In the earlier book The Phenomenon, Jack at age 28 has had only one partner. Circumstances force him into an eighteen-year quest to find out what he really wants. 

The Standard newspaper in Nairobi suggests such a search might be dangerous: “People get married when they are not ready for it, resulting into most of them thinking that they have selected wrong lovers. Such behaviour has proved so serious that some men have lost their private parts when they are found red handed making love with married women.”

Jack is less concerned about castration than about painful rejection. Based on sad experience, he should also have been concerned about being approached by women who are a little mad, as they seem to be his “type”.

Jack likes women and women like him, but he has no idea of how to form sexual relationships, apparently giving the wrong signals entirely. He has found it necessary to study seducers, men he has a low opinion of, to learn to interest the opposite sex. Somewhere along the way, he develops the skill. 

Up till this point, women have had no interest in him romantically. Now they do, partly because of his success in the workplace and the extra confidence and status this brings. And partly because Carmen is not around, painful though this is for them both. And so he finds his way onto the Mating Mound.

By the time of Buffalo Gals, Jack is able to attract women but he has little control over whom he attracts. He can actually be a nuisance, as he inadvertently leads women to expect more – Agnes the PMO, Magdalena of the waterfall and Ashley in Venice. Then there is Maggie in the bar, and a few other women there who try for his attention. His worst offence is with Sorina, a good woman who rightly expects a romance or even an “orgy”, but has to settle for making out in an Irish bar in Budapest.

Jack excuses misleading these women, as he believes he has an inviolable rule: he will not, cannot go with someone he thinks he will not be good for. Though why he thought he would be good for Njoki or Maria Fuchs is unfathomable – he isn’t.

He finally completes his quest in a moment of epiphany at a hanging swamp on the side of Ben Nevis. It should not have taken him so long, so much pain and so many false starts to find out the obvious: that what he wanted was what he already had.