Books discovered
Coming across a great book, whether newly published or ages old, is a thrill. So we’re offering Books Discovered as a regular feature, open to contributions from all readers. If you are still chuffed at a great read, drop an e-mail to info@voiceforarran.com and tell us what it is and why you liked it. No need to bother with publishers’ details or the ISBN, we can do all that. Meanwhile, here’s one from our editor to start with.
A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In is wickedly funny. It’s by Magnus Mills, who is a wonderfully practical man. Although he has an economics degree, he was stringing wire fences when he wrote his first book, The Restraint of Beasts, which won the McKitterick Prize and was short-listed for the Booker. He has absolutely no truck with literary luvviedom and pokes fun at all forms of authority like Ronald Fairbanks with a rapier. In my view, Mills is Britain’s best living satirist, writing in a laconic, matter-of-fact way, but in a not-quite-real world so wacky that you don’t at first realise how close it is to today’s Britain. A Cruel Bird is about a place (one is not sure quite what kind of place) governed by a privy cabinet of brain-aching stupidity. The lofty persons concerned have not noticed that a railway from a distant greater power is extending towards it at an alarming rate – but then, the only available telescope has to have sixpence inserted in it, and there is a serious shortage of sixpences. The head of the cabinet, an over-indulged public school boy, has gone AWOL, so the top job is empty. Other posts are handed out irrationally. The first-person narrator finds himself in charge of the national orchestra, and has a shot at conducting it in though quite unable to read music. This ineffably superior, utterly incompetent private power-house carries the reader along like a passenger in a crazy, collapsing trolley-bus that shouldn’t be on the road, unable to get off and both appalled and helpless with laughter.
Join the secret Mills fan club and read this book. You won’t regret it.
A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In is published by Bloomsbury, with no brou-ha-ha at all. I suspect that they don’t realise what a maverick genius they have on their hands.
Click the link below to see a brief video:
Alison Prince
