Abyssinian Chronicles explores the nature of the relationship between words, solid objects and postcolonial subjectivity. Fragile and distorted subjectivities emerge out of the allure of solid objects, of possessions, which beckon and tease and glitter in societies of great scarcity and poverty. The thread throughout the novel is the pivotal question of what is the nature of subject formation, within the particular power relationships that arise in this context of extreme material scarcity. It is a context within which despotism flourishes as the scarcity of goods drives ordinary people to feats of both extraordinary courage and violence, looting and questing. Or, as Achille Mbembe puts it in relation to the postcolony more broadly, there is a relationship ‘between subjection, the distribution of wealth and tribute, and the more general problem of the constitution of the postcolonial subject’ (2001: 24). As corruption, desire and struggle for power filters down, asserts Mbembe: ‘the masses join in the madness and clothe themselves in cheap imitations of power to reproduce its epistemology’ (133). Isegawa traces the life of Mugezi as he joins in the madness and then withdraws from it, over and over again, in a dizzying display of instability, hovering above the abyss, which gives the novel its title.

Mugezi is born in a Ugandan village, grows up in Kampala, is sent to boarding school at a seminary and eventually flies off to Holland. Mugezi's parents, strangely named Serenity and Padlock, raise their family and run their home as a dictatorship, one which mimics the military rule of Idi Amin. In Abyssinian Chronicles, dictatorship operates simultaneously on every level of life and seeps into the psyche of the individual.