Magnus Mills, famously a bus driver, first came to notice when his first novel, the 1998 'The Restraint of Beasts', was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Since then, his reputation for eccentricity, for breaking all the rules of fiction, has grown, and he remains a kind of cult figure in British fiction. I'd been aware of him since his Booker shortlisting, but actually hadn't read him until now, so I'm not aware if this latest novel is typical of him, but I expect it is.
He's in allegorical territory here. We don't know where or when the action takes place, it's as though the first chapter, in which the set up is described, has been deliberately left out. The title may be indicative - the Field of the Cloth of Gold was an area in France, in which in 1520, there was a negotiation between King Henry VIII of England, and King Francis I of France. The staging of this meeting was impressive, but the outcome a bit of an anticlimax. Perhaps the action in this novel might be taken as a precursor to this real historical event, or it may have nothing to do with it. The Guardian reviewer took it to be an allegory about England and its relationship with invaders - he saw Romans, Vikings, and early Christianity.
Anyway, the naive, unnamed narrator arrives and pitches his tent in a Great Field. One other camper is already there, and others arrive and leave. Various incidents take place, tension between the occupiers of the land are raised, and fall away. None of the characters has an inner life, their motivations are obscure, it's not explained where they have come from or where they go when they leave, the dialogue is deliberately mundane. All that being said, it's a short and gripping tale. It's meditation on immigration and the contrast between conservative ideas of preservation and progressive ideas of integration. It's also about the danger of not taking sides, of not choosing who you are going to be allied with at times of conflict. It made me wonder about myself, and how I behave, and how often I make a stand for something - you can't ask more of a novel than that, surely..