This mystery set mainly in London and New York centers upon a film made by two Americans living in England, Dagger DiGorro and his friend Cartwright. Certain forces are threatened by the film, by Cartwright’s diary of its shooting, and by his inquiry into why it was apparently destroyed. His family in danger now as well, Cartwright revises his recollection of the actual scenes shot in the film, as bits from diary, memory, and film come together, hiding or revealing one another; and in the process he reconstructs for us not only the film but the rich and peculiar reality of his life abroad.

Corsica, Wales, Stonehenge, a country house and its rainy patio where an umbrella shelters a deserted TV receiving Apollo 15 pictures from the moon — these scenes turn back upon Cartwright’s ambiguous relations with his wife, Lorna, who has at last managed to settle into English life, and with his son Will, an English schoolboy, and with Lorna’s best friend, the fascinating and difficult Tessa. His daughter Jenny, meanwhile, has become involved in the very network of forces the film threatens. Above all, we see Cartwright tramping the Outer Hebrides answering death with death, shadowed at Chartres, finding his perilous way over the map of New York City past and present; Cartwright alone and totally connected on the lookout for a sign from his people or a sound from his unknown enemy. A breathless rhythm of transatlantic flights drives the story through random and political violence. At the crux is Cartwright’s strangely increasing power — compounded of courage, luck, compulsiveness, and the sense that he has been inserted into a vast collaboration.

What the Druid Andsworth has told him — about the human body, computer circuits, new forms of telepathic contact — combines with Cartwright’s technological imagination and survival instinct to carry his actions beyond pessimism and grotesque comedy, easy or tragic endings, to a series of haunting climaxes. One by one they bring us closer to this businessman, husband, father, filmmaker, visionary, and to truths vagrant and compelling about the suppositions to which we anchor our lives.