Fascinating
Passages
I was the lie that
Empire tells itself when times are easy, he the truth that Empire tells when
harsh winds blow. Two sides of imperial
rule, no more, no less. But I temporized,
I looked around this obscure frontier, this littler backwater with its dusty
summers and its cartloads of apricots and its long siestas and its shiftless
garrison and the waterbirds flying in and flying out year after year to and
from the dazzling waveless sheet of the lake, and I said to myself, “Be patient, one of these
days he will go away, one of these days quiet will return: then our siestas
will grow longer and our swords rustier, the watchman will sneak down from his
tower to spend the night with his wife, the mortar will crumble till lizards
nest between the bricks and owls fly out of the belfry, and the line that marks
the frontier on the maps of Empire will grow hazy and obscure till we are
blessedly forgotten.” Thus I seduced myself, taking one of the many wrong
turnings I have taken on a road that looks true but has delivered me into the
heart of a labyrinth (135-136).
This moment of introspection from the Magistrate really
stood out to me, because it seems to encapsulate the struggle with passivity
that is ongoing in this novel. Should
the magistrate act out against the Empire, stand up to its reign of
terror? Should he stop the torturers
from torturing, stop the army from marching into the dessert? And if so, how soon should he intervene and how much? During some of the
moments at which injustice seems to reach its apex, the Magistrate is almost
complicit, even though his conscience is at war with itself. This lyrical passage really displays what he
wants for his town, but it is a dream, described as “seduction.”
I know somewhat too
much; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems to be no
recovering. I ought never to have taken
my lantern to see what was going on in the hut by the granary. On the other hand, there was no way, once I
had picked up the lantern, for me to put it down again. The knot loops in upon itself. I cannot find the end (21).
In this passage, truth in its political context is treated
as something infectious and to some extent, unwanted. For the Magistrate, the truth is the
corruption and evil of the Third Bureau, and once this truth comes to him, he
feels obligated to oppose it—irrevocably set upon a collision course with his
superiors and the mother country he represents, which he knows may end in his
own destruction.
New Words
warren: a building
or area containing many tenants in limited or crowded quarters.
ostlers: a person
who takes
care of horses,
especially at an
inn.
ordure: manure,
dung
poleaxe: an ax, usually with a hammer
opposite the
cutting edge,
trammel: a hindrance or impediment to free action;
maieutic: eliciting knowledge in the mind of a person by interrogation
libertinage: the
practice of being a libertine; a person who is morally or sexually
unrestrained, especially a dissolute man
palaver: a conference or discussion; a long
parley
brazier: a metal
receptacle for holding live coals or other fuel, as for heating a room.
vertiginous: whirling; spinning;
rotary; affected with vertigo
palliation: relieve
or lessen without
curing;
miasma: noxious exhalations
from putrescent organic matter;
trawling: to fish with a net that drags along the sea bottom
Interesting Dialogue/Monologue
“There is a certain tone,” Joll says. “A certain tone enters the voice of a man who
is telling the truth. Training and
experience teach us to recognize that tone.”
“Terrible things on in the night while you and I are
asleep”? The jackal rips out the hare’s
bowels, but the world rolls on (23).
“Nothing is worse than what we can imagine,” I mumble (31).
“Be patient, one of these days he will go away, one of these
days quiet will return . . . Thus I have seduced myself . . . (136)
Excellent Similes/Metaphors/Analogies
The new men of the Empire are the ones who believe in fresh
starts, new chapters, clean pages; I struggle on with the old story, hoping
that before it is finished it will reveal to me why it was that I thought it
was worth the trouble (25).
So I lie beside this healthy young body while it knits
itself in sleep into eve sturdier health, working in silence even at the points
of irremediable damage, the eyes, the feet, to be whole again.
The older a man the more grotesque people find his
couplings, like the spasms of a dying animal (32).
Once upon a time I imagined the human form as a flower
radiating out from a kernel in the loins.
What bird has the heart to sing in a thicket of thorns?
(41).
. . . in the honeycomb of my brain (47).
It seems appropriate that a man who does not know what to do
with the woman in his bed should not know what to write (58).
. . . to pierce her surface and stir the quiet of her
interior into an ecstatic storm; then to retreat, to subside, to wait for
desire to reconstitute itself.
The looping movement of my hand before my face to chase them
away has become as automatic as the flick of a cow’s tail (116).
I lie on the bare mattress and concentrate on bringing into
life the image of myself as a swimmer swimming with even, untiring strokes
through the medium of time, a medium more inert than water, without ripples,
pervasive, colourless, odourless, dry as paper (143).
Only days since I parted from that other one, and I find her
face hardening over in my memory, becoming opaque, impermeable, as though
secreting a shell over itself (75).
Vivid Physicality
He places his fingers together tip to tip before he answers
(23).
Soon my eyes close, my head droops. It is rapture, of a kind (29).
The wound on my cheek, never washed or dressed, is swollen
and inflamed. A crust like a fat
caterpillar has formed on it. My left
eye is a mere slit, my nose a shapeless throbbing lump. I must breathe through my mouth (115).
The Magistrate’s Introspection
Perhaps ten feet below the floor lie the ruins of another
fort, razed by the barbarians, peopled with the bones of another fort . . .
another grey-haired servant of the empire who fell in the arena of his
authority, face to face at last with the barbarians.
Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital
forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation. Living in the apartment has become bad for
me, I think (21).
Nor could I always see why one part of my body, with its
unreasonable cravings and false promises, should be heeded over any other as a
channel of desire . . . anchored to my
flesh with claws I could not detach (45).
Never before has my face been so rubbed in the quotidian
(87).
Without exception they are dreams of ends: dreams not of how
to live but of how to die (133).
Beautiful Imagery/Landscape
In the lulls of the wind the cacophony of their hooting,
quacking, honking, squawking reaches us like the noise of a rival city on the
water; graylag, beangoose, pintail, wigeon, mallard, teal, smew (57).
I think of the little convoys of travelers strung out along
hundreds of miles of road, heading for a motherland . . . day by day abandoning
at the roadside tools, kitchenware, portraits, clocks, toys, everything they
believed they might rescue from the ruin of their estates before they realized
that at most they might hope to escape with their lives (131).
It howls at us across the ice, blowing from nowhere to
nowhere, veiling the sky in a cloud of red dust. From the dust there is no hiding: it
penetrates our clothing, cakes our skin, sifts into the baggage. We eat with coated tongues, spitting often,
our teeth grating. Dust rather than air
becomes the medium in which we live (60).
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