Tales of Muffled Oars

Tales of Muffled Oars is more of the gently bleak absurdity Magnus Mills is known for. I enjoyed it, as I have the previous books, although I found it slight, as if one of his spare short stories had been stretched out.I deducted a star for the formatting of the hard copy: it looks like some hit print on a double spaced word document.

Brilliant novel.

I have no idea why an author with such a prestigious track record as Magnus chose to publish this novel via Amazon. But Bloomsbury's loss is our gain. It's just as brilliant as his others. I've read every novel by Magnus on release since Restraint of Beasts, and Tales of Muffled Oars doesn't disappoint, with the always-present undercurrent of mundane menace and a bizarre twist that never quite tips over into the unlikely. The everyman narrator conveys the same sense of bemused fascination as we saw in The Forensic Records Society, for example. What it has in common with that one is being set in and around a pub but the story is different, centring around history lectures and pints if Guinness. The mystery ultimately is who are McCauley, Hogarth and Swift. You may be able to guess.... but maybe not.

This is disappointing. Magnus Mills is great at creating bizarre situations in which ordinary people find themselves without ever questioning the strangeness. That's made for some wonderful books. But this reads like a rehash of the Forensic Records Society. In that, a bunch of blokes meet in the upstairs room of a pub to discuss music and differences of opinion emerge. In Tales of Muffled Oars, a bunch of blokes meet in the upstairs room of a pub to discuss history and differences of opinion emerge. The difference, here, is that they are joined by the real historical figures, Lord Macaulay, Jonathan Swift and William Hogarth - complete with their period clothes. And no one raises an eyebrow at this. Elsewhere these tropes have worked well. Here, though, Mills is just repeating himself and phoning it in. He's capable of so much better.

I have all Magnus Mills's books and often re-read them so I was looking forward to this new one but it was a bit of a disappointment. The book is relatively short and the core idea is very similar to his last book, although the story flows well and there's plenty of Mills's trademark humour. The biggest disappointment is with the quality of the paperback version of the book, which has a poorly-chosen font, small print size and double-spacing. It's distracting and annoying to read a book with spelling mistakes, incorrect tabs and varying page lengths. Perhaps the author makes more money from self-publishing through Amazon than through a conventional publisher (in which case good luck to him) but if he's going to publish this way again then I hope he puts more effort into design and proof-reading and gives us a book of better quality than this one.

This is another amazing book from Magnus Mills. As ever, he takes us on a little dance with some fascinating characters and a unique storyline.I am truly in awe of Mr Mills and his ability to spin a tale that is so original and unpredictable.This time he gives us an English history lesson which develops over the book to try and justify why England is at peace.

Brilliant and I think fans of Mills will be delighted. I think Mills is playing with us, with interlinkages with other his other books. At the end I dashed onto the internet to confirm my suspicions about the main plot device, just to unpackage a huge depth of great stuff. How should the History of England be told?