Matthiessen supplies a number of secondary characters here who offer a constellation of responses to the situation outlined above, and who provide a richness of texture to the novel. Some remain necessarily one-dimensional — the porcine Commandante Guzman, for example, or the fresh-faced and treacherous missionary chief Leslie Huben — but others transcend the boundaries of type, as with Moon's partner Wolfie.

The portrayal of Hazel Quarrier's gradual descent into madness, which could easily have turned into the stock response of white-bread Protestantism to an unimaginably hellish otherness, is so finely nuanced, at once horrible and hilarious, that it becomes one of Matthiessen's most deft fictional creations.

Perhaps most interesting is his portrait of Leslie Huben's wife Andy. Desirable, amorphous, ultimately ambiguous, she is the most fully realized woman, and the most sympathetic, in any of Matthiessen's novels.