It’s a surreal job, but someone’s got to do it

Magnus Mills is a slave driver. Find yourself in one of his novels, and chances are you’d either be a fence builder, an odd jobber, an excavator -- or, in his latest, “The Scheme for Full Employment,” a delivery van driver, shuttling spare parts from one depot to another.

Not that there’s anything wrong with a little hard work. It’s just that Mills, who drove a bus in London before jumping to fame with his Booker-nominated first novel, “The Restraint of Beasts,” has little interest in anything else. Once he starts imagining you, don’t expect to have a personal life; it’s all company time in these pages. So be forewarned: Say goodbye to your family and friends -- no room for them here -- and don’t go looking for a union representative. There is none.

Less a novelist than a writer of parables, Mills writes fictions that are satiric, didactic, subtle and blatant all at once. His characters have seemingly fallen out of the sky and landed in a world so surreal yet so completely realized that they, and perhaps you, will never once question its strangeness, and while Mills’ stories may provide a fair wage for the reader -- humor, provocation, unpredictability and the like -- they come with a hidden cost. But that’s in the fine print; for now, The Scheme’s the thing.

It all began some 30 years ago when one Sir Ronald Thompson came up with an idea that would provide eight hours of work every day for every one. It was an idea whose time had come, for the world back then was something of a mess: From the elevated roadways of today, you can catch a glimpse of the ancien regime Thompson redeemed with its derelict buildings and abandoned grounds. His scheme quickly became “the greatest undertaking ever conceived by men and women,” Mills tells us in the prologue, a solution to idleness and uncertainty, a panacea to sloth and meaninglessness. “Labor omnibus” became the motto of this workaday society, handily populated with clerks, managers, canteen ladies, engineers, key masters, gatemen, janitors, drivers, assistants and superintendents, to say nothing of an admiring public.

“The success of The Scheme depended above all else on appearances,” Mills’ narrator explains early on. Innocent and charming, he’s our nameless guide to this peculiar squirrel cage. “It was popular because people could see it in operation on a daily basis. When a UniVan passed by, it reminded onlookers that all across the country men and women were occupied in gainful employment. Eight hours’ work for eight hours’ pay: that was the deal, and everyone agreed it was fair.”

In return, there are usual, and not so usual, bennies: paychecks, cost-of-living allowances, dry-cleaning disbursements, attendance awards, productivity bonuses and other perks, such as uniforms, subsidized catering, welfare funds, a sports association and on-site amenities.

What exactly supports this enterprise is anyone’s guess and no one’s concern. This is work for the sake of work, the quintessence of work without such precious details like supply and demand or profit and loss. They would only get in the way. Besides, Mills is less interested in how this paradise is sustained than in how it destroys itself. And ruin is in the air.

One glorious spring day after a long damp spell, vans roll in and out of the depots “as smooth as clockwork,” or do they? Some drivers, upon finishing their appointed rounds, had been cutting out early. “Early swervers” they’re called, and their liberties threaten the whole enterprise, according to the “flat dayers”: the other drivers who, even if they finish early, wait out their remaining hours -- snoozing under a tree, reading the paper or enjoying a spot of tea before clocking out. It’s a distinction that runs wild, leading eventually to something of a civil war.

“The point is,” our narrator observes, “there’s a difference between full employment and being fully employed.” And no small point it is, or ever has been.

From the moment man first stepped from behind the plow and into the factory, his freedom has been in question. Ever since he stopped working for himself and started pushing a broom for someone else, he’s had to wrestle down feelings of entitlement and responsibility. Loss and gain, as it turns out, are far more than just items on an expense ledger; they’ve become a psychic, if not Faustian, bargain struck each time a clock is punched and a paycheck cashed.

Mills has an uncanny ability to throw all this into sharp relief. “The Scheme for Full Employment” contains not only the recognizable small dramas of the workplace but also the larger interplay among the heavyweights of modern labor. It’s the Keynesians versus the Von Hayeks, the Fords versus the UAWs, the Stakhanovites versus the shirkers. The lessons that arise may seem inadvertent, as if Mills might have stubbed his toe in the telling, but there’s more art and intention in these pages than first meets the eye.

You may enjoy the riddles. Or you may wish -- and here’s the fine print -- for a more chromatic story, for a little time off, a holiday or two, a chance to see these characters and their world as something other than their jobs. Before you can complain, The Scheme collapses, rent by petty bickering, inertia and stubbornness, forces well beyond anything the Chicago School might have taught.

“[W]e can’t lay the guilt on anyone but ourselves,” our narrator says. “The Scheme was created for us, and it was we who finally brought it down.” Here, of course, is the final word. Beyond all the -ologies and -isms of life, beyond the hopes and dreams of capitalism, socialism and democracy, are the slackers and the drones. Irrational, capricious, mischievous: It’s a wonder anything ever gets accomplished. So let Adam Smith and Karl Marx fade away; it’s physicist James Clerk Maxwell who carries the day: If all closed systems are doomed to fail, then so are we -- in spite of the best-laid schemes. *