"
It seems to me-and I no longer claim objective recall-that the morning on which I first arrived in Quettopolis looked much like this morning just breaking. One year ago. I was right at least that it was my last job
."
The Moufet Institute's mission is to protect endangered lepidoptera, but its experts are becoming bystanders, sidelined by the 'Players' and their pursuit of corporate self-perpetuation. Cuffe, recruited to create the rhetoric to underpin the new corporate vision, finds her inital confidence eroded by the peculiarities of the Institute and its environment-the punitive
process
with its absent defendant, the disregarded but omnipotent Registry, the quarterly Hunt, the Forest as it re-asserts itself.
Then the Institute is galvanised by the discovery of a breeding pair of a rare moth species in a country in the throes of a military coup. The Institute in turn is riven by competing ambitions-the scientific specialists trying to save the moths, the Players trying to save the goose that lays the golden eggs. Meanwhile, no-one has been paying enough attention to what is happening in the basement...
Hollowmen
is an intricate and unsettling work, its shifting, interleaved narratives by turns ironic, lyrical, witty, and savage.