From Publishers Weekly
NOTE: This review reveals a plot twist in the book In this acidly allegorical fancy, two unidentified nations at an unidentified time send coordinated expeditions into an uninhabited place of extreme weather—"the Agreed Furthest Point from Civilization." After arrival at camp, and a minor mishap that injures a mule (which has to be destroyed), the British-seeming team sets out, taking a difficult route over scree-strewn hillocks; the Scandinavian-seeming team, a few days ahead, progresses up a dry river bed. Given the polar explorer motif, questions begin to nag. Why does no one mention the poles? Where is the ice? Where are the sled dogs, and why are both expeditions encumbered with mule trains? Answers present themselves as we become familiar, through indirect hints, with the manner in which the mules have become a burden for both societies. One day, as disaster strikes the British party, a crew member and several mules drown—and one of the mules speaks. Mills (
The Restraint of Beasts) expertly wields a narrow-bandwidth prose that hides distortions of reality in its very matter-of-factness. The effect is similar to the way old painters used to put anamorphic skulls in the foreground of their paintings: when we finally understand what we are seeing, it creates a backward-crashing estrangement from any sense of normalcy.
(Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
NOTE: This review reveals a plot twist in the book
Since his first novel, The Restraint of Beasts (1998), was short-listed for the Booker Prize, Mills' reputation has rapidly risen, and his works have been widely translated. A signature feature of his narratives is a penchant for black comedy veiled in disarmingly minimalist prose. His latest novel takes that to its deadpan limits. In a deceptively straightforward plot, two expeditions of nineteenth-century explorers, one apparently British, the other Scandinavian, both accompanied by mules, blaze separate trails deep into a bleak wilderness in a race to pinpoint the Agreed Furthest Point from Civilization. Despite relentless winds, dwindling rations, and the loss of several mules, their exploratory resolve remains strong, albeit tainted by some decidedly strange motives. For it soon becomes more and more clear that the "mules" aren't what one would normally assume, and the expeditions are less noble acts of discovery than attempts to relieve society of an annoying ethnic burden. A slyly original critique of racism and the pretensions behind civilization's zeal for moral uplift. Carl Hays
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