But either way, when it's done well, as those two writers do it, it's satisfying muddle for the reader.
Life's a muddle, an only partially successful attempt to impose order upon disorder.
We can't really know what's going to happen next, and often we don't know the reasons for what happened before. Most often, there are no reasons. The perfect conditions, in other words, for mystery, as William Boyd has learned well. We are faced with the problem of error. The person chiefly faced with this unsettling condition of life, this problem of error, is Lorimer Black, the armadillo of the title.