Atdtda28: Promising young dynamiter revisted, 801-802

[Paul Nightingale]

Another "event" here, Reef's "traumatic train accident in the recent past".
As previously, the Siberian Event comes later in the section (802) to
synchronise the action. The "overhead voice" Reef hears recalls the "not
entirely opaque presence" he meets on 659. There, as the train enters a
tunnel, "the light of the world, day or night, had to be abandoned for the
passage of time however brief"; and he hears "a voice [he] had not heard
before but recognised nonetheless". Here, the "evening sky which had refused
the dusk" becomes "an equivalent in light of the invitation to attend that
Reef was now receiving from the overhead voice" (802). On each occasion,
what might or might not be Reef's 'conscience' (or perhaps a narratorial
puppet-master) calls him back from the wayward trajectory that has become
his defining feature.

On the night in question Reef "happen[s] to be in Mentone in and out of the
hazardous bed of one Magdika ..." etc (802); the Event, like a camera flash,
captures him evading Magdika's husband, "inching along a perilous
window-ledge ..." etc. As the section opens, Reef is "[t]aking care to look
woeful" following Ruperta's departure (801). Previously, we have caught up
with Dally "still moping around about Kit" (797). The "light in the sky all
night" (798) postpones, for Dally, the arrival of the "disagreeable gent"
who confronts her on 797; here, the light both exposes Reef to "the
exercised voice of the unexpectedly-arrived husband" and brings "one more
cosmically annoyed ..." etc (802). Furthermore, Reef's 'exposure' sees him,
a solitary figure, juxtaposed to the crowd, here "all the neuraesthetics of
Europe". On 801, Cyprian and Bevis are caught amid "the crowds in the Piazza
Grande and along the Rive". On 798, "two young women ... in an upper room of
the great Palazzo, in muted shadow" are located at a distance from "moneyed
guests" and "all manner of Venetian artists".