Magnus Mills was still a bus driver when his first novel, The Restraint of Beasts, was shortlisted for the Booker. The methodical, repetitious nature of that job, as well as his previous trade as a builder of fences, informs much of his strange and captivating fiction. This is certainly true of his fourth novel, in which the narrator — unnamed, as ever — spends his working life driving a UniVan round and round the arterial highways of an anonymous town as part of the Scheme of the book’s title.

Cracks begin to appear in the bureaucratic edifice when two factions square up to one another. One group, the “flat-dayers”, is pushing for the full eight-and-a-half- hour working day to be observed. Their opponents, the “swervers”, believe that the occasional chance to be signed off early by a manager should be recognised as an intrinsic part of their working life. As the positions taken by the two camps become intractable our narrator is taken off his normal routes to carry out a series of timing runs to a distant depot.

Mills’s narrators rarely act: they react. Like the tin-house dweller of his Three to See the King and the English foreman in The Restraint of Beasts, his UniVan driver is nominally part of a group that he is in fact isolated from. He dislikes eating in the staff canteen and this, combined with his timing runs to the Eden Lacy depot effectively removes him from the heated debate.

The Scheme dispute itself serves a number of narrative purposes. Firstly, and most obviously, it sets hubristic nationalised industry against the Darwinian liberty of a free market economy. When it transpires that the drivers are merely shuttling spare UniVan parts from depot to depot, for no reason other than to give them something to do, the illogicality of The Scheme is revealed, but not condemned. Indeed, it is its opponents who are given a draconian aspect.

More interestingly, the book is rife with intimations of religiosity. While the swervers are a raffish bunch given to ostentation, the flat-dayers are “rather strait-laced . . . going about their duties in strict accordance with the rule book, then clocking off in solemn silence at the end of the working day”. One charismatic flat-dayer is seen preaching from his forklift to a group of rapt workers in a pastoral scene that is heavily redolent of the teachings of early Christians. And then there is Eden Lacy, the paradisiacal depot, where a small group of workers lead a harmonious, tea-filled and prelapsarian existence until drivers from other depots bring corrupting knowledge of the political battles raging elsewhere.

In many ways The Scheme for Full Employment is a bridge between the darkly humorous, proto-horror of Mills’s first two novels and 2001’s more metaphysical Three to See the King. A menace runs through it that is wholly commensurate with the first two novels and, while its conclusion seems at first to be a shade gentler than the deeply pessimistic endings of those books, it would seem, on reflection, that once again Mills is delineating a sickness at the heart of society. Indeed, he may well have written the world’s first gently humorous anarchist manifesto.

But alongside the humour Mills’s writing remains deftly unsettling. His Britain of vapid UniVan drivers pootling along in their Sisyphean industry is undeniably eerie. Whether this novel brings anything new to Mills’s œuvre remains debatable. That it is immensely enjoyable and thought-provoking is, however, certain. He has sharpened his talent for freighting the everyday with ambiguous, disturbing resonance to a razor-fine edge. More than any other author working today, his disquieting fiction bears the much-abused comparison to Kafka: his methods, while disarmingly simple, constantly allude to liminal meanings that remain tantalisingly undefined.

THE TRIAL
By Franz Kafka
Penguin, £7.99, 208pp
ISBN 0 141 18290 3

This hellish account of faceless bureaucracy has never rung as true.

THE AERODROME
By Rex Warner
Harvill, £8.99, 304pp
ISBN 1 860 46141 7
Buy the book

Presenting a chilling choice between liberal chaos and authoritarian order.

1984
By George Orwell
Penguin, £7.99, 336pp
ISBN 0 141 18247 4
Buy the book

Orwell’s depiction of an existence lived under Big Brother’s steely gaze.

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist