After a decade in one South Seas mission, a London bank-clerk-turned- minister serves on a remote volcanic island. Fanua contains neither cannibals nor Christians, but its citizens,
his superior warns, are like immoral children. Still, Mr. Timothy Fortune lights out for Fanua. Yet after three years, he has made only one convert, and his devotion to the boy may
prove more sensual than sacred. Long after the publication of Mr. Fortune’s Maggot, Warner began the brilliant and subversive novella, The Salutation. Now adrift and starving
on the Brazilian pampas, Mr. Fortune is rescued by an elderly widow, who delights in having an Englishman about the house. Her heir, however, may beg to differ.
