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Books : Fiction : Contemporary Fiction: 1970 Onwards : Authors A-Z : M : Mills, Magnus
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Building high-tension fencing with a couple of rural Scots louts--what could be a more likely premise for a black comedy? An eerie noir fable told in a grim, deadpan voice, The Restraint of Beasts tells the story of an English fence-builder promoted to foreman over two under-motivated labourers. They've just been sent out to fix a badly done fence when events go horribly awry--and not for the last time either. For the rest of the novel, as his charges drink, loaf and pound the occasional fence-post, events go badly amiss over and over again. In a sense, that's all you can truly rely on in Mills's fictional world. It is not giving away too much to say that if you hire these workers to assemble your high-tension fence, you'd best watch your back. Or your front, for that matter. And keep a firm eye on the skies, just in case.The team travels south to England, where they live out of a damp, cold caravan in the town of Upper Bowland. Here they soon find themselves at loggerheads with the sinister Hall brothers, whose business enterprises seem to combine fencing, butchering, sausage-making and the mysterious "school dinners". "We committed no end of good deeds!" cries John Hall. "Yet still we lost the school dinners! Always the authorities laying down some new requirement, one things after another! This time is seems we must provide more living space. Very well! If that's the way they want it, we'll go on building fences for ever if necessary! We'll build pens and compounds and enclosures! And we'll make sure we never lose them again!"
In between placing Kafkaesque obstacles in his narrator's path, Mills seeds his novel with small, darkly comic touches: Tam's father, whom we last see erecting a stockade round his house "to stop you from coming home any more"; the sound of Richie's Black Sabbath tapes "slowly being stretched in an under-powered cassette player"; the caravan's encroaching squalor; An Early Bath for Thompson, the book that Richie tries in vain to read when they run out of money for pubs. No doubt about it, this is a strange book that only grows stranger as it progresses; with any luck it augurs well for more brilliant, odd work from debut novelist Mills. --Mary Park
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Magnus Mills may have single-handedly invented a new fictional genre: the Kafkaesque novel of work. First, his Booker-shortlisted The Restraint of Beasts brought to fence building the kind of black humour found in a Coen brothers movie. Now, in All Quiet on the Orient Express, Mills turns his deadpan prose on some very odd jobs indeed. The unnamed narrator is on holiday for a few weeks, camping in the Lake District before beginning an extended journey to India. He sees no reason not to agree when the campground owner--the sinister Tommy Parker, who seems mainly to engage in "buying and selling"--asks him to help out with a simple chore. As this is a Magnus Mills novel, however, no chore can possibly be simple. Through error or bad luck, one task leads to another and the narrator quickly finds himself trapped by his own passivity and a very English reluctance to cause a fuss. Soon he's doing homework for Parker's daughter, being kicked on and off the darts team at the local pub and learning how to perform a series of menial jobs. ("Have you ever operated a circular saw?" "Driven a tractor before?" "What are you like with a hammer and nails?")There's a lot that's strange about this little town. Where have all the females gone? Why does everyone seem to think he should take over the town milk route? Why won't the shops stock his beloved baked beans? Both the grocer and the pub are oddly eager to let him run up tabs and there's no sign of payment from Tommy Parker. It seems, in fact, that the narrator's early suspicions have been fulfilled: "I'd inadvertently become his servant." Like the Hall brothers from The Restraint of Beasts, Parker is volatile, irrational and all-powerful--a primitive god ruling over his own creation. As the narrator falls further and further under his sway, All Quiet on the Orient Express becomes a striking allegory of labour and capital, purgatory and judgement, and the uncanniness of manual work. --Mary Park
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Novella-like in form, Magnus Mills' Three to See the King is an uneasy read that transports the reader to a unique fictional setting where the familiar is strangely unfamiliar. Known for his Kafka-esque nightmares, Mills tells the abstract fable of an unnamed man, living in isolation in a tin house, who must choose between a solitary existence and joining the mass exodus of his neighbours. Through simple, deadpan prose, a keen eye for human nature and abrasive wit, Mills not only captures the dull emptiness of the unimagined life but comments allegorically on solitude and society, religion and civilisation, labour and capital. Mills, whose other books include Booker-shortlisted The Restraint of Beasts and All Quiet on the Orient Express, is an absorbing, disturbing writer who is refining his observations with each new book. --Nicola Perry
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Magnus Mills may have single-handedly invented a new fictional genre: the Kafkaesque novel of work. First, his Booker-shortlisted The Restraint of Beasts brought to fence building the kind of black humour found in a Coen brothers movie. Now, in All Quiet on the Orient Express, Mills turns his deadpan prose on some very odd jobs indeed. The unnamed narrator is on holiday for a few weeks, camping in the Lake District before beginning an extended journey to India. He sees no reason not to agree when the campground owner--the sinister Tommy Parker, who seems mainly to engage in "buying and selling"--asks him to help out with a simple chore. As this is a Magnus Mills novel, however, no chore can possibly be simple. Through error or bad luck, one task leads to another and the narrator quickly finds himself trapped by his own passivity and a very English reluctance to cause a fuss. Soon he's doing homework for Parker's daughter, being kicked on and off the darts team at the local pub and learning how to perform a series of menial jobs. ("Have you ever operated a circular saw?" "Driven a tractor before?" "What are you like with a hammer and nails?")There's a lot that's strange about this little town. Where have all the females gone? Why does everyone seem to think he should take over the town milk route? Why won't the shops stock his beloved baked beans? Both the grocer and the pub are oddly eager to let him run up tabs and there's no sign of payment from Tommy Parker. It seems, in fact, that the narrator's early suspicions have been fulfilled: "I'd inadvertently become his servant." Like the Hall brothers from The Restraint of Beasts, Parker is volatile, irrational and all-powerful--a primitive god ruling over his own creation. As the narrator falls further and further under his sway, All Quiet on the Orient Express becomes a striking allegory of labour and capital, purgatory and judgement, and the uncanniness of manual work. --Mary Park
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Magnus Mills may have single-handedly invented a new fictional genre: the Kafkaesque novel of work. First, his Booker-shortlisted The Restraint of Beasts brought to fence building the kind of black humour found in a Coen brothers movie. Now, in All Quiet on the Orient Express, Mills turns his deadpan prose on some very odd jobs indeed. The unnamed narrator is on holiday for a few weeks, camping in the Lake District before beginning an extended journey to India. He sees no reason not to agree when the campground owner--the sinister Tommy Parker, who seems mainly to engage in "buying and selling"--asks him to help out with a simple chore. As this is a Magnus Mills novel, however, no chore can possibly be simple. Through error or bad luck, one task leads to another and the narrator quickly finds himself trapped by his own passivity and a very English reluctance to cause a fuss. Soon he's doing homework for Parker's daughter, being kicked on and off the darts team at the local pub and learning how to perform a series of menial jobs. ("Have you ever operated a circular saw?" "Driven a tractor before?" "What are you like with a hammer and nails?")There's a lot that's strange about this little town. Where have all the females gone? Why does everyone seem to think he should take over the town milk route? Why won't the shops stock his beloved baked beans? Both the grocer and the pub are oddly eager to let him run up tabs and there's no sign of payment from Tommy Parker. It seems, in fact, that the narrator's early suspicions have been fulfilled: "I'd inadvertently become his servant." Like the Hall brothers from The Restraint of Beasts, Parker is volatile, irrational and all-powerful--a primitive god ruling over his own creation. As the narrator falls further and further under his sway, All Quiet on the Orient Express becomes a striking allegory of labour and capital, purgatory and judgement, and the uncanniness of manual work. --Mary Park
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Magnus Mills may have single-handedly invented a new fictional genre: the Kafkaesque novel of work. First, his Booker-shortlisted The Restraint of Beasts brought to fence building the kind of black humour found in a Coen brothers movie. Now, in All Quiet on the Orient Express, Mills turns his deadpan prose on some very odd jobs indeed. The unnamed narrator is on holiday for a few weeks, camping in the Lake District before beginning an extended journey to India. He sees no reason not to agree when the campground owner--the sinister Tommy Parker, who seems mainly to engage in "buying and selling"--asks him to help out with a simple chore. As this is a Magnus Mills novel, however, no chore can possibly be simple. Through error or bad luck, one task leads to another and the narrator quickly finds himself trapped by his own passivity and a very English reluctance to cause a fuss. Soon he's doing homework for Parker's daughter, being kicked on and off the darts team at the local pub and learning how to perform a series of menial jobs. ("Have you ever operated a circular saw?" "Driven a tractor before?" "What are you like with a hammer and nails?")There's a lot that's strange about this little town. Where have all the females gone? Why does everyone seem to think he should take over the town milk route? Why won't the shops stock his beloved baked beans? Both the grocer and the pub are oddly eager to let him run up tabs and there's no sign of payment from Tommy Parker. It seems, in fact, that the narrator's early suspicions have been fulfilled: "I'd inadvertently become his servant." Like the Hall brothers from The Restraint of Beasts, Parker is volatile, irrational and all-powerful--a primitive god ruling over his own creation. As the narrator falls further and further under his sway, All Quiet on the Orient Express becomes a striking allegory of labour and capital, purgatory and judgement, and the uncanniness of manual work. --Mary Park
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Novella-like in form, Magnus Mills' Three to See the King is an uneasy read that transports the reader to a unique fictional setting where the familiar is strangely unfamiliar. Known for his Kafka-esque nightmares, Mills tells the abstract fable of an unnamed man, living in isolation in a tin house, who must choose between a solitary existence and joining the mass exodus of his neighbours. Through simple, deadpan prose, a keen eye for human nature and abrasive wit, Mills not only captures the dull emptiness of the unimagined life but comments allegorically on solitude and society, religion and civilisation, labour and capital. Mills, whose other books include Booker-shortlisted The Restraint of Beasts and All Quiet on the Orient Express, is an absorbing, disturbing writer who is refining his observations with each new book. --Nicola Perry
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Building high-tension fencing with a couple of rural Scots louts--what could be a more likely premise for a black comedy? An eerie noir fable told in a grim, deadpan voice, The Restraint of Beasts tells the story of an English fence-builder promoted to foreman over two under-motivated labourers. They've just been sent out to fix a badly done fence when events go horribly awry--and not for the last time either. For the rest of the novel, as his charges drink, loaf and pound the occasional fence-post, events go badly amiss over and over again. In a sense, that's all you can truly rely on in Mills's fictional world. It is not giving away too much to say that if you hire these workers to assemble your high-tension fence, you'd best watch your back. Or your front, for that matter. And keep a firm eye on the skies, just in case.The team travels south to England, where they live out of a damp, cold caravan in the town of Upper Bowland. Here they soon find themselves at loggerheads with the sinister Hall brothers, whose business enterprises seem to combine fencing, butchering, sausage-making and the mysterious "school dinners". "We committed no end of good deeds!" cries John Hall. "Yet still we lost the school dinners! Always the authorities laying down some new requirement, one things after another! This time is seems we must provide more living space. Very well! If that's the way they want it, we'll go on building fences for ever if necessary! We'll build pens and compounds and enclosures! And we'll make sure we never lose them again!"
In between placing Kafkaesque obstacles in his narrator's path, Mills seeds his novel with small, darkly comic touches: Tam's father, whom we last see erecting a stockade round his house "to stop you from coming home any more"; the sound of Richie's Black Sabbath tapes "slowly being stretched in an under-powered cassette player"; the caravan's encroaching squalor; An Early Bath for Thompson, the book that Richie tries in vain to read when they run out of money for pubs. No doubt about it, this is a strange book that only grows stranger as it progresses; with any luck it augurs well for more brilliant, odd work from debut novelist Mills. --Mary Park
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Building high-tension fencing with a couple of rural Scots louts--what could be a more likely premise for a black comedy? An eerie noir fable told in a grim, deadpan voice, The Restraint of Beasts tells the story of an English fence-builder promoted to foreman over two under-motivated labourers. They've just been sent out to fix a badly done fence when events go horribly awry--and not for the last time either. For the rest of the novel, as his charges drink, loaf and pound the occasional fence-post, events go badly amiss over and over again. In a sense, that's all you can truly rely on in Mills's fictional world. It is not giving away too much to say that if you hire these workers to assemble your high-tension fence, you'd best watch your back. Or your front, for that matter. And keep a firm eye on the skies, just in case.The team travels south to England, where they live out of a damp, cold caravan in the town of Upper Bowland. Here they soon find themselves at loggerheads with the sinister Hall brothers, whose business enterprises seem to combine fencing, butchering, sausage-making and the mysterious "school dinners". "We committed no end of good deeds!" cries John Hall. "Yet still we lost the school dinners! Always the authorities laying down some new requirement, one things after another! This time is seems we must provide more living space. Very well! If that's the way they want it, we'll go on building fences for ever if necessary! We'll build pens and compounds and enclosures! And we'll make sure we never lose them again!"
In between placing Kafkaesque obstacles in his narrator's path, Mills seeds his novel with small, darkly comic touches: Tam's father, whom we last see erecting a stockade round his house "to stop you from coming home any more"; the sound of Richie's Black Sabbath tapes "slowly being stretched in an under-powered cassette player"; the caravan's encroaching squalor; An Early Bath for Thompson, the book that Richie tries in vain to read when they run out of money for pubs. No doubt about it, this is a strange book that only grows stranger as it progresses; with any luck it augurs well for more brilliant, odd work from debut novelist Mills. --Mary Park
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