"The sky was the colour of kelp that is starting to dry on a beach, and when a very light rain came across his skin it brought to his mind a plankton rain passing the whales, crustaceans, passing, in making their descent, all those armoured antlers and claws, sinking down into a pit without light. ..."The unnamed protagonist of this novel, referred to throughout the narrative, in a generalizing way, as "he" or "the man", goes to great lengths to make things hard for himself, to take maximum risks. On a deeper level, this is a meditation on warrior ethos, on what constitutes the "West" at its most archaic core; that which in Ancient Greece was called "kleos"; for this the island is the Petri dish.This novel: high adventure, philosophical horror, or even fantasy, depending on how you want to read it, is modelled on a whole array of man against monster battles, mostly on 19th and 20th century literary examples, that take place at sea, though ancient epic is part of this, too. Another inspiration are historical accounts of outsider life in late antiquity, of insect-eating zealots living in holes and caves, add to this that which once motivated Greek hoplites - sing a song to celebrate my end in battle - and we have the cast from which this story's main character is made.