Sometimes pretending to be a terrorist isn't as easy as it sounds.
"Bombs are messy, Fent. It's the nature of the beast."
"I thought you said we were gentlemen bandits though."
"Within reason, Fent. Within the confines of a terrorist framework, obviously. Take that principle too far and we wouldn't be able to kill anybody at all ..."
On an unnamed university campus late in the 20th century, a young man named Fenton Bland joins a society of student Maoists in order to get near the girl he loves. But the girl turns out to belong to the chief Maoist - and HE turns out to harbour alarming aspirations in the field of revolutionary terror. And so Fenton, wearing a forcibly grown beard, finds himself propelled into a bizarre covert world of death lists, backyard bomb labs, untraceable handguns, and attempted homicides of wildly varying quality - a world in which he must either lose the girl forever or else participate, perhaps very soon, in a successful terrorist atrocity ...