The journals of a club which called itself the Lunatic Asylum: a group of amiable eccentrics who spend their time trying to do the impossible. At first they are nothing more than that: four whimsical idiots with no sense of responsibility, clowning outrageously for the sake of clowning. But soon they begin to see themselves as men with a mission: for they find that they are the only people left in England who are still defending the individual soul against conformity, wealth, and the super-state.

As they find their buffoonery hemmed in more and more by official regulations, their pranks turn into a form of rebellion. The humor remains, but it takes on a purpose. And in the process, the tenuously connected stories turn into a novel. The book ends in a kind of crescendo of madness, which is at once a parable, and a clear call to arms (or at least a thought) for individuals in our Age of Conformity.