Opening Line
This novel actually begins with a metaphor. "The wall around the perimeter was child’s play." The phrase is fairly common, and the meaning should be almost universally understood. Child's play equates what would be a difficult task for some with being unexpectedly easy for another. In this case, scaling a wall only six feet tall with no barbed wire along the top should be child's play for a great many people. Unless that person is just barely more than five feet tall, which the narrator admits to being.
Slashed Throat
The narrator comes across a victim of a throat slashing, but it does not look like expectations. The result "wasn’t the neat surgical slash I would have imagined, but a fleshy mess protruding from a ragged hole, as if someone, something had ripped his windpipe out through the front of his neck, leaving a wound like a great scarlet laughing mouth." The first simile here helps to establish the visceral scene since it is probably not too difficult to imagine the gaping chasm left after viciously removing one's windpipe. Or, if it is still difficult to picture, the final metaphor may bring to mind the face of the Joker which is almost universally recognizable.
The Call Center
A location in the story called the Sunsmile call center is described using a metaphor that harkens back to ancient mythology. "A small labyrinth of desks and pods stretched away in a complex hierarchy that encompassed hot-deskers, people with little glassed-in booths, and the favored elite few with access to a door that shut and a window with real daylight." The labyrinth is a reference to an intricate maze with a ferocious beast waiting at its center. The call center is definitely mazelike, but the metaphor seems to end at that point.
Catlike Reflexes
Many of the similes in the narrative are very familiar and quite simple. For instance, the narrator describes herself hanging from a slight height and letting go. "I landed on all fours, silently, like a cat." The use of such universally recognized metaphorical imagery may not land points for creativity, but they get the job done. It is almost impossible not to understand how this scene plays out.
Spy Slang
Because the storyline is about a furtive organization engaging in furtive actions, much use of metaphor and slang is directed toward that jargon. "I was clearly on their radar." This phrase is a perfect example of this kind of use of figurative language which is spread throughout the book. The metaphor describes, of course, one person being aware of another's location in much the same way—figuratively speaking—as the blip on a radar shows the location of an airplane in flight.
