‘The Trouble with Sunbathers’ by Magnus Mills

Fiction – Kindle edition; Quoqs Publishing for Magnus Mills/Kindle Direct Publishing; 181 pages; 2020.

English bus driver turned writer Magnus Mills is a longtime favourite author of mine.

His deeply allegoric novels take the gentle piss out of British exceptionalism — the idea that Britain is morally, culturally and politically superior to other nations — and uses skeletal, almost pedestrian prose, to reveal the mundanity of people’s lives and livelihoods.

Sadly, he appears to have been dropped by his publisher Bloomsbury, but in recent years has issued five new books under his own steam, including this one which was published in 2020.

The Trouble with Sunbathers is about Brexit and Trump without ever committing those (horrid) words to paper!

Preserving the past

In this story, the American president has purchased Britain and turned it into a national park.

The president wanted Britain to always remain the same as it was when he’d glimpsed it briefly through the window of his aeroplane. This was why the terms of the purchase stipulated that nothing should be changed, the only exception being the four ceremonial gates (designed by the president’s son-in-law) that marked the inauguration of the national park. (p56)

The unnamed narrator and his colleague, Rupert, man the western gate.

The wrought iron gates are supposed to remain open at all times, so the men are essentially employed to greet people as they pass through. They soon learn that there’s an economic advantage if they close the gates at odd intervals because people are so relieved when the gates are opened after they have been queuing for hours that they leave generous tips and gratuities.

The men also have business dealings with other characters, including a menacing American called Carruthers, and a man who wants to come and paint the gate.

But on the whole, not much happens. Visits to the national park begin to dry up because everything inside the gates is falling into disrepair — “buildings were crumbling, bridges were collapsing and entire industries were lying in ruins” — helped in part by a lack of investment, increasing isolation and local acts of vandalism.

The entire population now resides on the coast (outside the gates) and spends all their time sunbathing (hence the title). They simply couldn’t care less about what’s going on in their own backyard, so to speak.

There are fewer and fewer cars on the road, too, because even the cars are falling into disrepair and cannot be fixed because there’s a shortage of spare parts.

The shortage was predicted years ago. We all saw it coming and the obvious solution was staring us in the face. Universal spare parts! Absolute simplicity and uniformity! Problem solved at a stroke! It made sense. Every country adopted universal spare parts because they could be interchanged and used in any vehicle. Every country, that is, except Great Britain. Great Britain refused to cooperate. Great Britain insisted that only British parts could be fitted in British vehicles. So what happened when the parts ran out? Everything ground to a halt. (p35)

Minor subplots

There are subplots revolving around a statue that keeps falling over and another about a drive-in movie theatre playing the same promotional video about a young British girl moving to Africa so she can learn to ride an elephant (a nod, I suspect, to the days of Empire), but the main narrative is an allegory for what happens if you cut yourself off from the rest of the world.

In the end, the President decides he no longer wants to keep Britain even though he “claimed to have developed a deep attachment to the ‘old country’”. Basically, he wants to reneg on his purchase when he discovers there is nothing exceptional about Great Britain after all:

‘I’m sorry to have to tell you,’ he announced, ‘that yours is a very mediocre little country. We’ve carried out an extensive survey during the past few months and our findings paint a sorry picture. The landscape is bland and uninspiring. The weather is unreliable. The beer is tepid. The roads are narrow. The rivers are sluggish. There re no proper mountains. No big skies. No untamed frontiers. No pioneers. No trailblazers. Nobody seeks adventure. Nobody runs any risks. In short, we’ve concluded that nothing exciting, interesting or unusual ever happens here.’ (p157)

The Trouble with Sunbathers is typical Magnus Mills fare. It’s absurdist and surreal with a hint of trademark foreboding underneath the surface.

The dialogue, as ever, is stilted and there’s not much in the way of character development or plot. But fans will know that’s not why you read Mills’ work.

You read it for the fable-like quality of the writing, the snide little digs and the perfectly deadpan sense of humour. You read it because it is so delightfully different to anything else out there.