In the end, ruin comes, as we know from the start it must, but without any apparent cause or meaning. And there is the tuatara, a primitive, three-eyed lizard (real tuatara have only two, and come from New Zealand.), which stands as a sort of ironic observer until it is brutally killed. There is the armless Torso, for example, and the delicate Glass-Girl. The Tabernacle has room for others besides the Gold-Washers. Rather we see their strange daily activities: Pontinus, who seeks to complete the Great Work of alchemy the Executioner, who sculpts things the Customs Man, who dissects bodies and so on. The Tabernacle was built by and for a cult (though one with no faith to speak of) called the Gold-Washers, because they pan for gold to support their Tabernacle and themselves - though, come to think of it, we never actually see any of them doing it.
The rest of the novel explores, though it does not exactly tell, the history of the Tabernacle. It has a plot, or at least the appearance of one: in the beginning, the (nameless, as always) narrator and two companions explore the ruins of a Tabernacle, outside what we will come to know as the City of the Golden Reed. This third novel in volume 1 of Krohn's Collected Fiction continues the overall weirdness of the first two. The unnamed city of Dona Quixote (which may be Helsinki?) and the titular Tainaron are the real foci of those two books. She writes more about places than characters, but what she writes are not travelogues but novels.
Finnish writer Leena Krohn is sui generis.
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