A reviewer in The Courier-Mail likened the book to the work of an earlier novelist: "Twenty years ago Louis Stone, an Englishman, then living in New South Wales, showed in his novel, Jonah, that the streets of Sydney, throbbing with life, intensity, and emotionalism, provided a wonderful background for an Australian novel.

So individualistic is it, in fact, that you can compare it with no other novel, although for purposes of explanation it can be said to resemble vaguely Virginia Woolf's The Waves which was published a few years before it.

Though they are poor and 'uneducated' in the conventional sense, they are acutely sensitive, their lives revolve around their inward experiences, they are unusually articulate and often speak with the rhetoric of accomplished orators or with the imagery of poets.

Conversation is diffuse, disjointed, full of popular sayings and banalities local in time and place which do not express character at all, or very little.

My purpose, in making characters somewhat eloquent, is the expression of two psychological truths; first, that everyone has a wit superior to his everyday wit, when discussing his personal problems, and the most depressed housewife, for example, can talk like Medea about her troubles; second, that everyone, to a greater or lesser extent, is a fountain of passion, which is turned by circumstances of birth or upbringing into conventional channels – as, ambition, love, money-grubbing, politics, but which could be as well applied to other objects and with less waste of energy.