Barney Fugleman has two major preoccupations in life: sex and literature. He is obsessed by the life and work of a man hailed by many as a genius of the nineteenth century — and by Barney as a ‘prurient little Victorian ratbag’. This curious propulsion drives him out of Finchley, and out of the life he shares with Sharon and her ‘rampant marvellings’, to Cornwall. There he offends serious ramblers with his slip-on snakeskin shoes, fur coat and antagonism to all things green and growing as he stomps the wild Atlantic cliffs on long, morbid walks, tampering with the truth, tangling with the imperious Camilla — and telling a riotous tale.