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UK Authors - General fiction - |
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All Quiet on the Orient Express |
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| All Quiet on the Orient Express by Magnus Mills Harper Collins (Flamingo) 210 pages, 2000 ISBN 0006551858 Reviewed by our UK Editor Rachel A. Hyde Describing the plot of this book conveys almost nothing about its extraordinary appeal and the spell it weaves around the reader. It is the end of the summer season on a Lake District campsite. One young man lingers on when the other tourists have gone home. He is in no hurry to leave, trying to get enough money together to travel to India, so he is glad when the proprietor gives him odd jobs to do – painting, sawing wood, and general repairs. Overnight, his status rises from mere tourist to temporary resident, and he soon becomes a member of the darts team in a village that is not easy to leave. The author manages to skilfully build up an atmosphere of mounting menace from seeming trifles: the ice cream van who delivers the milk can only play part of a tune, and the farmer always wears a cardboard crown and all that green paint. Reality is slightly off kilter, and anything can happen and still appear believable in this weird, Kafkaesque understated world. If you liked The Prisoner, lapped up Twin Peaks and enjoy the strangeness of plays like Waiting for Godot then this is your poison. All Quiet on the Orient Express is modern British writing at its original, fresh, innovative best. It is literature that isn’t literary, with no axes to grind and no flags to wave - a fine story that teases, surprises, amuses and never quite teeters over the fine line between fantasy and reality. A city dweller’s nightmare view of country life? Maybe but a lot more than that as well. All Quiet on the Orient Express is a must read. |
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