The novel’s epigraph opens with questions about the nature of time and matter and asks what the absence of past, present, and future tenses in the Hopi language says about time, grounding the novel in paired ideas about flaws in the traditional, “Western” understanding of time and space. This introduction primes the reader to distrust these conventional, linear perspectives and suggests that stories cannot accurately relay information about “true” reality. Jordan’s first-person narrative directly follows this prompt, rejecting a factual account of his life in favor of the “journeys I wish to record. Not the ones I made, but the ones I might have made” (2). This metafictional declaration establishes that the story will prioritize subjective, imagined experience over verifiable history. By dismissing “diaries and maps and log-books” (2), Jordan signals that his project is one of Reclaiming Agency Through Storytelling, focusing on the unwritten and the unseen. The comparison of his own life to a letter written in invisible ink reinforces this aim, suggesting that true meaning lies in the “life flaring up undetected” (2) between reality and imagination. This approach suggests that all of Jordan’s stories could be true, but it equally casts doubt that any of them are true.

The Dog-Woman’s immense size is a constant and visceral rejection of societal norms. In her account of outweighing an elephant named Samson and sending him flying into the sky, her body becomes a source of magical, world-altering power. This fantastical event illustrates Physical Power as a Tool of Defiance. In a 17th-century world where female value is tied to daintiness and beauty, her “hideous” appearance, also tied to hygiene, is a form of passive resistance. She wields her body actively, threatening to smother Thomas Johnson in her breasts and nearly strangling her Puritan neighbor. Her size is an embodiment of her untamable spirit, a spirit directly opposed to the rising Puritan austerity of the English Civil War era. Her Royalist sympathies are reflected in her very being; she is grand, excessive, and full of life, a physical rebuke to the “grey suits” of her enemies. This characterization is complicated by the motif of weight and lightness; despite her physical mass, she claims she can “melt into the night as easily as a thin thing” (7), suggesting the subversive power of difference. Although her size marks her as “other” to the people around her, this difference also grants a kind of invisibility gained by living on the fringes of society.

The novel’s structure, which alternates between Jordan’s and the Dog-Woman’s first-person accounts, creates two distinct but interwoven realities. Jordan’s narration is lyrical, abstract, and focused on his inner world, describing fantastical cities and suspended houses. The Dog-Woman’s voice is earthy, pragmatic, and rooted in the physical grime of 17th-century London, though her reality is just as prone to the miraculous. Where Jordan traces “the lineaments of my own face opposite me” (2) in the fog, the Dog-Woman recalls finding him in the “slime by the river” (3). This narrative duality is the novel’s primary method for demonstrating that truth is subjective and constructed through storytelling. They are both authoritative storytellers of their own equally valid, overlapping yet distinct realities. This structure reflects the epigraph’s challenge to linear time and singular reality, suggesting that multiple truths can exist simultaneously, a core tenet of postmodern thought.

The motif of journeys and maps is central to the novel’s exploration of reality, covering both physical travel and imaginative discovery. Jordan’s “first sail” (6) is a vision inspired by the sight of a banana, the first of its kind in England. The fruit becomes a symbol of an alternate reality of “deep blue waters against a pale shore” (6) and an emblem of a world larger than the one he knows. This internal journey is later reinforced by the historical figure John Tradescant, a renowned real-world explorer, who tells Jordan that the sea is vast and “every mapped-out journey contains another journey hidden in its lines” (17). Tradescant’s words validate Jordan’s own narrative project, suggesting that official records and maps tell only a fraction of the story. The Dog-Woman’s awe at the “shining water and the size of the world” (10) after her own sea voyage with Jordan contrasts her grounded, physical existence with the boundless possibilities that both real and imagined travel represents for her son.

The narrative fluidly shifts between the historical setting of London and surreal, fantasy landscapes that function as allegories for psychological and social realities. Jordan’s fantastical city where spoken words congeal into a physical cloud that must be scrubbed from the sky literalizes the tangible weight and impact of language. Similarly, his vision of a house whose residents live suspended over crocodile pits externalizes a state of ungrounded precarity. These imagined spaces hold the same narrative weight as the historical world of Puritans and Royalists, blurring the line between objective and subjective truth. Jordan’s search for the dancer leads him to another hidden world within the city: A network of sex workers who escape their locked quarters by floating down a stream to a convent. This secret collaboration between women from opposite ends of the social spectrum creates a powerful image of female solidarity operating beneath the surface of patriarchal society. His subsequent decision to remain disguised as a woman and take a job at a fish stall allows him to access women’s “private language” (27), further developing the novel’s project of feminist historiography by uncovering the coded systems women use to survive and resist.