The old men at the zoo

Simon Carter, secretary of the London Zoo, has accepted responsibility and power to the prejudice of his gifts as a naturalist. But power is more than just the complicated game played by the old men at the zoo in the satirical first half of this novel: it lies very near to violence, and in the second half real life inexorably turns to fantasy - the fantasy of war. This tense and at times brutal story offers the healing relationship between man and the natural world as a solution for the power dilemma.