A five-hundred word synopsis:

Mr. Air, that delicate degenerate, has taken it upon himself to return to history.  Naturally; this means he is forced to burn down London again, the little historical scamp that he is.  Following, this learned man, is a small clump of shoots that makes up his grassroots gang, known only as the small mass, and highly defective, little orphans of another age.  From this they are propelled towards their destination with a series of events along the way; a roadside lecture, a deep walk into woods, window shopping and door to door selling, with songs alongside the continual, habitual, killing of animals and spreading of seeds. 

Air is a grotesque, drunk on fiction, mad on idea, and with a pitiless sincerity.  His group, because he must have group to be leader, travel the roads from the sea into the denser blocks of bricks of the cities, raving and ranting the whole long way.  His orphans are dedicated to this authoritative litter picker as they have being changed by him from pathos to bathos, no longer poor but powerful, and disabled as they are their leader’s poetry overcomes them.   

They are small people with big ideas, powerful enough to generate enough motivation for a hundred miles, involved with incidents, events and sightings turning the ordinary into the unpalatably poetic with their single touches.  I can’t really approve a wandering character such as he, nor of any of his deplorable actions and there is at least one of three places I think he ought to be in, but what can I do?  He’s there; I just hope he’s not there for long.

But do they get to London?  Only to a London of a different type and scale…Bristol.  After climbing him up so far what happens to the climax now there’s only the view of another hill to scramble up?  Something miraculous.  He throws away the board he had pinned his hopes on and he goes to the theatre…with his group and initiates them into Small Square of play and the lights descend and darkened.         

Maybe this story is short on summary but I can’t write that I haven’t tried.  Oh it’s irritating enough, these words, so maybe I should be thanked for making these annoyances acceptable acute.  There, that’s enough…