The events of the novel revolve, for the most part, around Michael Banks who leaves home early one morning with his lodger, William Hencher.

Following Banks, readers skulk apprehensively in the dark, awaiting Rock Castle's arrival on a river barge at a London harbor. Later, at a race track in Aldington before the running of the "Golden Bowl" (Hawkes admits to a Jamesian reference), readers descend into a Hadeslike latrine beneath the race track, join Banks in a steam bath during a murder, revel with him in a Walpurgisnacht parody of promiscuous sex. Through each scene, related peripherally rather than described directly, the dreamlike quality pervades; intensely poetic language and vivid imagery combine to form a prose of incantation, a fiendish mixture of love and horror. With Banks, the reader wanders like fate from scene to scene so that each event seems a random occurrence without the causal...