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An Unlikely Story |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: Robert F. Geary |
| Publication: The world & I online |
| Issue Date: 1/1/2000 |
| Size: 2,057 Words, 12,239 Characters |
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ALL QUIET ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS
Magnus Mills
New York: Arcade Publishing, 1999
211 pp., $23.95
Magnus Mills is an unlikely teller of most unusual stories. According to his publisher, Mills had been a London bus driver for over a decade until, in 1998, the success of The Restraint of Beasts allowed him literally to quit his day job. With dreamlike rapidity, Mills exchanged the life of an anonymous workingman for literary celebrity, praised by prestigious reviews (in the New Yorker, for instance) and lauded by Thomas Pynchon as "a deadpan-comic wonder."
As surprising as is this transformation from bus driver to literary star, the subject of the novel that brought him critical praise and popular success is even more unlikely--for its very ordinariness. The Restraint of Beasts is not ...
. . .
...ll be trapped and exploited by a numbing routine (unless one is by nature an exploiter like Tommy Parker, whose name oddly echoes that of the man who discovered and promoted the working-class Elvis). Here is village life and work Samuel Beckett might have rendered had he chosen to depict Vladimir and Estragon with a paintbrush in hand or sipping a pint at a sleepy pub--going nowhere, forever.
(821 of 12,239 characters)
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