Dark, Sardonic Mills

 Magnus Mills is a national treasure. Read my blog if you must, but make damn sure you read his books. All of them. 

I suppose it was the sense of guilt provoked by my furtive glances cast at the unopened copy of David Keenan’s gigantic Monument Maker on the bedside bookcase that told me I needed to get back into reading. Having so far failed to even peer inside Keenan’s masterpiece, I decided it was time to plug a few bibliophilic holes with low hanging fruit, so to speak. Over the last couple of years, I’ve completed the entire works of Michel Houellebecq, BS Johnson and Harry Pearson, so I decided that specialist of short novels, Magnus Mills, would be my next target.

Mills was born in Birmingham in 1954 and raised in Bristol. After a degree at Wolverhampton Poly, he put his classical education to good use, erecting high tensile wire fences for a living, before moving to London in 1986 to become a bus driver. His debut book, The Restraint of Beasts, was shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and Whitbread First Novel Award on its publication in 1998, allowing Mills to quit his job and become a full time writer. If you’re looking for points of reference to draw comparisons with his work, I suggest looking in the place where Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, Flann O’Brien and Kurt Vonnegut intersect.

I first became aware of Mills in the late of autumn of 1999, when my good mate Paul Webb loaned me his copy of The Restraint of Beasts soon after I’d first moved to Bratislava. I loved it from the first page; the elusive, allegorical depiction of the baffling, surreal world of the itinerant fence builder, combined with the deadpan naiveté of the unnamed narrator’s version of events, had me howling out loud repeatedly. And yet, the madcap, inexplicable adventures of Tam, Ritchie and their unnamed foreman seemed to me to be of far more import than simple, uproarious comedy. Their repeated inability to complete tasks, establish human relationships and to interact with the world in general suggested to me some kind of an underlying, deliberate Marxist critique of the futility of work and the inevitability of alienation. Tam and Ritchie’s failure to build fences reminded me of Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil and the Rolling Stones’ serial failure to complete a satisfactory version of the title song. However, for the apolitical reader, Thomas Pynchon offered the opinion that the book was merely "a demented, deadpan comic wonder.” I don’t buy that judgement as a stand-alone review; there is far greater philosophical depth than mere surreal humour in all of Mills’ books. Especially the unsuccessful ones.

By the time I became aware of Magnus Mills, his second novel, All Quiet on the Orient Express, had already been published. I caught up with it the following summer and adored it even more than his first one. Again, and this was to become a staple of almost all his books, an unnamed narrator finds himself away from home, out of his depth and completely at a loss when searching for a way out. This time, we find ourselves on a campsite in the Lake District, observing the narrator attempting and failing to complete a seemingly straightforward job of work, on account of ever more ludicrous and labyrinthine external factors and pressures on his time. Initially he is supposed to paint the entrance gate, but soon he ends up distracted from his primary task by the need to write A Level coursework essays and the intractable problem of an ice cream van’s jammed jingle. Amidst this pastoral absurdity, a sinister realisation occurs to the reader; unlike in The Restraint of Beasts where gory episodes pepper the pages, nothing grotesque happens in All Quiet on the Orient Express, but the mood perceptibly darkens until it’s clear that nobody is ever going to leave this Cumbrian dystopia.

Having left my Slovak utopia for the reality of England in June 2001, I found my return coincided with the publication of Mills’ third novel, Three to See the King, which I have to confess is the one I’ve enjoyed the least, both back then and recently, when I briefly revisited it as part of my preparations for writing this piece. Unlike his first two novels, this has no pretensions of reality; it is more of a parable than a novel, with the comic content reduced to absolute zero. The nameless narrator lives in an isolated tin house situated on a windswept sandy plain, miles from his nearest neighbours whom he meets infrequently. He is quite happy with his lonely self-sufficient existence, until a woman comes to live with him. Unsettled at first, the narrator gradually gets used to the companionship. Then news comes of a new community being established on the edge of the plain by a charismatic, yet enigmatic figure who is digging a canyon and gaining more and more followers to his revolutionary cause. One by one, the narrator’s neighbours join the canyon project, moving their tin houses to the new community as the narrator feels under increasing pressure to join them. It transpires that the end-goal for the project is not for there to be a city of tin houses, but a city of clay houses. Many of the previously convinced citizens of the plain and beyond are frustrated by this news, and decide to return to their previous existences… And that’s about it; while I eagerly flicked the pages, hoping to come across a trademark episode of thigh-slapping insanity, instead I found suggestions of an elusive examination of the notion of a communal society and a vague critique of mass hysteria. Perhaps my expectations were wrong, but I found Three to See the King profoundly unsatisfying. Mills himself said the writing of the book was a "project" to prove to himself that he could be a full-time writer.

Thankfully, this minor aberration was soon swept aside by his next book; 2003’s superb The Scheme for Full Employment, which refers to the seemingly fool proof plan to provide thousands of jobs, driving UniVans from depot to depot, picking up and unloading cargo. The absurdity behind the scheme is that the cargo consists solely of replacement parts for UniVans. As Mills observes, "gloriously self-perpetuating, the scheme was designed to give an honest day’s wage for an honest day’s labour. It was intended to be the envy of the world: the greatest undertaking ever conceived by man.” As the novel unfolds, it reveals itself to be a satire of labour relations, as the scheme is brought to the brink of disaster by a workforce that is partly Stakhanovite and partly infested by shirkers. We are back in The Restraint of Beasts territory in terms of the clash between workers and bosses, which Mills addressed even more profoundly in 2009’s The Maintenance of Headway.

Based upon his experiences as a bus driver in London, Mills shows public transport to be a giant game of cops and robbers, or snakes and ladders, in which the drivers are the good guys and the inspectors are the baddies. The title refers to the concept, to which the inspectors are devoted, that "a fixed interval between buses on a regular service can be attained and adhered to by the maintenance of headway". The novel examines the generally farcical tension and conflict between the officious inspectors and the drivers themselves who aim to arrive early. In this novel, Mills adroitly exploits the comic potential of speech, especially the management-speak of the inflexible, robotic inspectors. Unlike the subtle philosophy behind The Scheme for Full Employment, here the reader is left in no doubt who is ultimately responsible for all strife and alienation in the work place.

In between The Scheme for Full Employment and The Maintenance of Headway, Mills published his only third-person narrative novel, Explorers of the New Century. Framed loosely on the contest between Amundsen and Scott to reach the South Pole first, it tells the story of two rival expeditions mapping a hitherto uninhabited wilderness from the coast to "the Agreed Furthest Point." They adopt two different routes, both of which are exacting and inhospitable, losing men and the “mules” who carry the supplies along the way. Dextrously interspersing accounts of the two expeditions, Mills slowly reveals the book not to be merely an account of stubborn folly in the face of hostile environmental factors, but a thoughtful examination of the nature of imperialism when it suddenly becomes alarmingly clear to the reader that the “mules” are not equine, but human. It is the single most chilling revelation in all of his novels and one that marks Explorers of the New Century as the first, non-comic triumph in Mills’ career.

Early in his career, Mills published two jolly collections of his short, almost flash, fiction; 1999’s Only When the Sun Shines Brightly and 2003’s Once in a Blue Moon. I bought the pair of them in 2004 from a bookshop in York and had read both by the time my train pulled into Central Station, finding them to be very funny indeed. Then, in 2010, the two slim collections were reprinted in one volume, with 3 extra, previously unseen stories, under the title Screwtop Thompson. This still reasonably slim volume brings together eleven short stories that "trundle gently between the ordinary, absurd and the outright surreal." As in almost all his novels, the stories are recounted by an unnamed narrator.

In "Only When the Sun Shines Brightly", the narrator watches as a large plastic sheet is caught on a viaduct above a joiner’s workshop in strong wind. "At Your Service" involves his attempts to help his diminutive Chinese friend cut branches from a tree that is obscuring the light entering his flat, but also growing in a neighbour’s garden. "The Comforter" presents an architect narrator who meets an archdeacon on the way to an interminable cathedral meeting. In "Hark the Herald", the storyteller spends his first night and day at a West Country guesthouse over Christmas, but repeatedly fails to meet the other residents, which is extremely creepy and superbly funny, but not as insane as "Once in a Blue Moon", when he acts as negotiator in an armed siege between the police and his mother. "The Good Cop" sees him interrogated by one or possibly two identical policemen.

The titular "Screwtop Thompson" tells of when he was a child and received as a present a toy whose head unscrews and which came in several guises. The narrator wanted a policeman but received a schoolmaster, without a head. In "They Drive by Night" he is picked up hitch-hiking by a large lorry. He sits in the noisy cab between the driver and his mate and attempts to make sense of the conversation. The three previously unpublished stories begin with "Half as Nice", which tells how his Auntie Pat had enjoyed four hit singles in the 1960s with an all-girl vocal group, and had married their producer, Dwight. "Vacant Possession" sees Noz and the narrator employed to fit a cattle grid at a large, but empty country house, staying there for three days while they complete the work; soon, the house begins to feel more than a little sinister. Finally, "A Public Performance.” In Bristol in 1970 a sixth former, more than possibly based on the author, buys a Russian great coat but it doesn't have the desired effect of establishing his countercultural credentials as he attends a Pink Floyd concert at Colston Hall.

Having read that collection, I secreted the book at the appropriate place in my library and promptly forgot about Magnus Mills for more than a decade, until David Keenan inspired guilt sent me back to him, where I discovered that I had 5 novels to catch up on. A quick scoot around Amazon and Ebay provided me with the missing parts of the Magnus Mills jigsaw and I was away.

Looking at the 5 novels I’ve just read, I’ve the feeling that 3 of them are amongst his finest work, while the other 2 don’t advance his reputation one iota. Thankfully, the first of these, 2011’s A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked in, is as imaginative as Explorers of the New Century and as funny as The Maintenance of Headway. We’re on allegorical territory here; the uncrowned ruler of the Empire of Greater Fallowfield has dropped out of University and gone missing, leaving eight nominated commoners, all of whom are inexplicably named after obscure birds, to act as a kind of War Cabinet. While they manage to change the clocks so that tea can be taken in the Imperial Drawing Room at 5pm every day, they fail abysmally in their main task, that of preventing the disintegration of the Empire. In time, the neighbouring economic powerhouse of the City of Scoffers bankrupts the fey and indolent Fallowfieldian realm. The cabinet find themselves to be economic migrants, working at backbreaking tasks in a foreign land to earn a crust. Needless to say, throughout the book, insane and hilarious events beset every character.

While the book could be construed as a reflection on the nature of leadership and human dignity, it is also a very satisfying riff on the primacy of aesthetics over industry. Who can truly say a railway line is of greater benefit to humanity than an oil painting or a string quartet? I think we can tell whose side Mills is on in the war against utilitarian tyranny.  Sadly, Mills followed this triumph with the book of his I like the least; The Field of the Cloth of Gold takes its name from a summit meeting between King Henry VIII of England and King Francis I of France from 7 to 24 June 1520, held at Balinghem, between Ardres in France and Guînes in the then English Pale of Calais. The summit was arranged to increase the bond of friendship between the two kings following the Anglo-French treaty of 1514.

From such a minor point in history, Mills takes his inspiration for his account of the events surrounding the fate of nomadic, rootless drifters who live in tents in a huge field, setting the action in an era long before the Agrarian Revolution. Where they come from, what they eat, how they sustain themselves is not explained; nor are the reasons behind successive, non-violent invasions by tribes from elsewhere. The whole atmosphere is one of passive aggression, but so unlikeable are the narrator’s neighbours, the reclusive Hen, the aloof Thomas and the intimidating Isabella for instance, that we do not feel compassion for them. Nor does the reader judge the narrator for accidentally collaborating with the incomers to construct a drainage ditch and accidental ha-ha that hides the size of the new encampment from the inquisitive eyes of the original dwellers. Instead, when the novel dribbles to its end, if not conclusion, there is a sense of being nonplussed by events and characters with whom it is impossible to forge any meaningful connection. Then again, knowing Mills, that could have been his intention.

If I had to recommend one Magnus Mills novel for you to read, then The Forensic Records Society just breasts the tape ahead of The Maintenance of Headway and Tales of Muffled Oars. Two social inadequate blokes, the narrator and his pal, meet up every Monday night in the back room of The Half Moon under the guise of the Forensic Records Society, which has been established for the express purpose of listening to records closely, in detail and without comment; forensically if you like. The rules, including a proviso of 7” singles only, titles but no reference to artists, and finishing in time for last orders,  are strictly enforced which leads to friction within the fledgling society and the forming of an alternative Confessional Records Society meeting on Tuesdays with the contrasting invitation to "Bring a record of your choice and confess!". Tensions increase between the rival societies, as well as a short-lived scion the New Forensic Records Society, leading to hilarious and disproportionate 'bickering, desertion, subterfuge and rivalry.’

Mills could be ruminating on the nature of male obsessions, the Russian Revolution, the Sunni / Shia schism or any great falling out in human history, with the added benefit of a glorious soundtrack that can be found on Spotify. Seriously, this book is an absolute corker and I defy any middle-aged, anal retentive, borderline OCD bloke not to see himself in its pages.

Incredibly, bearing in mind he had just produced the book of his career, Mills lost his deal with Bloomsbury after that. I don’t know who his agent is, but they can’t have been worth employing, as it was to be another 3 years before Mills was published again. In fact 2020 saw the appearance of two novels, Tales of Muffled Oars and The Trouble with Sunbathers; the latter isn’t bad. Two blokes employed as gate keepers for an enormous gateway to the wilderness central England has become once everyone moved to the sea, to spend every daylight hour sunbathing, don’t do much and meet a load of people on a superficial and inconsequential level. Yes, it’s amusing, but while he isn’t quite phoning it in, there is an element of Mills by numbers at work here.

In contrast, Tales of Muffled Oars is an absolute tour-de-force and may well be my third favourite of his books. Again two blokes, who could be the Forensic Record Society chaps in false beards and moustaches, meet in their local pub to drink Guinness and engage in discussions about England’s history, piloted by the erudite if eccentric Macaulay. His theory is the natural state of the nation is “England at peace,” going back to Edgar the Peaceable being rowed down the Dee by eight tributary princes in 943AD. Consequently, all his lectures avoid reference to anything remotely violent, whether that is the Battle of Hastings or the Wars of the Roses. It makes for an extremely funny, highly inventive take on our past. Considering Mills’ quintessentially English style that could almost be a pastiche of PG Wodehouse meets Look and Learn magazine, that is very fitting.

The sad thing is that these last 2 novels were produced in paperback form by Quoqs Publishing, having only been Kindle releases before then. With evidence that Mills has ideas by the bucket load and undimmed talent for the correct phrase or surreal flight of fancy, it would be a crying shame if his subsequent works do not receive the attention of mainstream publishers as he is a genuine jewel in the contemporary literary crown.