Arac, a naive house spider is washed
down a plughole, emerging in The Wide Wold for the first time.
His thinking has been much influenced by his experiences in House:
coping with humans Jace and Trace and their son Gary, and trying
to make sense of information gained through their bathroom radio.
He meets Nid, also an ex-House spider but very woldly wise. Nid
befriends Arac and teaches him the ways of the Wold, helping him
to build his own website, select prey and deal with the challenges
of the wild Wold.
As Arac learns the facts of spider life, he discovers the hard
way that spiders are fatally selfish creatures ("Love thy
neighbour? Eat thy neighbour, more like", as Nid says), and
that Nid's friendship is not what it seems.
The comedy of their relationship is largely derived from their
contrasting takes on life. Arac struggles to make sense of the
abstract concepts explored in the radio broadcasts he has heard,
such as cricket and the internet.
Nid, meanwhile, is supremely confident in his knowledge, also
gained largely in House, where he was an avid watcher of natural
history programmes on television. For example, Nid knows a great
deal more about his prey than how it tastes: he is aware of the
defining characteristics of many species and knows their Latin
names; he has a detailed technical awareness of insect phenomena
such as stridulation.
The sharing of Arac's and Nid's respective fields of knowledge
take them deep into metaphysical territory as they consider questions
such as whether brain size and intelligence are correlated and
the difference between the brain and the mind.
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