Professor Gervase Fen is in Devon working on his masterpiece critique of the modern novel, but keeps getting distracted - by the local animals (several pigs, a mildly insane cat, a horse with sleeping sickness), by the spectacular failures of the local electrical board, by the vicar's practical jokes, by the retired major yearning for another jolly war. Oh, and by the dismembered body, found in a nearby field, whose head keeps turning up in the most unlikely places.