According to Gabriel Gbadamosi's review in The Guardian, "All the bases are touched in a reckoning with South Africa's past and present turmoil, and no box left unopened in the search for some kind of limbo or twilight zone where all unresolved conflicts might find resolution.

Trapped in an unpromising, sexless marriage, and more than ten years younger than her husband, Lydia copes badly with Silas's sudden revelation about du Boise and the additional information that the now retired policeman has applied for amnesty for a number of sexual assaults, including the one on her.

In the long run, however, all their attempts at keeping up appearances cannot disguise the fact that, for a multitude of reasons, their marriage is failing, and that they have also lost touch with their son, that they have no idea about where, and how, he is actually spending his time.

By that time, Silas is toying with the idea of going abroad, preferably to Europe, to make a fresh start there, especially now that President Mandela is about to resign and he may lose his prestigious government job; Lydia has stopped working as a nurse and is planning to leave her husband for good; and Michael has acquired a gun and lets himself be influenced by fundamentalist Islamic circles.

Reinventing himself as a Muslim and planning to go into hiding and eventually to India, where his grandfather was born, he goes on a killing spree, shooting first the white father who for many years has had an incestuous relationship with his daughter—who is a friend of Michael's—,and then du Boise.