To quote William Gerhardie's own synopsis this work is 'a novel about two men treading the donkey-round of paradise deferred, their literary friendship strained to breaking-point by rivalry in love'. The two men are Max Fisher (Hugh Kingsmill) and Victor Thurbon (William Gerhardie himself).

In her biography of William Gerhardie (to be reissued in Faber Finds) Dido Davies describes it as being 'unquestionably amongst the most entertaining and comic of Gerhardie's novels'.

'The tale is extremely funny ... It is bitter, capricious, occasionally incoherent and without any feeling for the existence of organized society. But extremely funny it is, and extremely original. No sentence in it can be foreseen. The man has genius.' Arnold Bennett, Evening Standard