4 ideas
In the last volume of the trilogy, the narrator who has spent the earlier books compiling a 'History of Bestiality' from courtroom records turns to European colonial conquest. He finds these crimes differ from the ones he clerked because no court ever tried them.
When a people is annihilated, its testimony dies with it, and the only surviving record is written by the perpetrators. The victims' absence from the archive is therefore not a gap in the history but the final stage of the crime. A culture that does not hear the silence of the exterminated will mistake the victors' account for the whole story.
The trilogy reads courts, law, and 'civilizing missions' as instruments that administer and legitimize violence rather than restrain it. The same society that prosecutes individual murderers carries out mass killing abroad under the name of progress, trade, or religion. Seen this way, the scale of legitimate violence far exceeds the scale of the crimes the system punishes.
The book abandons plot and character arc for an accumulation of documented cruelties, digressions, and confessions, framed as a 'protocol' or record rather than a story. The reader is left with the weight of the record instead of a resolution.