Written as a sequel to Donkey Years, this quasi-autobiographical work plays hell with conventional time sequences in a virtuoso shuffling and reshuffling of past and present. Aidan Higgins belongs to a large extent in the post-Joycean line of Irish prose-writers, and also in the Europeanised tradition which includes Beckett, Francis Stuart, etc. The style is personalised, impressionistic and rather stream-of-consciousness, embracing travel, love affairs, drinking bouts, childhood memories, individual pen portraits, montages of contemporary events, opinions and reactions intermingled in a kind of verbal and intellectual fugue. Though egocentric at times, it generates much vitality and the contrast of a deracine, almost alienated tone with Insider native idioms and attitudes has a curious, very individual flavour.