This novel is a treatment of the theme of corruption wrought by poverty. It is the story of an upright man resisting the temptations of easy bribes and easy satisfactions and winning for his honesty nothing but scorn even from those he loves.
The book is a cross between a polemical broadside and a cri de coeur. Connell herself calls it an ‘experiment with truth’ (xiii). Like many established theorists writing from outside the metropoles yet with some measure of recognition there, she is deeply outraged by the invisibility of most non-metropole writing in metropolitan fora.