On December the third the wind changed overnight and it was winter.
The understated menace presented in the opening line of “The Birds” is typical of the author’s style. At every level of her artistry—whether in the novel Rebecca or short stories such as this—the tone of the narration is a significant as the information. Or, as in this case, perhaps even more. Nothing about the opening line hints at the horror to come, but when viewed from retrospective perspective in which the reader is aware of the events, going back to the beginning shows the author is here divulging quite a bit more than it seems. This is an example of the very subtle art of imagery.
You'll want to know what I did. I went back and got a spade, and I dug a grave for Boy, in the reeds behind the marsh, and I said one of my own prayers for him, being uncertain of his religion.
“The Old Man” is a story where everything is about the narration. It is a first account of a witness to a shocking scene of violence. The above quote occurs a short time after the actual act at the moment in which the narrator sees the dead Boy and shouts across the lake to the Old Man that he knows what he’s done, calling him a murderer. But the story turns out to be something quite apart from it seems. Is narrator a liar? Is the narrator the real villain trying to cover up? Is the narrator simply mad or suffering from a condition affecting his perceptions? Or is there something else entirely going on here?
Search parties were sent out, of course. The more experienced climbers amongst them, undaunted by the bare rock of the mountain summit, covered the whole ridge, from north to south, from east to west, with no result.
And that is the end of the story. Nothing more is known.
Except that these are the third and fourth paragraphs of a story that stretches across another fifty-something pages. The end is, as they say, the beginning and like some stories one may already be familiar with, some tales never really come to an end. They may conclude, but that’s not the same thing. “Monte Verita” is the author digging her spiky boots into the rocky terrain of the unsolved mystery that includes such peaks as Picnic at Hanging Rock. Something strange has happened and the people to whom it happened were warned beforehand that it might. Like Picnic at Hanging Rock, the pace is slow and the details dense packed with the purpose of slowing down perception of time and meaning.
He sank deeper, ever deeper into the snow, and when a stray piece of brushwood, cold and wet, touched his lips, it was like a hand, hesitant and timid, feeling its way towards him in the darkness.
The final line of this story seems fairly innocuous taken out of context. Oh, to be sure, it is a well-constructed piece of imagery capable of bringing forth a visualization of the exact scene taking place with ease. One can read the line and quite capably watch it take dimensional form in their mind. But the meaning and the emotional depth are missing. Place it back into context and, especially, insert it solidly into the narrative as the last image the author intends to leave you with and it becomes—arguably, perhaps—the single most deeply emotional and moving sentence in the entire collection.
