For the most part, the techniques Hemingway employs in this novel will be familiar to readers of his earlier work. For example, one constant in Hemingway's fiction is his precise, carefully disciplined and economical, understated prose, which is far more than a mere matter of reportorial accuracy. The taut complexity of his style is closer to poetry than it is to the reporter's task of "telling it like it is."

Attentive readers will see how his prose has "the dignity of movement of an iceberg" which, as Hemingway said, "is due to only one-eighth of it being above water." This controlling theory of writing results in Hemingway's techniques of implication, indirection, the deliberate omission of certain information in order to make the reader feel more than can be understood (Hemingway called this his "theory of omission"), and oblique and deeply buried allusions. Another technique...