Tag: fable

Author, Book review, Fiction, Kindle Direct, Magnus Mills, Publisher, satire, Setting, UK

‘The Trouble with Sunbathers’ by Magnus Mills

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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.

2023 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, Audrey Magee, Author, Book review, Faber and Faber, Fiction, Ireland, literary fiction, Literary prizes, Publisher, satire, Setting

‘The Colony’ by Audrey Magee

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Fiction – paperback; Faber & Faber; 384 pages; 2022.

When I was undertaking my Master of Journalism in the mid-1990s, I wrote a 5,000-word essay on how the Irish broadcast media was helping preserve and promote the Irish language, particularly in the Gaeltacht districts. I was thinking of how at risk the language was (in the years before the 2003 Official Languages Act was adopted) when I was reading Audrey Magee’s The Colony.

I was also thinking of J.M. Synge’s The Aran Islands, an anthropological study of the people who lived on these ancient rocky islands in Galway Bay, untouched by modernity at the turn of the 19th century, and how he sought to document their traditions and lifestyles before they disappeared forever.

The Colony, an intricately woven novel about the impacts of colonisation on a small island off the west coast of Ireland, is an amalgamation of these subject areas — and it is probably the best book I have read all year (so far).

Visitors and rivals

Jean-Pierre (JP) Masson, a Frenchman, is spending the summer (his fourth) on the island to document the Irish language, which is spoken almost exclusively by the inhabitants, while Mr Lloyd, an artist and an Englishman, is there (for the first time) to document the landscape in his paintings.

The two men become rivals in the sense that they wanted the island and its inhabitants all to themselves for a single summer — Masson believes Lloyd’s presence will affect the integrity of his study because the population will be more inclined to speak English with him. And Lloyd doesn’t like the idea of a noisy Frenchman, flirting with the island’s women and spoiling the peace and quiet he needs to do his art.

Their interleaved narratives are interspersed with short one-paragraph chapters revealing the state of play on the Irish mainland: it’s 1979 and The Troubles are in full swing.

Joseph McKee is walking on Saturday, June 9th to a butcher shop in Belfast, close to the amusement arcade on Castle Street where he works as a doorman. He is thirty-four years old, a Catholic and a member of the Official IRA. Two men from the Ulster Defence Association pull up beside him on a motorbike and shoot him four times in the back of the head, revving the engine to mask the sound of the gun.

A strange dependency

To survive, the islanders, who often make snide and funny comments about their visitors behind their backs (or in Irish), need the rent money Lloyd and Masson pay. The menfolk generally make their living from fishing, but in recent years many have died at sea and there’s a very real fear, especially among the women, that the community will starve when the harsh winter months arrive.

James, one of the young men on the island who spends his days hunting rabbits to supply his mother and grandmother with food for the table, dreams of escaping his adult fate — which is to become a fisherman — and begins to badger Lloyd into teaching him to paint. When he discovers an untapped talent for art, he believes he can head to London and make a different life for himself.

But even with Lloyd’s begrudging support, it’s clear that neither Lloyd nor Masson has any interest in helping the people they are using for their own ends. Once they have done their work, they will head back to England and France respectively and think nothing of the people they have left behind or of the potential harm they may have created by interfering in day-to-day life, if only for a few months.

Allegory and satire

The Colony is a wonderful allegory and biting satire about colonialism in all its oppressive, systematic glory.

Lloyd, who complains about the food and refuses to learn the Irish language, represents the worst of British colonialism; Masson, who is arrogant and demanding but damaged by his own colonial legacy (his mother was Algerian and yearned for her homeland), represents a sense of history repeating itself.

As both bicker and fight and argue with each other, it’s clear that neither party can see the potential long-reaching impact of their presence in a community that has become beholden to their money and influence.

You can’t speak on this. You have spent centuries trying to annihilate this language, this culture.
Lloyd stuck his fork into his tart. He ate two pieces and drank some tea.
France is no better, said Lloyd. Look at Algeria. At Cameroon. At the Pacific Islands.
You’re deflecting.
Lloyd shrugged.
This is about Ireland, said Masson. About the Irish language.
And do the Irish have a say, said Lloyd, in your great plan for saving the language?
The English don’t, said Masson.

But the islanders aren’t portrayed as weak or inferior. Indeed, the boatman Micheál does take advantage, believing the visitors to be ludicrous, stupid — or both.

Many times I was reminded of the wonderful work of Magnus Mills, whose own fable-like tales have often dealt with similar issues. (A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In, for instance, mocks colonialism, while The Field of the Cloth of Gold is about immigration and integration.) Even the mundane dialogue and understated comic moments feel like they have come out of Mills’ playbook.

But the prose style is more elegant, more lyrical than Mills, and often the way it is arranged on the page, stanza-like and with one word per line, it reads like poetry.

I adored The Colony, which was longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. It has recently been shortlisted for this year’s Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award, which will be named in a few days’ time. It would be a deserving winner.

For other reviews, please see Lisa’s at ANZ LitLovers and Susan’s at A Life in Books. Sue at Whispering Gums has also reviewed it.

This is my fifth and final book from the 2023 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year shortlist. I am trying to read them all (there are five) before the winner is named at the end of May.

20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2021), 2021 Miles Franklin Literary Award, Atlantic Books, Australia, Author, Book review, dystopian, Fiction, literary fiction, Literary prizes, Publisher, Robbie Arnott, Setting

‘The Rain Heron’ by Robbie Arnott

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Fiction – Kindle edition; Atlantic Books; 288 pages; 2020.

Robbie Arnott’s The Rain Heron is quite unlike anything I’ve read before. It defies convention because it’s a seamless blend of literary fiction, myth, fairytale and dystopia. Perhaps it could best be described as an “eco fable”? Regardless, it’s a wonderfully evocative and compelling tale about humankind’s obsession with exploiting nature to make money — seemingly at any cost.

Fairytale about a mythical bird

In this masterfully created tale, which is split into four parts, we are introduced to the rain heron, a mythical bird that brings rain wherever it goes. It has blue-grey feathers that are so pale you can see straight through them, and whenever it flaps its wings a thick spray of water falls from them, almost as if it generates its own rain.

In a world beset by drought, it’s a much sought-after creature, offering abundance and helping boost harvests, but it also comes with risks: the bird is also associated with frosts, floods, destruction — and sometimes death.

In Part 1 we meet Ren, an older woman who is living in a cave on a mountainside in the forest. She’s self-sufficient, eating berries and other plants, hunting deer for meat and occasionally trapping a fish for her supper. She barters with a man and his young son living nearby, with whom she exchanges items — fleece gloves, vitamins, boots, vegetable seeds — that she cannot get elsewhere.

The trio is careful to avoid contact with other humans, especially the soldiers that have recently infiltrated the area and who are on a mission to find and capture the sole rain heron that they believe lives in the vicinity.

Ren knows where the rain heron lives. She was introduced to it by her mother as a young girl. But when the soldiers find her and become threatening, she’s left with no option other than to show them where it roosts. This sets into motion a drastic — and deadly — chain of events.

Back in time

The story, which reads like a fairytale, doesn’t have a single narrator, nor follow a linear route. We go back in time to meet the female soldier — Harker, as she is known —  who puts so much pressure on Ren to offer up her secrets. In Part 2 we discover her way of life before the military coup that transformed the world into such a strange and menacing place.

This change in direction is a little disorientating to begin with, but it sets the scene for the rest of the novel.

Here, we discover that Harker had a happy childhood living with her aunt, who made her living from the “inking grounds” — a secret location out at sea where squid are caught, drained of their ink and then released back into the water without harm. (This, by the way, is not how ink is actually removed from squid — in the real world the squid are caught and killed first.)

This sustainable practice comes under threat when a northerner arrives in the port town seeking a way to make a lot of money quickly. He knows that the locals farm ink, which is worth a lot of money, but he doesn’t know how to do it and no one wants to share the secret with him.

Capitalistic tensions

This tension between a capitalist wanting to turn a secret into a business idea really does set the theme and tone of The Rain Heron, which is very much a book about humankind’s incapacity to just leave nature alone, to appreciate it intrinsically rather than trying to make money out of it.

In the final parts of the novel, which are essentially a road trip beset with danger and violence, this theme is developed further: how far would you go to capture a creature that may make you rich or give you an advantage over others?

It’s a beautifully realised tale told in graceful, elegant prose, which includes lush descriptions of landscapes and minimal dialogue. There’s a fable-like feel to the story, one that conjures up memories of other books I have read — think The Road meets Voyage of the Dawn Treader (and all those Narnia books) meets The Girl with Glass Feet meets The Silver Crown.

I love that we don’t know anything about this world — the politics or the events which have lead to soldiers taking over — nor the specific location (although I imagine it’s Tasmania, seeing that is where the author is from). Arnott simply plops you into this universe he has created and it all feels so real and vivid that you don’t need any explanations: you just accept it for what it is.

The ways in which he explores our fragile relationship with the environment is wonderfully evoked. It’s ripe with symbolism and meaning. This is the kind of novel you can really get lost in. I loved it.

The Rain Heron has been shortlisted for this year’s Miles Franklin Literary Award, the winner of which will be announced next week (15 July). And yes, if you haven’t guessed already, I’d be very happy to see this one take the prize.

This is my 5th book for #20booksofsummer 2021 edition. I purchased it in July last year.

20 books of summer (2017), Author, Book review, Canada, Denis Thériault, Fiction, Hesperus Press, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, translated fiction

‘The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman’ by Denis Thériault

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The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman

Fiction – Kindle edition; Hesperus Press; 128 pages; 2014. Translated from the French by Liedewy Hawke.

Denis Thériault’s The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman is one of the most unusual love stories I’ve ever read. Part fable, part treatise on Japanese poetry, it also “flirts with the fantastic” (as the author states in a Q&A published at the rear of the book) and delivers a quietly understated story about the power of the written word and the Buddhist concept of Ensō.

A man on a mission

Set in Montreal, Canada (where the author hails from), we are introduced to the postman of the title: 27-year-old Bilodo, who lives on the 10th floor of a high-rise apartment block with his sole companion: a goldfish called Bill. He rarely goes out, preferring to stay home to watch TV or play video games, but he loves his job and is super-efficient at it.

It wasn’t all roses, of course. There were those blasted advertising flyers to be delivered; the backaches, the sprains and other run-of-the-mill injuries; there were the crushing summer heatwaves, the autumn rains that left you soaked to the skin, the black ice in winter, which turned the city into a perilous ice palace, and the cold that could be biting, just like the dogs for that matter – a postman’s natural enemies. But the moral satisfaction of knowing oneself to be indispensable to the community made up for these drawbacks. Bilodo felt he took part in the life of the neighbourhood, that he had a discreet but essential role in it.

But Bilodo has a bit of a moral blind spot. If he comes across a handwritten letter — an increasing rarity in today’s modern world — he takes it home, steams it open, reads it, makes a copy of it for his records, seals the letter back up again and then delivers it the next day as if nothing has happened.

Through this illegal practice, Bilodo stumbles upon a correspondence between Ségolène, a woman who lives in Guadeloupe (a French overseas territory, part of the Leeward Islands in the Caribbean), and Grandpré, an academic from Quebec.

The pair send haiku poetry to each other and Bilodo, transported by the beauty of three lines of five, seven, and five syllables apiece, soon finds himself falling in love with Ségolène, a woman he knows he will never meet. And so he undergoes a psychological transformation that has him leading the peculiar life of the title.

A moral ambiguity

This short but powerful novella is deceptive in both its tone of voice (slightly mundane) and its subject matter (a dull man leading a dull life), but then about halfway through it turns into something else entirely (although I will put up my hand and say that I predicted the major plot development that occurs). This is not one of those “happy” books where the lonely protagonist learns to live a more fulfilling life; there’s a really dark edge to it and a moral ambiguity at its core.

There’s something about the whole “atmosphere” of the story that is hugely reminiscent of Japanese fiction: the functional prose style, the themes of alienation, chaste love and loneliness, and the lovely poetry in it, both haiku and tanka (the oldest and most elevated classical Japanese verse form).

Even the ending, which is unexpectedly strange and unsettling but ultimately satisfying, brought to mind Taichi Yamada’s Strangers, one of the most compelling and intriguing Japanese novellas I’ve ever read. I could almost say the same about this one, although I realise it’s Canadian…

This is my 7th book for #20booksofsummer. I bought it in December 2014, partly because of Susan’s review at A Life in Books, for the princely sum of 99p.

André Alexis, Author, Book review, Canada, Fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Serpent's Tail, Setting

‘Fifteen Dogs’ by André Alexis

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Fifteen-dogs

Fiction – paperback; Serpent’s Tail; 159 pages; 2015. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

André Alexis’s Fifteen Dogs has been longlisted for this year’s Giller Prize. It’s by far the oddest, and possibly most absurd, book I’ve read in a long while. Indeed, to say I didn’t much like it might be an understatement.

Under normal circumstances, I’m sure I would have abandoned this strange and unusual novella. But as some of you will no doubt know, every year since 2011 I have taken part in the Shadow Giller — chaired by KevinfromCanada — in which a group of us read and review all the books on the Giller Prize longlist for that year. Between the four of us, we then choose a winner in advance of the real Giller.  (You can read more about how the Shadow Giller came about on Kevin’s blog here.) And because I’m taking part in the process once again for 2015, I felt that I had to finish the book — even when every bone (pun not intended) in my body told me to put it aside and read something else instead!

So, what’s so weird about it, I hear you ask? Well, it takes the form of a fable in which the Greek gods Hermes and Apollo give a group of dogs the gift of consciousness. The idea is that intelligence does not make humans any more superior or happier than other animals.

— I’ll wager a year’s servitude, said Apollo, that animals — any animal you choose — would be even more unhappy than humans are, if they had human intelligence.
— An earth year? I’ll take that bet, said Hermes, but on condition that if, at the end of its life, even one of the creatures is happy, I win.

And then 15 dogs, all staying overnight in a veterinary clinic in Toronto, discover that they can suddenly think for themselves, talk in a new language (English) and reason with one another. Yes, I told you it was a weird book.

Go to the dogs

Fifteen Dogs follows the antics of the dogs, some of whom reject their new ability with language and revert back to the “old dog ways”, and through a series of set pieces, rather than a typical story arc, shows how their relationships with one another and humans changes as a result of their newfound intelligence. Sometimes this is quite horrifying — one set of dogs, for instance, leads another set to their deaths — but only goes to show where the idiom it’s a dog-eat-dog world comes from! But at other times it’s quite touching — the deep friendship that develops between Majnouin, a black poodle, and his human owner, Nira, for example.

Of course, I can’t dismiss Fifteen Dogs entirely. While fables aren’t my kind of thing, and I struggle with stories that demand that I suspend belief (even if it’s just for 150 or so pages), this novella does explore some interesting ideas around language (one of the dogs, for instance, composes poetry), cultural codes of conduct, emotion, individuality and morality. And if you’ve ever had a dog or own a dog (or commission training articles about them, like I do) there’s plenty of behaviours to recognise (and occasionally laugh about) in these pages.

But the book doesn’t just concentrate on canine behaviour: it also shines a light on (the absurdity of) human behaviour, as this quote, through the eyes of Benjy the beagle, shows:

And then there was the room where the humans bathed and applied chemicals to themselves. The bathroom was fascinating, it being astonishing to watch the already pale beings applying creams to make themselves paler still. Was there something about white that bought status? If so, what was the point of drawing black circles around their eyes or red ones around their mouths?

I can’t say that I’d like this deeply philosophical book to make the Giller Prize shortlist, which is announced on 5 October, but I can’t fault its originality or its ability to make you see the world in a slightly different way. It’s insightful and inventive, but not one for me…

Please note, Fifteen Dogs is not yet published in the UK. I was fortunate enough to get an advance copy, sent to me unsolicited. It will be published here on 5 November.

UPDATE 11 NOVEMBER 2015:
Congratulations to André Alexis, who was awarded the 2015 Giller Prize last night. You can read more about his win on the official Giller Prize website.

Author, Bloomsbury, Book review, Fiction, literary fiction, Magnus Mills, Publisher, satire

‘The Field of the Cloth of Gold’ by Magnus Mills

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The-field-of-cloth-of-gold

Fiction – hardcover; Bloomsbury Publishing; 224 pages; 2015. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

It’s no secret that I am a Magnus Mills fan, so I was naturally keen to read his latest book, The Field of the Cloth of Gold, as soon as it came thudding through the door. It’s been almost four years since his last novel, but it turned out to be worth the wait, for this is another profound story characterised by Mills’ typical bare-boned prose, tongue-in-cheek humour and incisive commentary on the foibles of human beings.

A tented village

The story revolves around a large irregularly-shaped field — known as The Great Field — situated in the bend of a “broad, meandering river”.

Dotted across this lush, green field are several tents of various size, shape and description, but over time more and more tents appear as people arrive to take advantage of the beautiful views, fresh air and quietude. But as the population of this quiet backwater steadily increases, disputes over territory, views and resources arise.

When a trench is created under the guise of drainage control for the (always damp) south-east corner, it doesn’t take long for some inhabitants to realise it’s actually a wall — or a defensive rampart, depending on your point of view — designed to secure the best corner of the field for a select group: everyone else must simply move north.

If you think this sounds a little like a metaphor for Britain you’d probably be right. I read this surreal story trying to figure out its meaning — was it a fable about community? immigration? British history? — before I decided it could almost be anything you want it to be: its charm lies in its ability to be interpreted in a myriad of ways.

It’s clever and smart and even if you don’t want to have to think about the points Mills might be making you can simply read the novel for what it is: a delightfully quirky and eccentric tale about a bunch of people living in a field and trying to get by the best they know how. I really loved it.

More reviews of Mills’ work

I’ve reviewed all of Mills’ previous novels on the site — simply click on the book titles to read the review: The Restraint of Beasts (1998), All Quiet on the Orient Express (1999), Three to See the King (2001), The Scheme for Full Employment (2003), Explorers of the New Century (2005), The Maintenance of Headway (2009) and A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In (2011).

Author, Bloomsbury, Book review, Fiction, literary fiction, Magnus Mills, Publisher

‘A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In’ by Magnus Mills

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A-Cruel-Bird-Came-to-the-Nest-and-Looked-in

Fiction – hardcover; Bloomsbury; 276 pages; 2011. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

If we ever needed a novel to satirise the current malaise of the British Empire — complete with unhappy public sector workers, crippling debt and politicos looking after their own interests — then who better than to offer it up than Magnus Mills? A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In is Mills’ seventh novel, and it’s typical Mills fare.

If you’ve never read anything by Mills before, you need to prepare yourself in advance. I promise that you will have never encountered anything quite like a Mills novel before.

He writes in a completely stripped-back way, using short, simplistic sentences. At face value, these may seem dull and monotonous, but you can never accuse him of being boring. That’s because it’s up to the reader to figure out what’s going on — in many cases, it’s the things that Mills doesn’t say that makes his stories so powerful.

Mills’ stories are also peopled entirely by men, there is little or no characterisation (although you will probably recognise people you know — officials and jobsworths primarily), little or no descriptions of people or places, and the plots are superficial.

But as allegories or fables, you can’t get any better. And as far as black comedies go, you’re in for a real treat.

Poking fun at the feudal system

In A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In Mills tackles the feudal system, which is not a topic you’d generally associate with humour. Yet in Mills’ hands it becomes the funniest thing since, well, the feudal system.

The story is told through the eyes of an unnamed character, who is the Principal Composer of the Imperial Court. Despite never having played a note in his life, he is the “supreme leader” of the imperial orchestra. He clearly isn’t up for the job, but it doesn’t matter, because the conductor, a very talented musician, does all the work for which he can take credit.

The Principal Composer sits on an eight-member cabinet presided over by His Exalted Highness, The Majestic Emperor of the Realms, Dominions, Colonies and Commonwealth of Greater Fallowfields.

Absentee king

Unfortunately, His Highness seems to have gone missing, and because he never turns up to the weekly cabinet meeting no decisions about the empire, which is bestridden by ongoing problems, can be made. So the officers-of-state, who are all equal in the hierarchy, muddle along as best they can.

Any form of cooperation between departments is ruled out, so the problems — an unreliable postal system, a lack of money in circulation (it’s all being “reserved for a rainy day” by the Chancellor of the Exchequer) and an imperial telescope that only works if the Astronomer Royal has a sixpence to put in the slot — are never sorted.

A series of idiotic decisions are made. Chief among these is an imperial edict that arrives via post from the absentee emperor. He orders that the sun must set at five o’clock all year round, but the only way to make that happen is to ensure all clocks within Greater Fallowfields are put forward by two minutes every day. This means a great deal of work for one particular cabinet member — who moans and groans about it  — but for several others, it’s seen as a wonderful opportunity to enjoy tea — lemon curd and toasted soldiers — in the library to watch the sunset every day.

A crumbling empire

Mills paints a convincing portrait of an empire, a former maritime supremacy, now stuck in its ways, failing to modernise or make decisions with the best interests of its citizens in mind.

Typically, there’s a lot of deadpan humour (when one cabinet member points out that there’s “absolutely no kind of spiritual, theological or pastoral representative”, a colleague responds, “Thank God”) and bitter irony (the cabinet spends much of its time rehearsing a play which is an “example of the feudal system in perfect working order — until someone tampers with it”).

But it all comes to a head when a (literal) threat on the horizon is noted: foreigners are building a train line to Greater Fallowfields and an immigration boom seems imminent — or does it?

A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In is a seemingly impossible mix of the odd and endearing. It’s playful and fun but with a serious undercurrent running between the lines. The characters are delightfully eccentric and the way in which the empire is run will, at times, remind you of the terrible bureaucracy and inflexibility of systems here in the UK.

All in all, it is a wonderful, comic read that is bound to appeal to new readers and Mills’ fans alike.

More reviews of Mills’ work

I’ve reviewed all of Mills’ previous novels on the site: The Restraint of Beasts (1998), All Quiet on the Orient Express (1999), Three to See the King (2001), The Scheme for Full Employment (2003), Explorers of the New Century (2005) and The Maintenance of Headway (2009).

Ali Shaw, Atlantic Books, Author, Book review, Fiction, general, literary fiction, Publisher, science fiction

‘The Girl With Glass Feet’ by Ali Shaw

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Girl With Glass Feet by Ali Shaw

Fiction – paperback; Atlantic Books; 295 pages; 2009.

Ali Shaw’s debut novel The Girl With Glass Feet is set on a fictional wind-swept island, St Hauda, where strange and unusual events take place. And there is no more strange and unusual event than having your feet turn into glass, which is what happens to the book’s central character, Ida MacLaird, who returns to the island in search of a cure.

Here she meets Midas Crook, a painfully shy young man, who distances himself from the rest of the world by observing it through the lens of a camera. Midas is emotionally damaged through no fault of his own: his parent’s had a troubled marriage, which ended in his father’s suicide, while his eccentric mother turned into a recluse.

The two develop a close friendship, which slowly morphs into love. Midas is anxious to help Ida find a solution to her fragile feet, but with the glass slowly taking over her body, it becomes a race against time. Will a cure be found? Or will Ida succumb to this unexplainable phenomenon?

There’s no doubt that The Girl With Glass Feet is a highly imaginative work of fiction and that Shaw is an ambitious writer. But I’m not sure the book succeeds other than depicting a beautifully described world in which enchanting, occasionally odd, things occur. For a start, the text is so oblique, it’s hard to get a handle on events: for much of this novel I felt I was standing on the sidelines watching as events unfolded rather than becoming immersed in the action. And there’s such a wide cast of characters, most of them cold, aloof and weak-willed, that it’s hard to keep track of them all and their relationship to the central pair of Midas and Ida.

I know that some people have struggled with the magic realism at the core of this novel — there are moth-winged cattle that flutter about, for instance — but I thought that added to the fairytale element of the story, and demonstrated very clearly that anything was possible on the island and that a cure for Ida’s glass feet, no matter how outlandish, may be possible.

As much as I did not fall in love with the story, I did appreciate many of the issues raised by it, not least the ways in which we deal with terminal illness and whether it is better to live your remaining life well or to chase a cure that may not exist. I think it’s fair to say that The Girl With Glass Feet may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I’m glad I read this book and will be very interested to see what Shaw comes up with next.

Author, Bloomsbury, Book review, Fiction, literary fiction, Magnus Mills, Publisher, satire

‘The Maintenance of Headway’ by Magnus Mills

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MaintenanceOfHeadway

Fiction – hardcover; Bloomsbury; 152 pages; 2009.

You know you’ve really enjoyed a book when you titter your way through it, which is exactly what I did when I eagerly devoured Magnus Mills’ latest novel, The Maintenance of Headway.

Mills, who is one of my favourite authors, is, admittedly, not for everyone. He writes in a deliberately understated way, with an almost childlike naivety. He doesn’t bother with extraneous detail, because everything moves forward chiefly through dialogue. This allows him to really get to the heart of the matter, which, in most of his novels, is this simple premise: English life is plagued by bureaucracy and officialdom for no other reason than it keeps people in employment.

In The Maintenance of Headway, Mills turns his scornful eye towards the running of the London bus network. (Mills himself was a bus driver when his first novel, The Restraint of Beasts, was published.)

Well, I suspect it’s London for the city isn’t named, but the description of the street system — “The streets are higgledy-piggledy and narrow; there are countless squares and circuses, zebra crossings and pelicans. Go east from the arch and you’ve got twenty-three sets of traffic lights in a row” — is unmistakable. I’m also convinced that the “bejewelled thoroughfare” (“a great canyon of flagship stores stretching side by side for nearly a mile”) mentioned in the text is actually London’s Oxford Street.

As to the story, there’s not really much to it. In fact, it’s pretty much devoid of plot. The book is essentially a satire that pokes fun at the overly regimented (and somewhat unsuccessful) way in which the Board of Transport runs its buses, where “there’s no excuse for being early” and everyone bemoans the loss of the Venerable Platform Bus (which can only be another way of describing the now defunct but rather iconic Routemaster) with its conductors and no doors.

It covers the running battle between the bus drivers, who just want to drive buses to their required destinations with a minimum of fuss, and the inspectors, who meddle with the timetables and routes under the guise of “maintaining headway”.

Much of it is laugh-out-loud funny, particularly if you have a dry sense of humour. The wit comes chiefly through the conversations held between drivers on their tea breaks.

I was rather partial to the rogue driver, Jason, with his reckless attitude to passenger safety. In a discussion about passengers who deliberately ring the bell with no intention of getting off, Jason says:

‘If they keep doing it on my bus I give them some treatment with the brake and the accelerator. Rough them up a bit:  teach them a lesson.’
‘What about all the innocent people?’ I asked. ‘The ones who haven’t touched the bell?’
‘Tough, isn’t it?’ said Jason.

If you’ve ever experienced the joys of being a bus passenger, there’s a lot in this funny little novel you’ll recognise. And next time you wait for ages for a bus and then three come along at once, you’ll know exactly who to blame.

Author, Bloomsbury, Book review, Fiction, literary fiction, Magnus Mills, Publisher, satire

‘Explorers of the New Century’ by Magnus Mills

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Explorers of the new century by

Fiction – paperback; Bloomsbury; 186 pages; 2006.

Magnus Mills is a cheeky little scamp. With a big black beating heart. He lulls you into a false sense of security before dealing you a killer blow. And you can’t help but love him for it.

Explorers of the New Century, his fifth novel, starts out as a rather fun, light-hearted story about two groups of explorers competing to reach the “furthest point from civilisation”. One group — Scandinavian, small and efficient — follows a dry riverbed; the second — British, large and disorganised — takes a different route across an endless landscape of scree.

The narrative plods along (pun fully intended) for what seems like forever. Not much seems to happen. (Admittedly, I considered abandoning the book, because it was so slow and dull.) The Scandinavians make good progress but are constantly worried they’ll get pipped at the post, while the Brits get mired in bickering and make poor leadership decisions.

And then, somewhere around the halfway mark, Mills throws a curve ball that makes you rub your eyes and re-read the sentence to make sure you didn’t misunderstand it. Suddenly the book takes a rather kooky and surreal turn, and you begin to realise Mills must have had a great time writing this book. Either that, or he was hallucinating when he cooked up the plot.

Then, just as you’re coming to grips with this new turn of events, he delivers another surprise twist that turns everything, and I mean everything, on its head. The story, which began as a rather pedestrian (there I go with the puns again, sorry about that) narrative now becomes rather dark and sinister. It makes you see everything that’s already happened before in a new and disturbing light. It’s brilliant.

Now, for obvious reasons, I can’t reveal the exact nature of these two “twists”, but I can say that Explorers of the New Century is one of those deceptively simple novels that is part allegory, part fable and stays with you long after you’ve finished reading it.

Crucially, there’s a lot of deadpan humour in it too, which breaks up the monotony of the anorexic text. Most of it is quite subtle, but there was one exchange that caused me to laugh out loud. The British group has just set up camp and is fantasising about scones with “lashings of jam and butter”.

The tent had four occupants. Sargent was in his normal position by the door. Next to him was Summerfield, already fast asleep. Then came Seddon, and at the far end was Plover. The latter had adopted his usual pose. He was lying on his side, outstretched with his legs crossed and his head popped on one hand, facing the doorway.
He waited a moment and then said, “I think you’ll find that the  correct pronunciation is ‘scones’.”
“‘Scones’?” repeated Sargent.
“‘Scones,'” repeated Plover.
“Well, I’ve never heard that before. We’ve always said ‘scones’ where I come from.”
“Same here,” agreed Seddon.
“I assure you the word is ‘scones’,” said Plover. “You should look it up when you get the opportunity.”

Trust Mills to capture the absurdity of English people arguing about the English language!

For what it’s worth, this is a hugely enjoyable book which can be easily read in just a couple of hours, perfect if you’re looking for a quick palette cleanser between novels. It’s typical Mills fare, if a little darker than usual, so if you like this you’re sure to enjoy his back catalogue, most of which is reviewed here.