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" The fact is, it's almost impossible to run a proper bus service in this city. The forces ranged against success are just too numerous. " The Maintenance of Headway was written in 2009, which is not that long ago but times change fast, so Magnus Mills's idea of petty English rules and regulations that over-complicate something that should really be quite simple to might seem old fashioned and nostalgic, but it still speaks to us in the age of spreadsheets and statistics that are divorced from everyday reality of human behaviour. " People aren't important, only bus movements ", one of the bus drivers here observes. The idea might be preposterous - as most things seem to Jeff, a new driver on the route - but it does reflect how things are viewed from the lofty, detached heights of officials in power.  Here it's the Board of Transport who are responsible for the maintenance of headway: the notion that a fixed interval between buses on a regular servic...

Having previously read many of Magnus Mills' books, the first thing that strikes this reader when going back to his first novel from 1998, The Restraint of Beasts is that while it is very recognisably a Mills situation involving men in a Sisyphean task or mundane employment that has strict rules, his first novel is slightly different in style and how it approaches its subject. It is however quintessentially Mills, hugely entertaining and opens up all kinds of consideration of society, people and the rules they live by. What is perhaps different, certainly to anyone coming back to this debut having read the other books, is that subsequent books become more refined, laid back and surreal in situations, while The Restraint of Beasts , …well …the beasts are rather less restrained, if I can put it that way. Which isn't surprising since that is the situation posed at the start of the novel.  Mr McCrindle's high-tensile fence has gone slack. Tam and Richie have only just put it u...

Magnus Mills is a unique voice in English literature. His works all have a distinctive character and even a similarity of subject, style and character that makes them immediately recognisable and unmistakable for anyone else. Having said that, I've read nearly all but his most recent books and I would find it hard to point out what makes any one different from another, or even remember how they progress other than in abstract terms, but I love each and every one of them while I am reading them. Mills has a way of drawing you into his worlds, with easy to read prose and a simplicity of ideas that nonetheless touches, I believe, on profound matters. When I say abstract common themes, I mean that they usually involve men in an routine occupation; a close and closed group of workers in a job that has clearly laid out rules, regulations and timetables that have to be adhered to for maximum efficiency or for the greater good, or sometimes for no discernable good reason at all. Eventually...

Such is the beautiful allegorical simplicity of Magnus Mills’ writing that there is something comforting and vaguely unsettling about his books at the same time. They are comforting in that Mills has a way of creating worlds – or observing how we create worlds – that operate to a clear set of rules, traditions and behaviours where we think we feel safe and unthreatened. There’s a sense of belonging to something meaningful, where we can control the conditions and remain immune from the uncertainties of change. What is unsettling about those situations, whether it be in the workplace, the simple life in the countryside, the satisfaction of traditional craft done well, is that no-one is immune to change. Rather than enjoying simple pleasures, the characters in Mills’ novels seem to spend more time trying to combating the incursion of foreign ways of thinking and behaving through complex rules and regulations that end up boxing themselves into a living nightmare. There is clearly an allego...