Take a normal couple haunted by a real question (why did their child lose her life in a meaningless accident?) and then expect anything to happen and the oddest characters to turn up. An ill-assorted party comes together and sets off on trips through time and space in a rickety camper van. Their adventures include a meeting with a domineering and unstable Old Testament God, another with Prometheus away in his mountain fastness still rooting for the human cause, a look at the birth of the universe, and then increasingly dangerous and treacherous battles with an agent of an obscure, highly bureaucratised power set on thwarting their attempts to solve the question of what it all means. For that, no less, is the perilous quest on which the travellers are engaged, a quest which, after a trial by ordeal in hell, comes to a gripping climax in a virtual version of Hampshire as the elusive fourth beginning of the title eventually takes shape.

Throughout, adventures tumble one into other, inset with jokes and reflections about language and thought and sharp-edged arguments about the limitations, not to say uselessness, of traditional ways, religious and scientific, of seeing time, the world and human history.  Certainly a book to be avoided by those of a nervous intellectual disposition.