What really happens when the ordinary world of evasion and pretence meets a man who is completely honest? Starkey Moore is this man, an island unto himself, impartial to mores or morals, traditional thinking or his fellows' opinion. Yet he is no figure from a morality play; he is vital, humorous, courageous and completely shocking, as unadorned truth and candour always must be. Across his path comes the young , lonely Joey, his very opposite, tender, vacillatory, carnal and priggish by turns, needing a hero and insisting upon finding one. This story of friendship and archaic disaster is played out against a remote landscape during a flare-up of nationalistic rage and hysteria.