The lead character, Tunde, is a West-African photography professor, who walks into an antiques shop at the beginning of the book, identifies African masks, a native American story, and then reflects on art and links Bach's cello suites to some modern day television series. But it also has to do with his relationship with his wife and daughter, with the professionals colleagues he meets around the world.
"They were sitting on the sofa during this conversation. He came closer to her and held her as she tried to find her words. At first she was startled, unable to trust his sudden alertness, but soon she eased herself into the knowledge that the things between the words were being heard. No there was no language yet for the little despairs nipping at her heels but now she knew he could receive that inarticulacy. His earnestness, his determination now to be better, felt like warmth." (p.65)
It is about racism, it is about art, it is about politics, in the United States, Africa, Asia, the Middle East. But above all it is literature of a very high level, without being too preachy about his own opinions, but like a good novel does, to even deeper levels, that are usually absent from any other work of art.
"The work I do takes me to places where I am received as a guest of honor, places where I try to think and speak and where I try to avoid speechifying. All of this is true but none of it is where reality is. There is another reality, the personal one. And then there's the secret one that is as dark as the blood beating in my veins, a cold river flowing undetected far from view, a place of uncertainty and premonition. Something is moving there that does not need me for its movement and that is taking me where I cannot imagine. A darkness to which the eyes can never become adjusted. (p.230)
Throughout the book, art works are described as part of the plot almost, like characters adding perspective and background, often linked to historical events: the Benin bronzes, expressing the 1897 massacre by the British army, Turner’s "Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying" and the Flemish master Herri Met De Bles’s mysterious "Landscape With Burning City", amongst others, and the French series he describes on the pages 202 and 203 but doesn't mention by name is "Bureau Des Légendes", on the espionage and politics in the Middle-East.
Cole mixes all these kaleidoscopics snippets of information, the personal stories, the art, the human horror into a meditative, at times even poetic and coherent narrative that is trembling with heartfelt emotions, both tender and loving on the one hand, and shocked and disgusted on the other. The tension between both creates the tremor, I assume.
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