Gordon Comstock has declared war on what he sees as an overarching dependence on money by leaving a promising job as a copywriter for an advertising company called New Albionat which he shows great dexterityand taking a low-paying job instead, ostensibly so he can write poetry. Coming from a respectable family background in which the inherited wealth has now become dissipated, Gordon resents having to work for a living. The war and the poetry, however, arent going particularly well and, under the stress of his self-imposed exile from affluence, Gordon has become absurd, petty and deeply neurotic. Comstock lives without luxuries in a bedsit in London, which he affords by working in a small bookshop owned by a Scot, McKechnie. He works intermittently at a magnum opus he plans to call London Pleasures, describing a day in London; meanwhile, his only published work, a slim volume of poetry entitled Mice, collects dust on the remainder shelf. He is simultaneously content with his meagre existence and also disdainful of it. He lives without financial ambition and the need for a good job, but his living conditions are uncomfortable and his job is boring.