Its characters are members of a complexly inter-related Anglo-Irish family who differ in their religious affiliations and in their views on the relations between England and Ireland.
As the story begins Andrew Chase-White is a young Second lieutenant in King Edward's Horse, spending a leave with his family in Ireland before accompanying his regiment to France.
His marriage to Kathleen proving unhappy, he reconnected with Millie and became a frequent visitor at her house, where he has the status of a tolerated relation.
They are freed just as the insurrection is starting and the novel ends with Andrew and Cathal observing the beginning of the rising in front of the General Post Office.
[4] There is considerable debate and discussion about Irish history and nationalist politics throughout the novel, chiefly carried on by Christopher Bellman and Pat and Cathal Dumay.
[5]: 13 Incest is an important theme in the novel, and a common topic in Murdoch's fiction, in which a "quasi-incestuous competition of members of one family for a single beloved is ubiquitous" as are actual incestuous relationships.
[3]: 140 Both Pat and Andrew are virgins who feel "a fear of sex and a fixation on long-suffering mothers", which the critic Declan Kiberd notes is a "complex of attitudes which was by the 1960s being recognized as a pathology".
[6] The novel has been characterized as part of Murdoch's "romantic phase" in which she was concerned with "the responsibilities, impositions and ties of marriage, or, in the case of The Red and the Green, of religious vocation".
[7] In this case Barnabas Drumm, while pining for Millie and resenting his virtuous wife Kathleen, is unable to give up his dream of a religious calling, and feels himself to be "by vocation a failed priest".
[4] Christopher Ricks wrote in the New Statesman that Murdoch's attempt to "combine a flatly faithful account of what happened in Dublin in 1916 with a love-imbroglio" showed "honourable and gigantic ambition" but resulted in a failed novel in which the "sexual permutation game both withers and demeans Irish history".
Ricks argued that her "clockwork" characters and contrived plot resulted in fiction that failed to live up to the demands of her own theories of literature.
[10] Another New York Times reviewer disagreed, calling The Red and the Green a "brilliant and entertaining" novel with a "magnificently wayward heroine" in Millie Kinnard and a "style that somehow blends the methods of Sartre and Stendhal".
The review praised her descriptive writing but called her characters "sexually confused, tortured by unexplained feelings of guilt, and totally ineffectual and unbelievable as human beings".