[Canal Zone is] a deliberate summation of Wiseman's previous work…. Its slow pace encourages the audience to consider Wiseman's long-standing preoccupation with the way institutions preserve order by demanding individual obedience. (p. 59)

Respectful of ambiguities, Wiseman brings a compassionate as well as a critical eye to the Canal Zone. Drawn to society's victims, he focuses on a wide range of flotsam and jetsam…. (pp. 59-60)

Wiseman ably demonstrates the complex system of values and symbols which wed self to community. The unexamined but much felt ideology is emphasised [in the portrayal of speakers] at public functions…. To dismiss or ridicule the rhetoric of these speakers is to miss the wider context of which Wiseman is acutely aware…. Wiseman's gift is to reveal the connection between general language and specific sympathetic responses—the process of 'socialisation' which explains how people can be united by an abstract idea, a sense...