Jenner Ransfield, a man endowed with a brilliant academic mind, personal magnetism, but no self-control, tormented by demons of Lawrentian sexuality and Calvinist upbringing, fumes out his existence on a farm in Somerset, teaching at a lowly Agricultural College, and sporadically tyrannising his family - his sad, suppressed wife Elspeth, who lives inside a romantic ballad and thinks of Jenner as her demon lover, and his two extraordinary children - May Margaret who carves wonders in wood that no man must see, and Robin who lives to keep the World Wide Web out of the Devil's hands.
Into this dark world beams Theodora Potts, blonde curls, white smile, pretty and neat as a sea-horse, an Australian veterinary scientist who knows it all. She intends to study the harvesting of bull semen with the great Dr Ransfield, but nothing goes according to her plan, from the moment there slides into her life and her bed Fergal, an urban warrior whose special form of protest is to hang naked in tree-tops. The cast is now complete for a black comedy of almost Shakespearian richness.
