"The Wanting Seed" Book from the same author as clockwork orange

The novel begins by introducing the two protagonists: Tristram Foxe, a history teacher, and his wife, Beatrice-Joanna, a homemaker. They have recently suffered through their young son's death.

Throughout the first portion of the novel, overpopulation is depicted through the limitation and reuse of materials, and extremely cramped living conditions.

There is also active discrimination against heterosexuals, homosexuality being encouraged as a measure against overpopulation. Self-sterilization is also encouraged.

One of the major conflicts of the novel is between Tristram and his brother, Derek. Very much alike at first, Derek chose a different path from Tristram and pretends to be homosexual while in public, to help his career as a government official. Derek has an affair with Beatrice-Joanna, and when she forgets to take her State-provided contraceptives she becomes illegally pregnant. She has sex with her husband, Tristram, and his brother, Derek, within a 24-hour time span, thus the paternity of her twin boys is uncertain.

Life changes as the largely homosexual police ('greyboys') become more repressive, and a mysterious blight spreads across the world threatening food supplies. Tristram is arrested after getting unintentionally mixed up in a protest and spends the next section of the novel in jail.

While he is imprisoned, formerly repressed religion begins to bloom, fertility rituals are endorsed, and the structure of society, as well as government, undergoes radical transformation. Cannibalism is openly practised in much of England. Beatrice-Joanna has run away, and is staying with her sister and brother-in-law in the countryside on their farm, where the blight is affecting even their chickens. She stays there until she delivers her twin sons, when members of the Population Police arrives to take her and her children to the city.

With the help of his cellmate, Tristram escapes and tries to rejoin his wife. He travels across England to his sister-in-law's farm. He is so desperate for food that he briefly joins "a dining club", a rather chaotic affair which provides food (composed of murdered human beings) and orgiastic behavior for its village membership.

His journey eventually takes him to a sort of soup kitchen, where he enlists in the newly recreated army, which has replaced the (largely eaten) greyboys and Population Police. This is the third section of the novel. In the army, Tristram is shipped to an unknown location to fight in the war, though the reader later discovers that he is in Ireland. In his first battle he discovers that there is no real enemy; the purpose of the "war" is population control by winnowing out the socially expendable. Companies, led by junior officers trained to recite patriotic verse, are sent to a made-up Western Front style battlefield to kill each other. Every other member of his unit is shot down as they emerge from their trench, but Tristram slips through the barbed wire surrounding the miniature war zone and begins his journey back to England.

Escaping back into general society, Tristram finds a new job. In his absence, Beatrice-Joanna has been moved to live with Derek. She has also brought the twins (it is implied that Derek is their father) and named them after her two brotherly lovers, Derek and Tristram Foxe.

At the last scene Tristram meets again his wife at Brighton pier.

The book closes with a translation of the final stanza of the French poet Paul Valéry's poem 'Le Cimetière marin'. The quotation clarifies the book's themes: