Set on the Niagara frontier in the final days of the American Revolution, The Life and Times of Captain N. sees the revolutionary new world order from the standpoint of the losers. Hendrick Nellis, a Tory guerrilla, has also been a redeemer of whites abducted by Indians. His son Oskar finds himself sometimes allied with the Indians, sometimes at war with them. Hendrick kidnaps Oskar for the British army, and Oskar, haunted by dreams and by books, is the teller of the tale, trespassing into the no-man's-land where the delirium of combat drives races, genders, languages, and ideas into a primeval frenzy.