It is the winter of 2008, and things are not going well for the Big Guy, a helium magnate and behind-the-scenes Republican powerbroker. The GOP has lost the White House to someone who is repeatedly referred to in the Big Guy’s circles as an ‘African’ president. His wife, Charlotte, is immured sine die in the Betty Ford Center; his daughter Meghan is writing long and, you’ve got to assume, deeply unwelcome letters to the parents of a murdered child, having caught a glimpse of what she fancied to be the face of evil while AWOL from boarding school on the back of her beloved horse Ranger.

Almost as much to distract himself from his family travails as to salvage what’s left of the American Dream, the Big Guy has begun to put together a kind of paramilitary political action committee, a small, all-male, tight-knit sodality of plutocrats, futurologists, deep-staters, ideas guys and wet-job enthusiasts sworn to wrestle the republic off the primrose path to socialism – to break America in order to remake her as something more closely resembling the vision of the Founding Fathers (another tight-knit sodality of old white guys, of course). Over long bull sessions involving manly banter, occasional gunfire, enormous cigars and fine, albeit generally American, wines, tactics are thrashed out, if not quite yet a strategy: obfuscation, media manipulation, something to do with Big Data. Funds will be moved offshore (Switzerland is preferred to the more arriviste Cayman Islands) and kept in a state of readiness. Soldiers of fortune will be made available further down the line (at a very reasonable ‘$1,200 a day per man’) should things turn ugly. Members of the inner circle will enjoy privileged access to the USA’s doubtless well-appointed nuclear bunkers. The Big Guy commissions a set of golden tiepins so that the brethren might be known to one another.

The Unfolding is plotted so neatly – with a timeline running from election to inauguration, a party at the start and the end, the casting of Meghan’s first vote heralding the end of various forms of innocence, big set pieces and revelations centred on Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year,