As is usual in Powell's fiction, the settings are often restaurants, parties, and private apartments (though a Berlin film studio also figures significantly), with social behaviour in such surroundings the sustained focus of comically critical and detailed attention.

Of Powell's pre-war novels, Agents and Patients is most insistently focused on the questions of what one wants from life and how one might recognize moments when such desires have been achieved, even when the results are unexpected.

The “two knaves” bring Blore-Smith to art galleries, to restaurants, to Paris—at each stage extracting both money and entertainment from their ‘patient’.

Blore-Smith falls in love with Maltravers’ wife, Sarah (a motoring enthusiast), becomes entangled with Mrs Mendoza (Mendie), whose flower shop, la cattleya, evokes Proust, and eventually travels with Maltravers and Chipchase to Berlin, where he observes first-hand the workings of the cinema.

The novel remains Burtonesque, clearly showing that the persistent belief that life does have something else to offer, no matter what one may currently have, is the essence of melancholy.