Lucas and Angela seem like a regular domestic pair. They're a young couple in their early twenties, but they act much older, and though they love each other, there's a gaping distance between them. Lucas thinks of jokes or plays-on-words that might lighten the mood of their conversations, then dismisses them all, because he can't decode Angela enough to know if she'll like what he has to say. Angela's not happy, and he isn't sure what will make her happy. It's easy to wonder why, if Angela's so bored, she doesn't find something to do with her life, but the scary truth is, she can't. It's a slightly-in-the-future dystopian setting where women are sequestered in their homes and men run what's left of the world after most of the population has been killed or imprisoned by the government.
It's a scary world for women. Lucas notes that ladies' bathrooms are obsolete because women aren't allowed to work outside their homes, which makes all public bathrooms into mens' bathrooms by default. Women may leave their houses, but only to visit other women that they're related to, so they claim relation to a large number of people in order to move about more freely: "Men made the laws. Women set out to exploit the loopholes in them" (pg 18). But for all the tiny loopholes, they still have to wear veils in public and are still undervalued and very easily exploited. When Angela receives an old journal from Jesmond, Lucas' wild godfather, she's thrilled to read the love letters and snippets of poetry inside, because it's the first time another adult has spoken to her through the written word and reached out to her as an intelligent equal.
Early on, the horror of the setting is slightly lessened by the injection of humor. Lucas works as an official with the Ministry, where the public servants have titles like the Inspector of Cats and Inspector of Hedgerows and Grass Verges. Lucas himself is the Inspector of Miracles, the only one in the known world, though he hasn't yet discovered a miracle. The office scenes can be funny because even though this is a horrible misogynistic dystopia, everyone's very polite and understated. It's awful, then it's hilarious, then it's awful again. Lucas seems quite sympathetic, but then he has darker moments of power abuse, followed by moments of clarity: "He'd assumed that men were more intelligent than women but then he'd never been forced by law to sit around the house all day waiting for something to happen" (pg 34). A big part of the story revolves around his investigation of Christina, a little girl who might possibly be miraculous.
Angela wants to move away to Cornwall, a freer place that has taken on a fantasy glow in their imaginations, and Lucas considers the possibility. But as Lucas gets increasingly paranoid (with good reason) Angela has to decide how committed she is to escaping, with or without him. After the midpoint of the novel, the horrors increase and the reader is left to contemplate a beautifully written, and almost unbearably sad, depiction of a society's downfall.
