Bloomsbury £10.99 pp184

Depicting seasoned voyagers on deck, gesturing towards the polar wastes that await them, the cover of Magnus Mills’s new novel prepares us for Boy’s Own Paper adventures and, initially, we seem to be in a world of late-Victorian heroics. Pioneering expeditions are under way, one led by Johns along a western route, the other by Tostig in the east. The language of dated decency (“Look sharp”, “First-rate”, “Good show”) resounds, as the doughty explorers cross uncharted terrain. It all seems reassuringly familiar.

But with Mills, the familiar soon becomes fantastic, the mundane mutates into the menacing. From the outset, puzzling questions multiply. Where is the anonymous landscape of scree, dust and wind that the teams are traversing? When is the action taking place? What is the “Agreed Furthest Point” towards which they are tracking, and what is the “Transportation Theory” spurring them on?

The strangeness that increasingly unsettles the reader does not appear to bother the characters, who act with an exaggerated ordinariness that comes to resemble insanity. Despite the apparent futility of their enterprise, the leaders press on with lethal optimism and the men with suicidal compliance. Tentative reservations are robustly denounced (“I’m not interested in your weaselly sort of griping”). Pointlessly precise protocols are observed concerning headgear, mapping and naming. Chin-up cheeriness is farcically undercut by bickering and barmy rituals.

As the book travels from the fatuous to the alarming, a fabular structure begins to emerge, hinting that themes of empire and exploitation, slavery and segregation, are being explored. Although the book remains teasingly vague, a political subtext surfaces. The self-defeating nature of imperialism is slyly suggested through a dramatic reversal that exploits the notion of the white man’s burden. But while the novel undoubtedly harbours darker elements, its most successful mode is deadpan humour. Seemingly influenced by Beckett and Kafka, Mills’s weirdly imperturbable style, as he squelches mankind’s confident madness, deftly and comically fuses the monotonous and the monstrous.

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