The protagonist, Father Latzer, a priest banished for doctrinal heresy to an isolated, backward mountain parish, struggles to achieve personal redemption by bringing salvation to his primitive, taciturn, rural flock. Their mute atavism is disturbed only by the local whore, Footloose, embodying all the forces against which the priest's reforming mission is directed. The action is set in a recognisable time and a landscape which, through the power of Casellas' language, is endowed with a complex poetic charge and is as compelling today as when it was written.