Cassandra in Reverse

“It’s a lie, the first page of a book, because it masquerades as a beginning. A real beginning—the opening of something—when what you’re being offered is an arbitrary line in the sand. This story starts here. Pick a random event. Ignore whatever came before it or catch up later. Pretend the world stops when the book closes, or that a resolution isn’t simply another random moment on a curated timeline.”

Smale uses second-person language to draw the reader into the novel and elicit their participation in its framing. This passage also introduces the motif of metafictional elements, as the narrator self-consciously addresses the problems related to the beginning of a story.

“I rarely understand what another human is thinking, but I frequently feel it: a wave of emotion that pours out of them into me, like a teapot into a cup. While it fills me up, I have to work out what the hell it is, where it came from and what I’m supposed to do to stop it spilling everywhere. Rage that doesn’t feel like mine pulses through me: dark purple and red. His colors are an invasion and I do not like it.”

Smale employs a simile of emotion pouring from another individual into Cassie, “like a teapot into a cup,” which provides a visual and a connotation of urgency due to the potential overflow of hot liquid. It also introduces Cassie’s experience of emotions as colors, including her narrative style, which includes frankly assessing her reactions and her frequent use of expletives.

“At some point last night I must have rearranged myself, because I’m now lying on Will’s chest and he’s staring down at me. Again. Is he going to study me first thing every morning now? I’m not sure I like it very much. It makes me feel like I’m both hanging up in the Tate and being peered at under a rock, like a wood louse.”

Smale describes Cassie’s feelings about being studied by Will as paradoxical. The use of specific imagery—a specific museum, and a specific type of insect—serves both to characterize Cassie’s detailed way of thinking, and to highlight how different those types of gazes are.