The Review of Contemporary Fiction

All Quiet on the Orient Express by Magnus Mills
Brian Evenson

Magnus Mills. All Quiet on the Orient Express. Arcade, 1999. 224 pp. $23.95.

Anyone familiar with the absurd workingman’s comedy of Magnus Mills’s The Restraint of Beasts will find All Quiet on the Orient Express familiar territory. Here, instead of a team traveling about installing fences, Mills offers a passive, out-of-work narrator vacationing in the Lake District in England. Almost without knowing it, he becomes caught up in a campground owner’s labor plans. Beginning with agreeing out of politeness to paint a gate, he slowly begins to take on more and more responsibility until he seems inextricably tangled in a situation, living among people who always seem to know some vital piece of information he’s missing.

The narrative is related in a deadpan style, one in which the narrator seems to worry more about rumors of his boss’s temper than about accidentally killing someone. Mills is expert at capturing the rhythms of the everyday, noncommunicative speech we engage in.

Though stronger in many regards than The Restraint of Beasts, All Quiet on the Orient Express nevertheless suffers a little from its similarity to that first novel. The characters are similar, the style and tone are quite similar, and both make wry but dark commentary on the dilemma of working men. Yet one must acknowledge that the range of All Quiet on the Orient Express is larger; Mills develops the absurdity of this situation with more subtlety and precision. In any case, even if the two books are similar to one another, they’re similar to nothing else being written today. Very funny, often frightening in ways that remind one of one’s own struggles at work, All Quiet on the Orient Express is a sardonic attack on the work ethic that, though it expands slightly on Mills’s first novel, is a wonderful read. [Brian Evenson]