The Shape of Water
The author effectively uses imagery to give shape and form—to personify—the sights and sounds associated with living where water surrounds you. For those who have never experienced such conditions, it may be difficult to fully appreciate how water comes to define geography and psychology, but it is one of the most efficient passages in the entire book and successfully brings those conditions to life:
“Inland, too, the sea was always around us. Sometimes it came as fog, rolling in suddenly, heavy with the smell of tidal water, softly blotting out the houses and the streets. Sometimes it came as sound—the terrible sound of the surf pouring without pause on the beaches seven miles away. As a boy, I used to hear it while I tried to fall asleep. I would sit up in my bed to listen to it, on winter nights when the cold air brought it in clearly. I was frightened, for it seemed about to pound away the land. It was the sound of inhuman force—the first I knew.”
The Infamous Pumpkin
No single object is more closely associated with Chambers than the pumpkin. It was where he secreted away the second most famous object associated with his name: five strips of microfilm containing images of State Dept. documents which he claimed to be evidence supporting his charges against Alger Hiss. The imagery here is less convincing than his description of water, perhaps because he is reaching for myth instead of settling for personification:
“As I hung up, two filaments of thought spun into a single thread: the pumpkin-shaped god of Fate with the firearms hidden inside, and Stripling’s remark about pumpkins the night before. A hollow pumpkin was the perfect hiding place for the microfilm. Investigators might tear the house apart. They would never think to look for anything in a pumpkin lying in a pumpkin patch… I broke off a pumpkin, took it into the kitchen, cut out the top, scooped out the seeds. I wrapped the developed film in waxed paper to prevent damage by juices from the pumpkin. Then I laid the developed film and the cylinders of undeveloped film inside the hollowed pumpkin and replaced the top.”
The Scent of Desperation
Throughout the book, over and over, Chambers reveals himself to be far more talented describing the simple things than he is at trying to create political theater. This recurrence indicates the inherited talent of the painter’s eye of his father more than it does the gifts of a natural storyteller. The book succeeds most when it acts as set decoration rather than acting out the drama itself; it is through the imagery of the smaller details rather than the grand scheme that Chambers hits his marks:
“While the men worked, I saw them eyeing me as I helped them, eyeing my wife on their trips through the house, trying to figure us out. The poor can smell poverty as a doctor can smell sickness. No doubt, they noted, those plain, untalkative men, that I was a jobless man with two small children. No doubt, they had children of their own. No doubt, they remembered months without work.”
When Facts Fail, Imagery Ignites
In a long passage taking up almost the entirety of an entire chapter, Chambers attempts to explain what it is about communism which should be feared. What it is about the ideology he once embraced that made him one day to decide to reject. It is not really an appropriate forum for the use of imagery; facts and cold hard evidence would be more convincing. Those are in short supply, but his dedication to replacing them with something almost verging on poetry is to be admired from a purely literary perspective:
“What Communist has not heard those screams? They come from husbands torn forever from their wives in midnight arrests. They come, muffled, from the execution cellars of the secret police...They come from those freight cars loaded with men, women and children, the enemies of the Communist State, locked in, packed in, left on remote sidings to freeze to death at night in the Russian winter. They come from minds driven mad by the horrors of mass starvation ordered and enforced as a policy of the Communist State. They come from the starved skeletons, worked to death, or flogged to death (as an example to others) in the freezing filth of sub-arctic labor camps.”
