Who really is Mansour, the sultan who rules over an imaginary country that readers will recognize as modern Syria? The anonymous narrator, a member of the sultan’s entourage, tries to answer that question. A military man who belongs to the sultan’s inner circle thanks to his father, he has known the sultan since Mansour was a child. After the accidental death of the eldest son of the dynasty, the narrator played a role in the younger man’s accelerated education for the role that awaited him. This novel starts out with the tale of that education, before evolving into a chronicle of the first 10 years of the young sultan’s reign, until turmoil overwhelms the country. Following upon other Arab countries, revolution sets the kingdom alight. The sultan’s reaction is violent, and his evasive personality is gradually revealed – or at least the narrator discerns some keys to it: a totally unscrupulous man revealed by a heartless war against his own people, a man whose acts are dictated by a clannish dynastic obsession inherited from his father. Thanks to his diabolical cleverness, he manages to slip through the direst straits willingness by taking advantage both of circumstance and of the West’s turning a blind eye.

The portrait of a despot with a juvenile face and blood on his hands, this novel is also the story of the narrator’s own evolution, which in many ways echoes that of the Sultanate’s people. A courtesan by birth, expected by his family to take on a role and tasks that he doesn’t want, but which tradition and his education oblige him to accept, he eventually breaks with the sultan, refusing to compromise what he sees as the loyalty he owes his country.