Innocence, experience and comedy in Cumbria. He's a bit of a handyman. Or, at least, so Mr Parker seems to think. No matter, he'll soon be on that train east to India from these wet lakeland fells. Just as soon as he's finished that little job Mr Parker asked him to do. It wasn't much of a holiday anyway. As the tourists trickled away from the campsite, so did the sunshine, and the hot water, and the provisions at the local shop, and even the good beer. Still, there seemed to be plenty of work to take his mind off these minor disappointments -- as much as he cared to do, in fact, even homework. And payment could be discussed later. Meanwhile, he was really beginning to fit in, to become one of the local fixtures, down the pub, on the farm, on the lake. Maybe that trip east could wait? In this cautionary tale of labour and capital, of innocence and experience, Magnus Mills takes us back to the kind of terrain he patrolled so notably in The Restraint of Beasts -- rural circuits where neither cash nor unemployment are much prized -- and makes it conclusively his own turf.
--This text refers to the
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
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 humor 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 England's 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 labor and capital, purgatory and judgment, and the uncanniness of manual work. --Mary Park
From Publishers Weekly
Booker and Whitbread Prize-finalist (and former bus driver) Mills (The Restraint of Beasts) maintains his reputation as a wry humorist, here transforming a fly-by-night entrepreneurial work ethic into a cue for a Kafkaesque comedy of manual labor. Mills's unnamed protagonist is an itinerant odd jobber hoping to save enough money for a trip to the "East" (Turkey, Persia and India). Meanwhile he's camping, living off canned beans and doing various chores in England's Lake District for camp manager and enigmatic jack-of-all trades Tommy Parker. Parker gathers scrap metal, runs shady ads in the Trader's Gazette, collects motorcycles and concocts hopelessly complicated schemes. The jobs he cooks up for the narrator, such as painting gates and a flotilla of rowboats, are seemingly simpleAyet they prove unpredictably disastrous, each task leading to another in a nightmarish shaggy dog novel of odd jobs getting odder. The narrator struggles under his mounting tabs at the pub and the grocer's, realizing that he seems to have acquired a sense of obligation toward his new environs, or is it rather an unfamiliar form of attachment? As the tourist season winds down, the narrator bonds with Parker's 15-year-old daughter, helping her with her homework, teaching her to play darts and engaging in a nice bit of comic sexual tension. The bleak off-season Lake District is made lively with darkly startling characters like Deaken, the schlemiel milkman, and a neighbor who constantly wears a cardboard Christmas crown. Unsettling touches such as the winter shortages of good biscuits, favorite ales and females, as well as the vague whiff of a mysterious town conspiracy, keep this story wicked, witty and weird. The deadpan humor is perhaps a touch less black in this laudable if less edgy followup to The Restraint of Beasts, but Mills never needs to raise his unique voice to make his disquieting mark. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A very spooky unnerving read,
By A Customer
This review is from: All Quiet On The Orient Express (Hardcover)
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.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
CLEVER FABLE WITH AN ENDEARING NINNY,
By M. JEFFREY MCMAHON "herculodge" (Torrance, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER) (VINE VOICE) (REAL NAME)
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: All Quiet On The Orient Express (Hardcover)
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.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
You'll either love it or hate it - I loved it,
By
This review is from: All Quiet On The Orient Express: A Novel (Paperback)
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?
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