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Christopher Priest's first novel is a book of two parts. The first part lays out a "willfully obscure" premise: Elias Wentik, a British scientist experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs in a research outpost in Antarctica, is taken by U.S. government agents to a place in the Brazilian jungle. There he finds himself a prisoner in a surreal atmosphere, run by a paranoid bureaucrat in command of a group of men exhibiting bizarre behavior. Wentik attempts to decipher what is going on around him and the truth behind the vague accusations being thrown at him.
Then about halfway through the novel, the book's focus and pacing suddenly shift. The obscurity is displaced by a tighter plot that deciphers the events of the first part of the book, as Wentik learns the details of the mysterious plateau on which he was imprisoned and the reason for the bizarre behavior of the men. Looming over it all is a holocaust that will set humanity back by hundreds of years, one in which Wentik learns his discoveries play a small but enduring part. Here events proceed at a much more rapid clip before coming to an abrupt, almost rushed conclusion.
The dissonant approach of the two books reflects the novel's genesis as a fix-up. As Priest explains in a short Author's Note at the end of the 1979 edition, the book began as two separate stories (entitled "The Interrogator" and "the Maze") that Priest wrote in the late 1960s. These cryptic works form the heart of the novel, and can make for frustrating reading given the lack of a context. This is provided later in the novel, the existence of which seems mainly to give readers an explanation of what they read. As is often the case with fix-ups, the whole work does not cohere as well as it might have, and in the end proves less than the sum of its often imaginative parts.
