All Quiet On The Orient Express. Murder On The Western Front? You choose, because, when all said and done, bus driver cum Booker nominee Magnus Mills’ latest is about a lot of things, but none of them very much: baked beans, row boats, dangerous farm equipment, death and green paint. Because, like the award-winning The Restraint of Beasts, at heart this is a book about time passing. It’s about the process of boredom.

It’s probably set in the Lake District. Our narrator (unnamed) is taking a few days out camping before setting off on his ancient motorcycle overland to India. Only, the farmer whose field this is asks him if he’d paint the gate. Green. Mr Parker has a lot of green paint. And thus begins his slow absorption into the Millford fabric. Would he like the milkman to leave him a bottle? We need someone to make up the darts team? Summer gives way to autumn and each job Mr Parker finds is superseded. Chopping wood, rebuilding a jetty, sprucing up the pleasure boats. "The idea of staying here forever, and never moving on, seemed quite unthinkable."

Mills’ prose, like his narrative, is insidious. It’s spare, shorn of flourish and adjectival ornamentation, more suited, one would think, to the short story. (His terse short story collection, Only When The Sun Shines Brightly, comes highly recommended, incidentally.) As a British novelist he stands apart from his contemporaries with books that are both rural and seemingly disinterested in attracting attention. He invites us into his peculiar little world by writing about what we know: the ability of things and circumstance to fill available space. Drama is incidental. Why won’t grocer Hodge stock baked beans? Why does the ice-cream van play only one line from ‘Pop Goes The Weasel’? Why does one farmer always wear a cardboard crown? And green paint?

The results are claustrophobic and increasingly sinister. So much so that many will likely find it all too much all too soon. Although it would never make the claim itself, you are inexplicably drawn to Went The Day Well? or A Canterbury Tale. Mills gifts characters no inner-life, putting them entirely at the service of the text, then doesn’t tell us what the book is actually about. His dialogue is Pinterish, but his narrative sense more Ivor Cutler. Funny and disturbing. It could all too easily become affectation, but for now, from here, All Quiet On The Orient Express looks like quiet triumph.