From his exile in North Africa, the narrator raves and rages against his beloved Spain and forms an obsessive identification with Count Julian, the great traitor, who opened Spain to the Moorish invasion and 800 years of Islamic influence. He dreams that, in another invasion of his homeland, there will be total destruction of the ethos and myths central to Hispanic identity. Count Julian is the central novel in a trilogy that includes Marks of Identity and Juan the Landless.