The dominant characters, Kate and Baba, express two fundamentally different views of life. As Edna O’Brien has said, she set out to create a woman who was “my own and my country’s view of what an Irish woman should be and one who would undermine every piece of protocol and religion and hypocrisy that there was.” What might have been schematic in presentation becomes highly realistic because each character’s limitations are happily compensated for by the other. Alone, neither woman seems able to find a satisfactory relationship. Yet they are united in their attraction to men and in their willingness to make their contact with males the main purpose of their lives.

Baba’s brashness saves Kate, for a time, from wallowing in romanticism. To be a romantic is not necessarily to know how to love or how to please others. Baba, for all of her brutishness, has a knack for making contact, for thrusting Kate into a larger world that she might not otherwise experience. Yet Baba hardly has all the answers for Kate, since Baba’s crude conviviality prevents any deep appreciation of life. She cannot imagine the lives of others, cannot read Anna Karenina, and, therefore, is unable to make sense of her own experience.

Both characters are victims of patterns they are unable to break: Kate cannot resist doomed affairs with married men, and Baba turns every relationship into profit for herself. Baba connives for herself, while Kate contents herself with the ready-made lives of others. Baba has no compunctions, while Kate does penance for her sins.

The men in Kate’s and Baba’s world are not so clearly revealed, and in Kate’s case, the men she chooses to embrace are all surrogates for her own failure of a father. While Baba has the practical—if unromantic—sense to wed Frank Durack, a man who seemingly has only wealth to recommend him, Kate repeatedly gets herself involved in relationships that are doomed to failure. Each man seems further and further removed from Jacques de Maurier, Mr. Gentleman, her first love and childhood ideal. (As she grows older, Kate finds that he bears little resemblance to what she once imagined him to be.) Eugene Gaillard, like Mr. Gentleman, is a much older man of French extraction; it is appropriate that Kate’s primary lovers are “foreigners,” for she never learns to understand these beings who seem almost to inhabit another world. Like Mr. Gentleman, Eugene represents another doomed attempt by Kate to work out her bitterly unsatisfactory relationship with her father while she repeats her mother’s fatal pattern.