Building a house of tin

Aman wants nothing but to live in the middle of a canyon, in a house built entirely of tin. In the middle of his search, he comes across such a building, abandoned, high upon the plain. So he settles, and seems happy, until one day a woman reminds him of his dream. Then news trickles back about another man who has refused to give up on the original vision ...

Magnus Mills does like these abstract, metafictional structures. He enjoys flirting with allegory and fable, enigma and ellipsis, all those off-putting and annoying book-reviewer words. In The Restraint of Beasts (1998) and All Quiet on the Orient Express (1999) this tendency was held in tension with an equal fondness for the concrete and the recognisably British: tools and camp sites, labourers and bosses, pots of paint. A house of tin, however, does not belong to the same world order. Nor does the deadpan plot, with its logically perfect structure, like a social psychology textbook, like an absurdist student play.

Mills's work illustrates what James Kelman calls "negative apprehension". Ornament is avoided. Lots is left unsaid. So much fiction at the moment is written to Hollywood D-girl formulae - what does Bridget want? What are the obstacles in her way? - it's good to read something that marches to a different drummer. Mills's narrator is defined largely by what he doesn't want - he resists and refuses the roles of neighbour, husband, townsman, leader. And then, what he does want is such a strange thing, "a house built entirely from tin, with four tin walls, a roof of tin, a chimney and a door". What sort of a life goal is that?

Mills writes marvellous prose, plain and puritanical, with added strangeness. But there is not quite enough stuff in this book to make it work. Mills likes to do sinister, Pinter-ish dialogue, in which key words are repeated over and over. But "house of tin", somehow, isn't sturdy enough an image to bear the repetition. And the protagonist is a bit too passive. His character isn't quite strong enough to keep the tale in shape.

Mills himself turned up on Radio Four's Today programme some weeks ago, to spar with Donna Tartt, author of The Secret History (1993). Tartt, it seems, has taken nine years to write her follow-up. Mills, on the other hand, wrote the excellent Restraint of Beasts while working as a London bus driver and has published a book a year since, working all the while. He has also been a postman and a van driver.

Like everyone else, I was cheering Mills along as I was listening; but that was before I had read his latest novel. It is clearly a transitional work in Mills's oeuvre, and perhaps that accounts for its occasional flimsiness. Or perhaps it is Mills who has been spreading himself too thin.