Ironic Title
The title is infused with irony. Although the narrative is obsessed with the functions of the body, it is not really the bodies of the characters that are vile, but their minds. In fact, the novel suggests that the state of mind of civilization has become vile by this point in history.
Knowing Pornography When You See It
The story opens with a scene of a customs officer inspecting the belongings of the characters. One of them is particularly excited about the authority his job gives him to retain books deemed obscene or subversive. The irony of his lack of fitness for this job begins with thinking Dante’s Purgatorio is a French book and extends confiscating on the grounds that it simply doesn’t look right. The Purgatorio is, of course, a work of epic poetry that is fundamentally concerned with fundamentalist Christian belief in sin and punishment.
Miss Runcible’s Outrage
The very same customs inspection treats Miss Runcible particularly ill: suspected of being a jewel smuggler, she is subjected to a strip search. Such is her outrage at this humiliation that she undertakes to complain about it with the ironic result being that what was initially known to only the only the three people involved is very quickly a subject for national tabloid coverage in which the details become increasingly more lascivious, to the delight of the “humiliated” Miss Runcible.
Ironic Semantics
Much of the irony in the book turns on satirical perspective. Very often that satire is created from the juxtaposition of irony in the use of language. Some sentences are constructed like ones you might find on any given page of Catch-22:
“They lunched Chez Espinosa, the second most expensive restaurant in London; it was full of oilcloth and Lalique glass, and the sort of people who liked that sort of thing went there continually and said how awful it was.”
Chapter XI
Chapter XI of the book comprises just two pages which is constructed entirely of the dialogue taking place in telephone conversations. Much of that conversations consists of one character saying to the other, “I see.” The irony runs deep: neither character can physical see the other, of course, and this circumstance prohibits them from picking upon the body language of the other that could more helpfully convey what is not being said so that ultimately this blindness extends to their insistence upon “seeing” the facts of the situation when, in fact, neither of them really sees anything at all either literally or metaphorically. .
