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 Albion — at which he shows great dexterity — and taking a low-paying job instead, ostensibly so that he can write poetry. Coming from a respectable family background in which the inherited wealth has been dissipated, Gordon resents having to work for a living. The "war" and the poetry are not going well and, under the stress of his "self-imposed exile" from affluence, Gordon has become absurd, pettyminded 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 on a magnum opus, a long poem that he plans to call London Pleasures; meanwhile, copies of his only published work, a slim volume of poetry entitled Mice, collect dust on the remainder shelf. He is simultaneously content with his meagre existence and disdainful of it. He lives without financial ambition or the need for a "good job", but his living conditions are uncomfortable and his job is boring.
Comstock is "obsessed" by what he sees as the pervasiveness of money (the "Money God", as he calls it) behind social relationships, feeling sure that women would find him more attractive if he was better off. At the beginning of the novel he senses that his girlfriend, Rosemary Waterlow, whom he met at New Albion and who continues to work there, is dissatisfied with him because of his poverty. An example of his financial embarrassment occurs when he is desperate for a pint of beer at his local pub, but has run out of money and is ashamed to cadge a drink off his fellow lodger, Flaxman.
One of Comstock's last remaining friends, Philip Ravelston, a Marxist who publishes a magazine called Anti-Christ, agrees with Comstock in principle, but is comfortably well-off himself. This causes strains when the practical miseries of Comstock's life become apparent. Ravelston does, however, endeavour to publish some of Comstock's work and his efforts, unbeknown to Comstock, resulted in Mice being published via one of his publisher contacts.
Gordon and Rosemary have little time together — she works late and lives in a hostel, and his "bitch of a landlady" forbids female visitors to her tenants. Then, one evening, having headed southward and having been thinking about "this women business" in general and Rosemary in particular, Gordon happens to see Rosemary in a street market. Rosemary refuses to have sex with him, but she wants to spend a Sunday with him, right out in the country, near Burnham Beeches. At their parting, as he takes the tram from Tottenham Court Road back to his bedsit, he is happy and feels that somehow it is agreed between them that Rosemary is going to be his mistress. However, what was intended as a pleasant day out away from London's grime turns into a disaster when, though they are hungry, they opt to pass by a "rather low-looking" pub, and then, not able to find another pub, are forced to eat an unappetising lunch at an overpriced fancy hotel. Gordon has to pay the bill with all the money he had set aside for their jaunt and worries about having to borrow money from Rosemary. Out in the countryside again, they are about to have sex for the first time when she violently pushes him back because he was not going to use contraception. He rails at her: "Money again, you see! ... You say you 'can't' have a baby. ... You mean you daren't; because you'd lose your job and I've got no money and all of us would starve."
Having sent a poem to an American publication, Gordon suddenly receives from them a cheque worth ten pounds, a considerable sum for him at the time (£10 in 1934 equates to £592.20 in 2023.[17]). He intends to set aside half for his sister Julia, who has always given him money and support. He treats Rosemary and Ravelston to dinner: it begins well, but deteriorates as Gordon, drunk, tries to force himself on Rosemary. She angrily rebukes him and leaves. Gordon continues drinking, drags Ravelston with him to visit a pair of prostitutes, and ends up broke and in a police cell the next morning. He is guilt-ridden over the thought of being unable to pay his sister back the money he owes her, because his five-pound note has been given to, or stolen by, one of the prostitutes.
After Gordon makes a brief appearance before the magistrate Ravelston pays Gordon's fine, but a reporter writes about the case in the local paper. The ensuing publicity results in Gordon losing his job at the bookshop. As he searches for another job, his life and his poetry stagnate. After living with his friend Ravelston, Gordon ends up working, this time in Lambeth, at another bookshop and lending library owned by the sinister Mr Cheeseman, where he is paid thirty shillings a week, ten shillings less than he was earning before. Yet Gordon is satisfied: "The job would do. There was no trouble about a job like this; no room for ambition, no effort, no hope." Determined to sink to the lowest level of society, Gordon takes a furnished bed-sitting-room in a filthy alley parallel to Lambeth Cut. Both Julia and Rosemary, "in feminine league against him", seek to get Gordon to go back to his "good" job at the New Albion advertising agency.
Rosemary, having avoided Gordon for some time, suddenly comes to visit him one day at his dismal lodgings. Despite his terrible poverty and shabbiness, they have sex, but it is without any emotion or passion. Later, Rosemary drops in one day unexpectedly at the library, having not been in touch with Gordon for some time, and tells him that she is pregnant. Since she and Gordon reject the idea of an abortion (which would have been both illegal and dangerous at that time), Gordon is presented with the choice between leaving Rosemary to a life of social shame at the hands of her family or marrying her and returning to a life of respectability by taking back the job at the New Albion agency that he once so deplored.
Gordon chooses Rosemary and respectability, and experiences relief at having abandoned his anti-money principles with such comparative ease. After two years of abject failure and poverty, he throws his poetic work London Pleasures down a drain, marries Rosemary, resumes his advertising career and plunges into a campaign to promote a new product to prevent foot odour. In his lonely walks around mean streets, aspidistras seem to appear in every lower-middle class window. As the book closes, Gordon wins an argument with Rosemary to install an aspidistra in their new small but comfortable flat off the Edgware Road.
