 This is imagined as being a passionate adulterous love-affair between the book's two central characters with the nation's unstable political scene as its backdrop.The politics are rendered to us through the characters' every day conversation- they rely on newspapers for information- which means that the "history lesson" aspect of the book arises organically in the narrative.Written in the third person using a conventional omniscient narrator, the novel airs the internal motivations and viewpoints of various characters.