The cannibals are the art collectors riding first class to an archaeological dig in Teheran. As a group they represent the values of art over life, and yet they show the limits of this view, since art has not improved or enlightened them. They know much but understand little; their interest is not in the art itself but the "collecting," with value placed not upon aesthetics but upon dollars. Replaced by their artifacts in the trade, they have subsumed life to "things."

More real, because more human, are the Missionaries — the members of a fact-finding committee investigating prison conditions in Iran. Humanists all, they value people over things and become the principal narrators: the two churchmen, the two academics as McCarthy had drawn in earlier novels, a female college President with her "screech" and a tweedy male "specialist," the two politicians, one Dutch and the other a...