Auch der zweite Mills-Roman, Indien kann warten, ist schwarzer Humor pur. (...) Mills versteht es, diesen ganzen Wahnsinn höchst überzeugend in Szene zu setzen. Mehr noch, es gelingt ihm, den Leser völlig in den Bann seiner Erzählung zu schlagen." - Gerd Busse, Frankfurter Rundschau I felt I really ought to decline the offer as it seemed to be my duty to walk on such a pleasant day. But I got in all the same. It's very British, and it's this Britishness, the protagaonist's politeness - a fear of causing offence - that powers the plot. How can darts, real ale, malted milk biscuits, baked beans, green paint, a cardboard crown and a milk round be so sinister? How can dialogue centred around delivering groceries or sawing wood be so utterly disturbing? Mills manages to throw you off balance with the most banal sequence of events.

I watched him go, then delved in my bag for a can of baked beans and set about preparing some breakfast. It was a simple affair, because all I had was a stove, a pan and these beans. I heated them up and The shopkeeper was standing in his doorway, and appeared to be sunning himself. Above his front window was one large word: `HODGE'. I've got to say it was strangely readable despite the intentionally sparse dialogue and simple narrative style. The author had a clever way of putting little odd things in here and there that made me want to keep reading till the end- to find out if there were answers (and there were. At the very, very end. To a few questions anyway).I was slightly surprised by this. There'd been quite a lot of people staying here when I first arrived, and I more or less assumed I'd gone unnoticed before today. After all, I was only one tent Smith, Zadie (October 2011). "New Books". Harper's. Harper's Foundation. 323 (1, 937): 75–78 . Retrieved 6 July 2013. (subscription required) Mills's style has been called "deceptively" simple. [8] His prose style is rhythmic, often repetitious, and his humour is deadpan. He favours short sentences, little description and a lot of dialogue. Mills has cited Primo Levi as a key influence. [9] Themes [ edit ] Yes,' he said. `We like it very much. Of course, I've been here all my life, so I don't know any different.' All Quiet on the Orient Express is the second novel by Booker shortlisted author Magnus Mills, published in 1999. As with his first novel it is a tragicomedy with an unnamed narrator dealing with apparently simple but increasingly sinister situations.

A hard one to shelve, as it turns out. Gothic, but modern and quite light. Funny, but not in a humorous way. Weird, but not fantastic, eerie but without anything sinister.Not that I was bothered by all this. The vehicles that went by were few and far between, and their passing broke the monotony of the job. It was actually taking much longer than I'd expected, and although

I've recorded everything under distinct headings so that I can remember all of this when the rest of the Book Club members get around to reading this. The headings are:Mills' style, and his odd inventions -- the green paint ! the crown ! -- and the characters his narrator never quite gets a grip on all work together to make this a surprisingly dark and compelling tale. World News Network: Book Review: Three Novels by Magnus Mills, Published: 20 September 2009, Uploaded: 19 June 2011. done was charge him a fiver and he'd most likely have let me off the rent anyway. After all, I was hardly taking up any space in his field. Still, it was too late to worry about that now, and to tell the truth I wasn't It isn't true to say, as the blurb does, that Mills invented the "Kafkaesque novel of work" singlehandedly. Paul Auster might feasibly claim this, specifically the burdensome wall-building in "The Music of Chance." I suspect that Kafka would regard his own handling of "work" in something like The Castle to be an earlier origin still, and that would leave "Kafkaesque novel of work" as a tautology. Mills' debt to Auster is evident in his constant use of first person picaresque narrators, usually "innocents" in a vaguely threatening and tenuous "fish out of water" circumstances involving pressing personal obligations, the ever-present unspoken danger of causing offence, and so on. Maybe only the English write books like this. The narrative unwinds slowly. The plot reveals itself in the most deliberate increments. Much is suggested, little explained. Hints of incipient drama along the way lead nowhere in particular. Characters who will eventually become pivotal drift in and out, making scant initial impact. There are strong inklings of an overriding daffiness. Not until the end are readers aware of just what has happened, and even then doubts linger." - James Polk, The New York Times Book Review