The dustjacket of this novel gives the author grounds for action against his publishers. Bald, bold, equi-width, football scoreboard capitals, half sump oil black and half baby stool brown occupy the left upper corner, announcing author, title and the fact that this is ‘a novel by’. From the lower right corner rises a green, broken ended frond, or wave perhaps, flecked with the same insistent brown, as though the artist, an early morning surfer, had woken with the intermittent sewage-crowded state of Bondi Beach troubling his mind. Granted the visual contradiction manifest here, the quoted words of Geoffrey Dutton, further crowding the surface in the bottom left hand corner, throw their weight behind the bold explicit capitals rather than the vague, Triffid-like thing.