The Field of the Cloth of Gold by Magnus Mills, book review: A bit of 'carry on camping'

Magnus Mills is unique. There is simply no equivalent of his brand of domestic absurdism. Partly this is a matter of style, the unmistakably deadpan voice concealing the precise construction of each book, each sentence even, under an artless veneer. But the distinctiveness also reflects his preoccupations.

Mills's comic universe is a place in which the individual is always in conflict with "the system", chaos is barely held at bay by out-of-control bureaucracy, and the essential human desire to organise things is undermined by the intractability (and sometimes stupidity) of those being organised. Work, in particular manual labour, is both a salvation and a curse. The idea of Progress with a capital P is suspect if not outright ridiculous.

If Mills had been plying his trade in Soviet Russia, he would almost certainly have been sent to the gulag, which is quite an achievement for a writer of such generally gentle humour. He is the most British of anarchists, something that his brilliantly crafty seventh novel, The Field of the Cloth of Gold, makes explicit.

The field of the title sits in a bend of a river, cut off from the expanse of land around it by water on three sides and wilderness on another. It is a damp place but a fertile one, ripe for settlement. For the nameless narrator, who chooses to pitch his tent in the middle of what he calls the "Great Field", it is also "the place where momentous events would unfold and come to fruition".

The reader could be forgiven for mistaking that for another small, boggy, windswept island whose inhabitants possess a similar belief in their manifest destiny. In the west, the narrator's neighbour, Hen, makes great play of having been the first inhabitant. In the south-east a legion of soldiers is erecting a small town of tents, under the supervision of their enigmatically imperial leader, Julian. Soon new settlers will turn up in longboats to populate the shoreline and a holy man by the name of Hippo appears too. Each new arrival prompts a flurry of anxiety and competitiveness.

Much of the comedy here comes from a clash of scale, with Britain's foundation story reduced to a series of Carry on Camping squabbles. It is not the first time that Mills has (so to speak) pitched his tent in this field. His second novel, All Quiet on the Orient Express, featured a put-upon handyman doomed to spend his life pleasing his landlord and neighbours on a Lake District campsite.

Although very different in tone, this novel shares the earlier book's belief that, while superficially egalitarian – for what could be more levelling than peeing with strangers outdoors? – life under canvas is in fact a breeding ground for status anxiety, one-upmanship and territoriality. The book's narrator is prone to all three of the above. He is the embodiment of "the narcissism of the small difference", the term used by Freud to describe people's tendency to direct their most primitive negative emotions towards those who resemble them most.

But though he takes offence at the smallest perceived slight, he is also adaptable – or perhaps lazy – enough to accommodate each generation of newcomers. If at times – such as when he finds himself co-opted into helping build a wall to separate two parts of the field – his adaptability verges on appeasement, then so be it: it's the price for keeping the peace.

It is a long way from the narrator's grand dreams for the Great Field to the reality, a place of petty feuds and passive aggression held together by a series of fudges. Yet, despite all the human foibles and folly on display, it just about works. And that, Mills seems to suggest, displaying again his instinctive distrust of grand projects, is more than anybody might have hoped. How terribly British.