I thought that was a really clever parallel. At one point, in the library, Mrs Elm 'moved a black bishop across the board to take a white pawn.' This came immediately after a chapter in which Nora realised her partner Dan was too overbearing and that their relationship was unequal. Haig didn't only use imagery with the characters playing chess - sometimes he had the characters as chess pieces.
Another parallel was the idea that the game is still afoot even when it seems as though you've lost all your pieces, this being one of the ultimate messages of the book. The infinite variations and positions on a chessboard mirrored the idea of the parallel universes it also fitted the theme of decisions having endless consequences. On the other hand, it was an extremely well-chosen extended metaphor, which worked on a number of different levels to illustrate what was actually quite a complicated concept. Sometimes I feel these things are best left subtle, otherwise it can come across as a bit heavy-handed, and even a bit condescending - did he think we wouldn't get it? In other words, the parallel between Nora's many lives and chess would have been apparent without the character of Mrs Elm needing to explain it. On the one hand, I think the use of chess as a metaphor for life could have been more effective if Haig hadn't made it quite so explicit. The idea of chess was used throughout the whole novel, and essentially the point Haig was making with this was that 'life is a game of chess.' I'm not sure I 100% agree with this as a philosophical outlook, but that's another discussion - here I'm talking about it in a literary sense. I say 'interested' here, deliberately, because I still can't quite decide whether I liked it.
It all fitted into a theme of trees, which I quite liked.Īnother thing that interested me about this book was the recurring motif of the chessboard. Mrs Elm, the librarian, did have more of the qualities of a tree in comparison to Nora Seed - she was sturdy and grounded, wise and experienced, and she introduced Nora to the idea of different branches of life stemming from different decisions. I like that sort of thing, and I noticed that Miss Seed, the protagonist, was buried and smothered in a dark place, but she ultimately had potential. I will say now that I appreciated the symbolic names. So much happened in this book the plot really raced along. Secondly, it was incredibly well-written, making it very compelling. Firstly, the chapters were very short, some less than a page long - so it was literally page-turning stuff.
The first thing that struck me about this book was how quickly it moved.
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