Mark Lattimer lies dying in an upstairs room, the not quite random victim of a chopping by a ganja-smoking man in the middle of a demonstration. It is random because the two are total strangers, but deliberate: Latimer looks white and middle-class and his assailant is poor and brown. Lattimer, though, has his own mixed ancestry and is a politically committed lawyer working for the poor and the radical nationalist movement. Now he is trapped by the consequences of the riot, cut off from doctors, ambulances, police. As he dies, he talks to his companions, his black lover and a fellow party worker, and drifts into memories of his past: his childhood as member of the privileged white elite, his time in London and the RAF, his affairs and marriage and the moment when he gives his allegiance to the poor. But what meaning has his life and death? What of the tension between his conscience and his commitment when he has begun to feel trapped in the slogans of his politics? John Hearne's novel was widely praised on its first publication for its both its articulation of the problems of creating a viable nation out of a society riven by the structural inequalities of race and class bequeathed by slavery and for his scrupulous concern with the art of writing fiction. A re-evaluation of his work will focus on his concern with the individual conscience, with his emphasis on sexuality and on the existential questions he poses about the meaning of action in an apparently absurd world.