McEwan frames his fiction like an actual memoir, beginning with a preface, using exact dates, and anchoring events in known history. The novel is however playing with being non-fiction in order to highlight the subjectivity and situatedness of all histories, both national and individual. Bernard and June's stories are in many ways incommensurable, not least because at the center of each is a firm and opposite idea about the nature of fact and truth, science and narrative, the spiritual and the material.

As each refutes and reconstructs the other's version, our assumptions, like Jeremy's, are undermined, and so is the moral weight we cannot help but attach to each version. Two startlingly vivid scenes, one involving a dragonfly and the other a scorpion, illuminate the difficulty of objective perception and demonstrate how the beauty and the malignity of the world, particularly where humans are involved, are often inseparable.

This novel would be a powerful tool for exploring narrative ethics, situated knowledge, and the relationship between abstract principles and concrete lived experience. Bernard is able to cling to the principles of socialism long after Stalinism has demonstrated its practical failure. Similarly, he persists in understanding what happened to June as figurative. Not having been there, he cannot grasp the concrete reality that is so unavoidably obvious to her.

He links the horror (the specifics of which we learn--if these are actual--only at the very end of the book) with Churchill's metaphor for depression, the "black dog." "June's idea," he tells Jeremy, "was that if one dog was a personal depression, two dogs were a kind of cultural depression, civilization's worst moods" (82). But for June, the dogs and what they signify are absolutely literal. They are starving animals that threaten her life, and worse. Jeremy, along with the reader, must decide whether the difference matters.