Victorian that he was, Wagner could not help viewing Shakespeare's rowdy, devious Elizabethans in a moralistic but sentimental light, sometimes with disarming results.
In a broad sweep, she ranges from the sometimes vicious territorial disputes between rival lemur troops (described with excitement and, at times, sentimental anthropomorphism), to the history of the mica mines and sisal plantations that drove the island's economy after the second world war.