Reading matters

'The Scheme for Full Employment' by Magnus Mills

Fiction - hardcover; Flamingo; 255 pages; 2003.

Reading a book by Magnus Mills is a bit like stepping into a parallel universe: everything looks and feels the same but there's something a little off key that you can't quite put your finger on. The Scheme for Full Employment, Mills' fourth novel, is no exception.

The Scheme is essentially a distribution business in which goods are transported from depot to depot in a vehicle called a UniVan.

The UniVan was a glorious creation! With its distinctive gunmetal paintwork and silvery livery, its bull-nosed profile, running boards and chrome front grill, it had become a celebrated national icon, recognised and loved by all! Moreover, it represented a great idea that not only worked, but was seen to work!

Becoming an employee on The Scheme, which runs like clockwork and offers eight hours' pay for eight hours' work, is held up as a pinnacle of achievement. What better way can one earn a living than driving a van in a courteous, efficient and timely manner from depot to depot delivering unspecified goods to a rigorous and ordered schedule?

But the rigour and order with which The Scheme is renowned comes under threat by revelations that some workers aren't doing their full eight hour days -- some are being signed off for an "early swerve" on a semi-regular basis, so instead of finishing bang on 4.30pm some are going home a half-hour earlier! This authorised skiving is not approved by those employees who believe that such actions will destroy The Scheme's regimented order they love so much, and a strike -- the first in The Scheme's history -- ensues.

'The Restraint of Beasts' by Magnus Mills

Fiction - paperback; Flamingo; 215  pages; 1999.

This is the type of book that will make you look at high tensile agricultural fencing in an entirely new way. I'm not joking. And it might make you think twice about refusing a third helping of sausages at breakfast, too.

A highly unusual tale written in a highly unusual style, The Restraint of Beasts (the title refers to what a fence does) is a black comedy like no other.

It tells the story of two itinerant Scots fencers, the pub-obsessed, cash-strapped Tam and Richie, who are dispatched to England to build a fence. With them goes the narrator, their foreman, who dreads spending the next six weeks or so living on a farm in a squalid caravan with his often silent and moody charges.

'Three to see the King' by Magnus Mills

Fiction - paperback; Harper Perennial; 167 pages; 2001

Three to see the King is a fable about human relationships and human happiness. Is the grass greener on the other side? And if you conform to society's expectations will you feel like you belong?

This is a simple tale told in Mills' characteristic stripped back prose; it's almost like reading a children's story, except the adult complexities resonate off the page. In fact it's the things that Mills does not say that reveal so much about the characters in this little gem of a book.

The narrator himself is a simple character, happy to live in a house made of tin on a vast, red sandy plain in relative isolation and obscurity. But one day a woman arrives at his door and moves in. Initially he feels unsettled by this, but eventually he gets used to her presence and a comfortable companionship ensues.

Then his neighbour announces he's moving further afield to join a community being built by the great Michael Hawkins.But the narrator refuses to accept that Michael's way of life is any better than his own, and, in making such an admission, inadvertently offends his neighbour who is unable to believe his short-sightedness.

Within weeks everyone living within a five-mile radius of the narrator has packed up their houses and moved to Michael's village. The narrator watches a never-ending stream of people wandering across the red sandy plain, pieces of tin strapped to their backs, as they head towards nirvana down the road.

Before long curiosity gets the better of him and he too goes in search of greener pastures. . . with devastating (and hilarious) consequences.

'All Quiet on the Orient Express' by Magnus Mills

Fiction - paperback; Perennial; 214 pages; 2004

The Lake District, England. It's the end of summer. All the tourists have packed up and gone home - except one young man, the unnamed narrator of this book, who decides to hang on for a couple of more days before heading to India on a backpacking adventure.

Tommy Parker, who owns the land our narrator is camping on, befriends him, and gives him a succession of odd jobs to do. The jobs become more complicated and more time consuming. Before long our narrator finds himself so embroiled in the local community, with its sinister undertones and strange, quirky characters, that all idea of travelling to the subcontinent gets completely shelved.

He spends his days working for Parker while his evenings are spent doing homework for Parker's teenage daughter and playing darts and drinking pints in the local pub. All the while he has one eye looking over his shoulder, because he keeps doing things that - for reasons unfathomable to him - upset others. "You better watch Parker's temper," he keeps getting told, which only makes our narrator more nervous and watchful.