Reading time: About 1 minute
I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a series of metaphors from Jo Hamya…
Joyce Hamya is a young British novelist from East London, born to a Polish mother and a Ugandan father. She graduated from King’s College London and University of Oxford and is currently pursuing a PhD.
Hamya began her career as a copy editor for Tatler and also contributed to the Financial Times and The British Blacklist. Hamya was 24 when her debut novel Three Rooms was published in 2021.
The most recent novel by Jo Hamya, The Hypocrite, tells the story of a young playwright, Sophia, awaiting her father’s verdict on her new show. The crux of the plot is that her father is a famous novelist and when watching the show, he discovers his daughter has used the events of a vacation they had spent together in Sicily to critique the attitudes and sexual mores of the men of his generation.
There are a number of candidates for hypocrite in this engaging book: The father, for his selfish and sexist ways; the daughter for exposing her father to shame and embarrassment; and the ex-wife for having stayed mute to the bad behaviour of both her husband and her daughter.
The book is a short, quick read, and I found some of the figurative language to be delightful. Here are my favourite examples:
- Everything was sound, sound — the tide’s white noise rasping closer, then withdraw, the maracas of pebbles being disturbed.
- They have started to grow tired of the ordinary screams chair legs around them give when pushed out for old guests to exit.
- It is important for her, he knows, to tend to his wrongs. Often, he lets her. It helps her feel better. She hangs them like wet laundry on his bones.
- She takes Sophia’s father gingerly by his elbow, the way nurses in films handle the infirm.
