This was just a really pulpy, trashy Sword and Sorcery novel -- OR WAS IT? It's actually a weird postmodern discussion of symbolism, imperialism, capitalism, and slavery. The last chapters are fake academics discussing the preceding novel as though it resulted in an ancient manuscript, noting the delicacies of translation.

At one point, there's a conversation between two characters about religion, and it's completely elided. Instead, there is a paragraph about how religion world building makes us assume that the characters' "relationship with their metaphysics" is different from our own, providing an inappropriate explanation for other elements of culture.