The second part of a trilogy, written last. It is the story of the early life of Chester Nimmo who grows up in a poor fundamentalist family on the moors in Devon in the mid-Nineteenth Century.
It traces the growing disbelief of the boy in adventist religion and a consequent realisation of the power dynamics between rich and poor..
What makes this special is Cary's talent for illustrating these shifting and developmental ideas in our hero using the rural and village personalities to do it. In this case the religious foundation of Nimmo's childhood is the impulse for the political philosophy (19th Century Radicalism) that is a theme in the other two volumes in this trilogy. Simply put, Cary's view is the creative imagination is interwoven with one's religious imagination.