Customer Reviews

All Quiet On The Orient Express: A Novel

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The only reason that I didn't give this 5 stars is because it is quite similar to 'Restraint of Beasts' although this is really much eerier as the plot centres around a single character 'stranded' in the countryside instead of the 3 characters in Magnus's first book. Therefore, I was more worried the character in this novel. There he is, having spent his holiday so far at camp site that I took to be in the Lake District, on the last week of the 'season' and he is happy to while a few morre days of solitude before continuing on his travels, hopefully to India. He is such an easy going person that he is only to help the owner of the camp-site out by painting a gate. This is actually his point of no return. The owner has a spooky daughter who lets him do all her homework and get the gold stars to go with it. He does get 'sort of' accepted in one the local pubs and even gets as far as making the darts team, only to get himself barred when he fails to turn up for an away game. Of course this was a match that he was really looking forward to and as far he knew he had noted the date correctly. The one time where he does try to leave, the weather is bad that his motorbike packs up and he 'rescued' by the person that has become his boss and landlord. As I'm writing this, I now regret not giving the book 5 stars as it has really preyed on my mind since I read it [all in one sitting]. Please please read this. It is not the sort the of book I would usually pick and I'm also often put off by the author being nominated for the Booker Prize' as Magnus Mills was for his debut novel. Believe me, he is far far better than any other new novelist around. I hope that if I am ever in the Brixton area waiting for a bus that he is the driver.

Magnus Mills is a genius for creating anti-heroes we care about and love and remember so well. He did it in Restraint of Beasts and does it again in his latest effort. He brilliantly has pulled off a fable about barter and wages in a contemporary yet primitive society ruled by a mysterious partiarch. The nameless narrator sinks deeper and deeper into the patriarch's clutches while deluding himself that he is about to make a voyage. But the narrator's trip east is simply a chimera. He has more in common with the stagnant town than he wants to believe. Ultimately, it's not the plot but the style, the language, the dialogue, and the humor that is so magical and compelling. I hope Mills publishes his absurd fables once a year.

We just discussed this book in our book club, and the group split in the same way as the reviewers here - some found it unique and gripping, and the rest found it hopelessly dull, and even frustrating (they kept willing the central character to DO SOMETHING). From our small sampling, it didn't appear that you have to be 'artsy fartsy' (as stated by another reviewer) to enjoy this book.

'All Quiet', in my opinion, credits the reader with being able to (a) fill in missing pieces of the story as needed and (b) let the story unfold by itself without trying to impose a particular direction on it. Of course the main character could leave if he wanted to. Of course he could tell Mr Parker to shove it. Of course he could demand his baked beans and custard creams from Mr Hodge. But then it wouldn't be the same book, and that's the point.

If you happen to like it, I highly recommend 'The Restraint Of Beasts', Mills's first novel. If anything it's even more of a page-turner. The ending is a bit disappointing but who cares?

There?s something about British humor that no other English-language literature will ever be able to supplant. The narrator -- whose name we never learn -- is a young odd-jobs-man who is presently on holiday with his motorbike and tent in the Lake District. It?s late summer, he?s been at the campground a week, and he?s about to depart, when Tommy Parker offers him a bit of temporary employment painting the front gate. One thing leads to another, and the narrator finds himself responsible for painting a flock of rowboats, cutting firewood (on loan, as Mr. Parker seems to have rented him out), spending his evenings at the local pub (where he?s recruited for the darts team), and being drafted by 15-year-old Gail Parker to do her homework. But money almost never changes hands. Everyone in the area knows everything about everyone else -- including him, he discovers. And then Mr. Deakin, the milkman disappears into the lake while helping locate the new mooring raft, and the narrator finds himself with the milk route, as well. The story is perfectly deadpan, in a very sly, droll way, and the effect is cumulative and almost Hitchcockian -- especially the last page! Even though one might get annoyed with the narrator for allowing himself to be so thoroughly taken advantage of, this is a most delightful yarn.

In echoing the title of Erich Maria Remarque's novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, Magnus Mills has deepened and darkened, quite considerably, the meaning and metaphor of his book. In this Mills has placed an insistent and nagging theme: waste, the wasting of lives, which serves to spur the reader (if not the protragonist). The trajedy of Remarque's novel is that young men pushed into events beyond their control had their lives and potential cut short. The trajedy of Mills' novel is the protragonist getting himself pushed into endless menial and thankless tasks at the cost of his ambition to travel east. He lacks the insight to disengage himself. He has that chance; the young men in Remarque's novel, the young men who died in the Great War, DIDN'T. Though Mills' metaphor of 'capital and labour' is compelling, his genius here lies in his conscience.

Strange story about a young man who decides to take a short camping trip before heading off to explore India. However, while he's camping, the campground's owner asks him if he'd do an odd job in exchange for the camping fees he owed. Soon that odd job is leading to even ODDER odd jobs and before he knows it, he's moved in and started working full-time. But something about the whole thing feels really strange. First, there's all that green paint. Then there's a convenient death. This book really held my attention -- in fact, I read it in one sitting -- but I was disappointed in the ending. It almost seemed like Mills was on a strict deadline and just had to stop working when he got to the end of it, whether he was done with the story or not. At the same time, something about the novel's tone makes me wonder if he didn't do that on purpose just to disappoint the readers. Some kind of satire of contrived sinister-ness? Hard to say, but I'm definitely intrigued and will look for his earlier novel, The Restraint of Beasts.

An unnamed narrator tells us he's about to embark on a quest to visit the Orient but he must, he explains, get his scooter repaired so he waits in a sort of limbo at pastoral campsite on the edges of a small town that is lorded over by the imperious Mr. Parker, a capitalistic patriarch who is at the center of all the town's commerce. Mr. Parker has a lovely daughter who arouses our narrator's senses but merely titilates him. One mishap after another makes the narrator feel obliged to stay longer in the town even though he keeps reminding us--and himself--that he wants to break free and begin his exotic travels. His major impediment to leaving, he would have us believe, is Mr. Parker, a brutal, intimidating man who demands that the narrator do all sorts of chores and odd-jobs for him, but gradually we realize that the narrator is afraid to adventure out of his comfort zone and would rather live in the relative prison of Mr. Parker's campsite tent, with its severely limiting rules, than inch his way into the flux of the vital, real, outside world. Thus the novel's theme is the conflict between our need to branch out and challenge ourselves vs. our tendency to roll up into the fetal position and die a spiritual death in our tiny world of comfort and familiarity. This theme is further explored in Mills' subsequent novel Three to See the King.

Without a doubt, this is a modern masterpiece. An unnamed narrator on a camping holiday in England's Lake District gets entangled in an extended Kafkaesque morass. What starts as a simple trade of painting a gate in exchange for a week's free camping turns into what looks to be a lifetime in purgatory thanks in great part to the narrator's own weakness of character and the town's perpetual barter economy. One menial job in trade begets another as he gets further and further immersed in the small town's weird male culture (there are only two females in the whole book: the Lolita-like daughter of his boss, and the captain of a darts team from another town). Like many of us, the narrator has grand plans (he's saved up to take a trip on the Orient Express), but falters in the execution. This everyman nature is makes him an extremely appealing and yet frustrating character. It's a deadpan, darkly humorous book, somewhat akin to one the Coen Brothers' films. Just to give a taste: someone drowns in the lake while with the narrator and his boss. Once they realize he's drowned, that's it-there's no more mention made of him, the authorities are never called, etc. Don't even get me started on the groceries. Whether you read this straight, or as some kind of allegorical work, it's enjoyable.

It is a good book, but not for those that like a `beginning, middle and end' to their fiction. Think of it as a few chapters from the narrators' life and you will get the idea. We know very little about the narrator's past, and equally little about his aspirations, except a desire to travel to India. I noticed that other reviewers read the book in one sitting - as did I - and this shows that the story is interesting. Mills describes the Lake District (in the northwest of England) well - the constantly changing weather, the fells up the sides of the lake, and the parochial nature of the locals. The reader can identify with the overpowering nature of Mr. Parker and the meek nature of the protagonist, although not all British are like this! Some elements are frustrating, however, particularly the lack of explanation after Deakin dies - why do the characters just shrug it off and carry on talking, and then it is never mentioned again? Overall, an 80% effort.

Mills creates a world of quirky characters in this novel about a man who finds himself stalled in the Lake District. He initially expects to move on but because he likes to go with the flow, circumstances cause him stall as he becomes enmeshed in the local culture. The book is about characters and a surreal society where people are forced to work together because there is nobody else to do the daily tasks and where bartering is the norm and money never seems to change hands. The old man who keeps popping up and helping the protagonist is unforgettable as are many of the other characters. Like other Mills books, the dark humor and atmosphere created around the central character is the book, rather than the story line per se.

I think it was unfortunate that Mills created an expectation in some not familiar with his work that there would somehow be a journey across the Russian steps and those people are disappointed. However, those that savor the other worldliness that Mills is capable of creating will not be disappointed. This is his second best book after The Restraint of Beasts.