The year is 1968, the milieu South Africa. It is a year in which moral certainty for one Seamus "Dirk" Devlin is rudely dislodged from its comfortable moorings, demolishing his pollyannish concept of a promised future. Devlin, a young Irish American chemical engineer of provincial roots finds himself immersed in a country and culture he knows precious little about, charged with the daunting task of orchestrating the merger of disparate chemical enterprises into a shiny new conglomerate. Dirk performs this corporate sleight of hand in the foreboding atmosphere of APARTHEID, an Afrikaner diktat beyond his bucolic grasp. Now, a quarter-century past WWII, the United States stumbles into the future, uncomfortable under its new mantle as, not just the grocery and hardware store of the world, but its reluctant police service. No longer comfortably nestled in Edenic bliss between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the U.S. is saddled with the prestige and the burden of free world hegemony, a role for which history did not prepare it, often displaying appalling hubris.

Flaunting his formidable technocratic expertise, Devlin projects that national conceit. Culturally programmed for another time in a different world, he unwittingly finds himself fully exposed on a foreign stage, his moral certitude in shambles. The psychological anguish that envelops him introduces Dirk to a self that he did not know in a world that still holds the modern mind hostage.