This is John Haylock's sixth novel. Like the others, it is a diverting essay on the English sense of class. His characters are members of the gentry in a world -- Asia -- where the pretensions of British birth and breeding cannot exist. These comic figures are undone by their new reality.
In Haylock's world, this reality usually takes the form of sex -- this urge puts these people through their paces. At first, they are offended by it. One of them suffers what she describes as "a provocative gesture," offered by a Japanese.
The provocative gesture occurs at the door of her flat. "He had taken off his pullover, undone his shirt buttons to the navel, half unzipped his trousers and put his fingers on his crotch. 'You no like?' he had said."