It reads very nicely, and the many quirky details -- plausible enough not to seem artificial -- make for much amusement. 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 being outside in the sunshine was quite pleasant, I began to find all the fiddly corners and underneath bits rather tedious. I was just working along one of the diagonals when I heard a clinking noise coming along behind He seemed content with this answer, and moved aside. Then he followed me into the shop and slipped behind the counter. 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 ]

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.the brightness I chose a shower cubicle and turned the tap on. Oddly enough I discovered it was already fully open, but there was no water coming out. I tried the tap in the next cubicle and it was the same. I was just

The strange townsfolk were all very intriguing yet half the time I was thinking 'you cheeky bugger!'. I feel like there was an odd theme of manipulation and advantage taking. And at the same time I wanted the lovely narrator of the story to stop letting people walk all over him! Yet I couldn't be annoyed at him because he was just too lovely. The structure and strength of both [his] novels comes from their dialogue, which is natural yet as stylised as Pinter... There is little in the way of story and less description. The atmosphere is powerful and lies somewhere between comedy and horror. -- The Observer, 12 September 1999It 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. I'd made up my mind about that, and was just brewing the tea, when a movement caught my eye. Walking down the narrow concrete road that led from the house came a teenage girl in school uniform. I looked

I glanced at the gate that was hooked open beside us. It was a steel tube type, painted red and hinged on substantial concrete posts. summer, and the locals would surely be used to outsiders by now. Yet just because a stranger was painting someone's gate, he immediately came under local scrutiny. a bleak succession of odd jobs, a trap that gradually tightens its grip. Glorious plans to ride a motorbike through the Continent and then head off by train, eventually to India, are derailed at a campground in the He fell silent for a moment, and when I looked up I saw he was gazing across at my tent. I'd been crouched down painting for quite a while now, so I stood upright to give my knees a rest.in for a lunchtime drink, though, as I didn't want the day to dissolve into an alcoholic blur. Once I'd bought my supplies I would have to think of something else to do in the afternoon.

Mills' real subject all along has been work, and All Quiet on the Orient Express may be seen as a curtailment of political and philosophical embellishments rather than a less rich book. Work -- what's right and wrong with it -- is what this novel is about." - Robert F. Geary, World & I

It also kinda reminds me of an O' Henry story. But darker in theme of course. I need to read more Saki... it's been years but I think he did stuff like this. Do you know?? really bothered. It was actually quite nice to have something proper to do for a change, and so as soon as I'd dumped my groceries in the tent I set off up towards the house. tedious day. The result is a fine and funny novel that says some provocative things about class and work in the British Isles. Carey Harrison in the San Francisco Chronicle commented, "It's not out of idle amusement that the sweetly fiendish author has named his book All Quiet on the Orient Express. This marriage of famous titles hides from view (yet points to) its dark, telling twin: Murder on the Western Front. Not since Kafka has an author lured his audience so innocently, so beguilingly, into hell." [2] in a hard gravel yard. As I came up the slope I was aware of the house looming above me, overlooking the yard, the road and the fields below. I passed the lower corner of the building and scuffed some gravel with my boots.