The extract belongs to the 4th chapter of the novel and it represents a crucial moment in the development of plot and the characters’ level of awareness about meaning of their encounter.

Indeed this is the second time Fiona and Henry meet. It is not planned arrangement since Fiona is totally surprised to realize that the young man the life of whom she has decided to save has followed there despite the unfavorable weather  condition from London to New Castle. In the desperate effort to have a contact with her.

The writer’s intention is without any doubt to provide the intelligent reader hints about both characters emotional response when facing each other. The novelist offers such information into two different ways: firstly he adopts the technique of telling and once he has decided to do that he adopts Fiona’s point of view. This implies the reader can only see facts from her perspective and only indirectly from Henry’s point of view. What adds quality to nation is the use of the language made: the narrator exploits elliptic sentences that focus on the different parts of Henry’s face and body. They show the young man’s transformation after what Fiona perceives as “young health”. It recalls the previous use of “transformation”. The points Fiona rests on a typical form used in courtly love poetry thus communicated sort of romantic attitude in her thoughts. This explains from the reference to the face of a “romantic poet”, a cousin of Keats and Shelley. Both Keats and Shelley were romantic poets that died of tuberculosis, a desperate disease at the time of their lives that had the same effect of todays cancer or leukemia.

Henry’s personality appears as the one of a young man full of energy even when he was trying to be apologetic. The repetition of “too” in before “vivid and angry” returns an image of strength also the intelligent reader and the smart novelist also clearly perceive a typical attitude of adolescence when he refers to Henry’s effort “to order in his thought the sequence of events”. On the all the reader may well understands that the choice of the narrator produces the same effect a film director may get when he adopts a close up in his scene to let the audience came into close contact with the character of the film. The result is the reader feels as he/she were in front of a picture thus can be said the novelist reaches a cinematic effect even if both character are still in the scene. They don’t seem to move and everything is only true in Fiona’s mind. Interesting is to realize that Fiona’s interior monologue is busy making a comparison between before and now: Henry’s first impression and her second meeting the guy. But strangely enough Fiona also thinks or better “wonders” whether her mother would consider Henry the one of a romantic hero.

Why does Fiona thinks of her mother? Why she’s busy coping with her emotions? What justify that thought? This is a brilliant indirect connection the novelist wants the intelligent reader to do and he does it indirectly. Readers are not all the same.

The extract refers to a scene in the first chapter that occurs just after a row between the protagonist and her husband. She is looking out of the window and reader can clearly perceives Fiona’s mood when she cannot understand the change her marriage and her husband as well has undergone. The function of the quotation is clearly to introduce and make the reader reflect on marriage crisis.

In addition as the intelligent reader of the two extract of the class test can clearly see in a comparative analysis what the novelist is really interested in is to follow he stream of consciousness of his female character and one of the most effective means to do it is true the exploitation of scenes. Both the first and the second extract are scenes and therefore the effects on the reader as well as the intention of the writer is dramatic.

A scene is the minimal unit of a dramatic product.

The more important themes of the novel are:

1. Fiona’s emotional parabola in order to experience how difficult it is to live with ones choices. The consequences to this are not easily apparent on the very moment you make them.
2. The controversial theme of ethic VS scientific approaches to life. There are different position and stands in front of making decision  that may or may not be in line with one’s religious belief.
3. The role of experience and therefore of time are two crucial aspects of everybody’s life.