The Scheme for Full Employment, by Magnus Mills

England's scheming in a new novel by the Wodehouse of manual labour. Brandon Robshaw is glad he doesn't live there

As children, we clamour to be told the same stories over and over again. When we grow up, we retain this desire for the familiar. What we demand from the writers we enjoy is, essentially, that they repeat themselves. We don't want P G Wodehouse turning into Dostoevsky. Magnus Mills's admirers, then (of whom I am one), will be delighted that his new novel bears a strong family resemblance to The Restraint of Beasts and All Quiet on the Orient Express.

The tale is told as usual by an unnamed first-person narrator, in Mills's familiar deadpan style. There is the same significance attached to the seemingly trivial; the same banal interchanges that seem to be weighted with hidden import. There is also the same interest in work, a favourite theme of Mills, and one too often neglected in the novel. Many contemporary writers give the impression that real life only goes on outside working hours; for Mills, work (and skiving off) is the stuff of life. A couple of chapters end with "I went home", but we never discover where home is or what happens there.

The story concerns a mythical Scheme whereby people are employed to drive "Univans" around all day, delivering and picking up crates. The narrator is on a circuit of seven depots and spends eight hours a day shuttling back and forth. It's only about a third of the way through that we discover what's in the crates: spare parts for the Univans. The work is light, agreeable and well-paid, and everyone's very thankful to be on the Scheme: "It's like being in a great big feather bed."

But a conflict develops between those drivers who make a point of working a full eight-hour day, and those who time their runs so that they fetch up at a depot half an hour before the working day ends and get signed off early. This is called "an early swerve". Soon the entire workforce is split between the "flat-dayers" and the "early swervers". The conflict leads to an all-out strike and the glorious days of the Scheme are numbered ...

Now, this could be read allegorically. The Scheme could represent a satire on (or affectionate commemoration of) the heady trade-union days of the Seventies; Superintendent Joyce Meredith, one of the bosses who presides over the dismantling of the Scheme, seems a pretty clear caricature of Thatcher. She disapproves of school dinners and of the Scheme itself; towards the end, "she removed her peaked cap, causing her hair to tumble around her shoulders. She looked magnificent, and at that moment I realised the future belonged to people like her."

But this isn't the main point. Mills is primarily a comic writer and the appeal of this novel lies in his loving concern with tea and sandwiches, the strange atmosphere of cosiness and rivalry, the bathetic descriptions of the banal: the warehouseman who accepts his tea "with quiet grace"; the depot manager who, weighing a Univan, fusses around the mechanism "as if he were about to weigh gold dust at some oriental bazaar". The allegorical possibilities lend another layer to the story, but are no more necessary to appreciation than it's necessary to know that Wodehouse's Spode is a caricature of Oswald Mosley.

Mills is a very different writer from Wodehouse, yet they do have things in common. Like Wodehouse, Mills has created his own quirky, instantly recognisable, deeply English world – limited in range, perhaps, but rich in comic possibilities. I wouldn't say I'd like to live there, but it's a wonderful place to visit.