Another possible title for Magnus Mills’ most recent novel, The Encouragement of Others, might be The Absence of Explanation. The lack of context for the characters and their landscape is typical of Mills, who was a fence builder and a bus driver before turning to fiction with the Booker Prize-shortlisted The Restraint of Beasts (1998). Encouragement is like a canvas left intentionally part blank. We don’t know our protagonist’s name, nor where he came from. We do learn that it’s not “the north,” where the novel takes place, nor “the south,” where everyone assumes that he must be from. Neither is necessarily Britain, though Mills is an English writer and people in the novel speak English and drink in pubs. We also don’t know where our protagonist sleeps at night, nor what he does for a living. Actually, almost everyone in the novel, except for those in the pub business, seems to be ne’er-do-wells, perhaps because “the north,” we learn, is so prosperous that most people need not be employed.

Part of Mills' residual brilliance is to compel readers to follow his toned-down enigmatic narratives on their own terms. In fiction-writing workshops many years ago, we would frequently demand that fictions have “more of this character” or “more of that character” as if each person who showed up on the page needed to be equally fleshed out. It’s interesting to imagine how Mills’ work might have been greeted in one of those of classes. More of . . .well . . . everything.

The novel does have a plot. The unnamed narrator takes his sailboat back and forth across a body of water to two very different pubs: The White Swan, which is crowded and features a noise rock band that never actually gets around to performing in a back room, and the always empty The Black Swan, whose two featured beers, the special and the reserve, turn out to be the same.

Soon, the narrator abandons his prized sailboat for the New Standard Sailing Dinghy urged upon him by two not very friendly characters, Jenkins and Louise.

Another mystery is why Mills, who after the Booker-shortlisting seemed to have taken up permanent residence at Bloomsbury, has chosen to self-publish. Is the UK publishing industry no longer imaginative enough to appreciate him? Is he interested in writing and publishing without the hassle of agents and editors?

His early more renowned novels were also opaque, though quite a bit more dramatic. The two Scottish fence-makers from The Restraint of Beasts go to England and meet the violent Hall Brothers, leading to dark happenings. And the two rival teams of pioneers in Explorers of the New Century (2005) run into intense difficulties trying to reach the AFB, agreed-upon furthest point. Those earlier novels also have more easily legible systems of metaphor: the literal as well as metaphoric beasts, the relatively innocent-seeming exploration getting to look more and more like violent colonialism.

The New Standard Sailing Dinghy, so efficient as to practically sail itself, does begin to dominate. At one point, an enormous flotilla of them crosses the body of water. And the narrator is appointed by Jenkins to do some sort of PR for them. Is this a cautionary tale about over-mechanization like self-driving cars, the body of water in the novel a contemporary San Francisco? No, it doesn’t really feel weighted like that. There is real harm, menace and metaphor among fence-builders and explorers, but Encouragement has a much lighter feel.

At the very end, as our protagonist seems to be failing at his new gig, he has a surprisingly pleasant interaction with Louise. I won’t play spoiler here except to say that one of the novel’s constant tropes gets repeated and the hugely entertaining novel is suddenly over, leaving me imagining that chorus of undergraduate work-shoppers yelling more, more, more!!!