Innocence, experience and comedy in Cumbria
He’s a bit of a handyman. Or, at least, so Mr Parker seems to think. No matter, he’ll soon be on that train east to India from these wet lakeland fells. Just as soon as he’s finished that little job Mr Parker asked him to do.
It wasn’t much of a holiday anyway. As the tourists trickled away from the campsite, so did the sunshine, and the hot water, and the provisions at the local shop, and even the good beer. Still, there seemed to be plenty of work to take his mind off these minor disappintments – as much as he cared to do, in fact, even homework. And payment could be discussed later. Meanwhile, he was really beginning to fit in, to become one of the local fixtures, down the pub, on the farm, on the lake. Maybe that trip east could wait?
In this cautionary tale of labour and capital, of innocence and experience, Magnus Mills takes us back to the kind of terrain he patrolled so notably in The Restraint of Beasts – rural circuits where neither cash nor unemployment are much prized – and makes it conclusively his own turf.
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There's a lot that's strange about this little town. Where have all the females gone? Why does everyone seem to think he should take over the town milk route? Why won't the shops stock his beloved baked beans? Both the grocer and the pub are oddly eager to let him run up tabs and there's no sign of payment from Tommy Parker. It seems, in fact, that the narrator's early suspicions have been fulfilled: "I'd inadvertently become his servant." Like the Hall brothers from The Restraint of Beasts, Parker is volatile, irrational and all-powerful--a primitive god ruling over his own creation. As the narrator falls further and further under his sway, All Quiet on the Orient Express becomes a striking allegory of labour and capital, purgatory and judgement, and the uncanniness of manual work. --Mary Park
‘Absorbing, darkly worrying and very, very funny’
The Times
‘Mills is a master of the cliffhanger and can make even the most deadpan behaviour compelling and funny... A deliciously sly comic fable.’
Financial Times
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