This collection's fictional protagonist, Herron, is a cadet in the Irish diplomatic service, a young literary Irishman of a type that moved to Paris in the 1930s and got to know the surrealists – Denis Devlin being the model.
 
Herron is a bit Barnaboothian, a bit W.V. Balloon, and a bit Karl O'Hanlon.

The book is an elegy for poet and existentialist Benjamin Fondane, who was murdered at Auschwitz in 1944.
 
It is a book about dreams, Surrealism, and low dishonest decades, then and now, exploring bureaucratic sclerosis in the face of atrocity.
 
It attempts to do what Walter Benjamin described as "remembrance": making the concluded (suffering) into something open-ended.