"[3] Daniel Skipton is a paranoid novelist living in Bruges who attempts to supplement his measley income by preying on gullible English tourists, taking them to comically bad sex shows, giving them directions to brothels, and trying to sell them dubious Flemish paintings.

Meanwhile, Skipton works obsessively on the manuscript for a new novel, which he has completed a year ago but continues to tinker with using different coloured pens to mark grammatical errors, stylistic changes and marginal comments.

"[2] Skipton ingratiates himself with a group of British tourists: Cosmo Hines, a London bookseller mostly concerned with visiting a brothel, his wife Dorothy Merlin, a pretentious writer of bad plays, Duncan Moss, a friendly drunk, and Matthew Pryar, a well dressed gentleman with upper class connections.

[5] Time's review stated that "Johnson parodies Rolfe to perfection in all his attributes save one; the mad genius that cut Hadrian the Seventh into one of the diamonds of modern fiction.

"[6] Patrick Cruttwell in The Hudson Review called the novel "an exercise in the picaresque" and "a great success" and said that "the whole book, which is kept, as it should be, on the level of caricature and farce, reads as if its author has enjoyed herself making it.

"[10] Philip Hensher, writing on the republication of Johnson's novels in 2018, had a more adverse reaction, calling the book "desultory and repetitious; no inventiveness of language, incident or character sustains forward momentum.