Set immediately before and during the Great War, Some Do Not... is a tale of social cruelty among the English upper classes that pits real honour against shameless duplicity and subjects its principal characters to extremes of mental suffering that appear to be analogous to the (never directly described) physical horrors of the actual fighting. The plot revolves around the mores and desires of the intellectually brilliant but impossibly high-minded Christopher Tietjens, his icy wife Sylvia, and Valentine Wannop, a poor but well-educated young woman who loves Christopher, and is in many ways his moral and intellectual equal. In its time, the novel was unusual for its daring, often disorienting, use of flashbacks within scenes, for its scrambling together of interior and spoken dialog, and for the demand it places on the reader to interpret what is "really" taking place on the basis of slender and widely dispersed clues. As Julian Barnes has written "It will be a very rare reader who doe
