Lepidopterist Robert Gilmerton is recovering from his war wounds in a convalescent home in Dorset in 1916. He is writing a pillow book, designed to be read in ten-minute sections. One day, he finds and catches a Lobster Moth which deceives its predators not by camouflage but by appearing as two creatures: a large ant climbing atop a fat grub. Interspersed among Gilmerton's passages are the musings of actor David Orr, some eighty years later. Orr lies awake in bed one night, next to his sleeping pregnant wife, going over in his mind how to play Gilmerton in a film, 'Almost A Hero'. Through the two men's meditations - on metamorphosis, acting and mimicry, Shakespeare, cinema and biography, anatomy, war - an absorbing attempt is made to grasp the nature of perception.
