The next two novels take a less pleasantly ironic tone than the previous trilogy: although the plots do not include as much horrific material as the mass killings of The Gates of Ivory, the narrator shows little indulgence towards any of the individual characters. The tone is detached and critical, and even pleasant descriptions, such as of the country house where the first scene opens, are qualified by negative aspects: the roses in the rose garden have a ‘rotting, fecal, fungal smell’ (WE 17), the little tender tendrils of the virginia creeper round the window embower a dead bird. Patsy, the owner of the house, is condemned for denying problems in her own family: ‘That's a bit harsh, but why not be harsh?’ (WE 121) the narrator adds robustly.

Margaret Drabble says that she was concerned that the reader should not be allowed to identify with any of the characters; the novel was conceived as a satire on bourgeois selfishness, and she did not wish their behaviour to be seen with sympathy. While trying to finish The Gates of Ivory she had said

In fact the novel illustrates what she had foreseen, ‘the near-impossibility of writing peaceful regional traditional rural fiction in a poisoned landscape of undrinkable water, over-fertilized soil, dangerous nuclear plants, and brain-mad cows’.

Thematically, the novel returns to Stephen's concern for the just society. Denied in The Gates of Ivory, the dream is attacked again in The Witch of Exmoor, but where the former novel glanced at the distorted and decayed attempts of the Khmer people to bring the dream into being, the latter keeps this ideal as a theoretical hypothesis, toyed with by the characters.

This theme determines the opening scene of the novel which depicts, not the Witch of Exmoor of the title, otherwise known as Frieda Haxby, but her three grown-up children (Daniel, Gogo and Rosemary), their spouses and children.