somebody moving by the absence of pain."
