Double trouble strikes them: K is about to be let go from the public park, and his mother becomes too ill to work and is bed-ridden.

She proposed that he should quit Parks and Gardens before he was laid off and accompany her by train to Prince Albert, where she would hire a room while he looked for work on a farm.

This plain style eschews any attempt to capture the colour of working class language or thought. It gives precedence to the bare facts of the story, and emphasises K’s rationality. K comes up with plan after plan of how to cope with the increasingly chaotic world about him. A civil war begins. When a permit for the train tickets is refused, his first ingenious solution is to construct a wagon from bicycle parts so as to be able to push his mother all the way to Prince Albert.

But the attempt to escape to a simple rural life is thwarted again and again. His mother dies, K drifts, is picked up for a military work gang, escapes, is brought to an internment camp. His plans narrow, he grows more remote from the world: all he wants is a quiet corner where he can grow pumpkins. From an outside perspective we would say he is traumatised by war.

Towards the end of the story K reflects on some people who gave him charity:

They want me to open my heart and tell them the story of a life lived in cages. They want to hear about all the cages I have lived in, as if I were a budgie or a white mouse or a monkey. And if I had learned story-telling instead of potato-peeling & sums I might have known how to please them.

There is an integrity and faith to this book which is not conveyed in any praise of its prose or structure. It stands against me, a coherent vision, trying to convince me.