A Return to the Strange and Wondrous World of Magnus Mills: Author Interview
As life's vicissitudes roll on, things have remained dependably constant in the fantastical, curiously unsettling literary world of Magnus Mills since Albionfirst paid a visit in 2010. Back then, Screwtop Thompson was set for release by Bloomsbury. In a striking red cover adorned with toy figures representing various trades – Mills first editions are often blessed with really outstanding covers – it compiled two early short story mini-collections (Only When The Sun Shines Brightly and Once In A Blue Moon), alongside new material like the foreboding “Vacant Possession” and a beautifully droll lorry-themed nod to the obscure James Curtis novel They Drive By Night. If we complete the rewind to 1998, Mills’ debut novel The Restraint Of Beasts had just hit the public consciousness, and Mills was happily rooted in a career as a London bus driver. When a spot on that year’s Booker Prize shortlist materialised, an ever-opportunistic UK media didn’t need asking twice to go all in on the ‘Booker-nominated bus driver’ slant. Million-pound advances were (erroneously) cited, and you’d have been forgiven for thinking that it might all in the end turn out to be something of a fad. But Mills has gone on to write fourteen more novels, nine of them since our last review.
I asked him whether at the time he felt that he would keep writing to such an extent? (And was there any truth as to the rumoured existence, at least in part, of a movie of The Restraint Of Beasts?) “At the time of publication my editor Philip Gwyn Jones told me I would probably write another twelve or thirteen books. I found it hard to believe but actually it was true. The Restraint of Beasts was filmed by a director called Pawel Pawlikowski and fragments can still be viewed on the internet. Filming was eventually abandoned. Actors included Rhys Ifans, Ben Wishaw, Eddie Marsan and Warren Clark.”
The persistent factor throughout the subsequent books is the signature deadpan narrative voice, freighted with careful banality and teetering on the edge of mischief, that is so beloved of Mills devotees and yet seemingly at times a source of mild critical irritation. His inclination might therefore have been to start tweaking, to recalibrate even a little, in a (probably fruitless) quest for some sort of appeasement, but the most remarkable thing about the work of Magnus Mills is how utterly immune it has been to this kind of influence. You get the impression that he’d laugh at the idea of bending to outside suggestion. A course was set with The Restraint Of Beasts: foundations planted in allegory as deeply as protagonists Tam and Richie’s high-tensile fencing posts; the detailed-to-the-point-of-pernickety accounts of manual working practice; the steadfast refusal to, well… to explain anything. This would prove to be a consistent pattern. When I put to Mills that repetitive work, and primarily manual labour, is a major component of his stories (which the narrator will often undertake in an initial state of indifference, coercion or plain confusion, yet usually end up getting quite into) and asked him whether it is a reflection of his own experience or of his observations of others, he replied succinctly that “I have only ever done manual work (including bus and van driving) so it’s the only thing I know.”
A related consistent Mills theme is the trope of happy, functioning systems that then disastrously implode, usually because of human dissent and dissatisfaction, such as the blue collar UniVan drivers of The Scheme For Full Employment who divide into two opposing factions: the Flat Dayers, who toe the line, and the Early Swervers, who tend to look for an easy ride. The caretakers of Greater Fallowfields in A Cruel Bird Came To The Nest And Looked In are forever stymied by a wall of procedure and affairs of state. In The Forensic Records Society, club members sit and play their records in an otherwise reverential silence until they are usurped by an opposing alliance. Are organisations and their rules and regulations a source of fascination for Mills?
“I have worked for several large organisations as a tiny cog. London Transport is the most influential on my writing, although my fascination with blue collar work began during a holiday job in a MacFisheries warehouse. I was the student who returned every holiday and in later days the manager told me to reverse the charges when I phoned up for a job at the end of term. Clubs and societies often try to attract new members but then do their best to discourage them. I once attended a chess club that had advertised for new members. As an induction I was subjected to a game of chess with all the other members spectating. I lost after about five moves and was informed that I had fallen for a ploy called ‘Fool’s Mate.’ I didn’t go back again.”
If The Restraint of Beasts’ themes of grave humanitarian darkness creep up imperceptibly on its readers, then these topics would —via the same stealthy device— continually re-emerge in Mills’ fiction, particularly in the form of the transportation of ‘mules’ in 2005’s Explorers Of The New Century. In our interview he noted that he “got the idea for Explorers of the New Century from an Aesop’s fable where a man ends up carrying his mule over a river. The mules in my story, however, are an underclass of people due for deportation.” Such concerns are rendered darker by the sparse descriptions of setting; Mills once mentioned that he describes his own tales as fables, and withholding the details of his fictional environments serves to make the reader focus on the real meaning underneath.
Arriving not far behind the career early midpoint of Screwtop Thompson came the aforementioned novel of pious vinyl obsessives, The Forensic Records Society. For this, unusually but fittingly, Mills took the later step of curating an accompanying playlist. Still available in the usual places, it’s a wide-ranging and startlingly diverse assortment that pinballs from obscure US space surfers Man Or Astro Man to Creedence Clearwater Revival, rebounding off King Crimson on route to Dolly Parton before landing in the capable hands of UK grind-core legends and fellow Midlands alumni Napalm Death. Nestled amongst all this is a solitary track by The Fall, How I Wrote Elastic Man, a song in which Mark E Smith compares the strangeness of life to a painting. One of Smith’s finest pieces of work, depicting the routines of a disaffected sci-fi writer constantly badgered about his one great success, the song also harbours a number of cultural/historical references for those attuned to them. That Mills pulled it from the vast catacombs of Fall material is of course no accident. Indeed it feels, the further you delve into his worlds, that —to quote a noted utterance of the great JG Ballard— with Magnus Mills “there are no coincidences.” Every line on every page has been deliberated.
Elastic Man also zeroes in on how literary influences can prove to be a trap, and great deal has been made over the years, in particular on the journalistic side of literary critique, of Mills’ unapologetically unique style. From his second novel All Quiet On The Orient Express onwards it has driven some reviewers to try and pinpoint literary comparisons, and Kafka has regularly surfaced. So I asked Mills whether he feels a real kinship with other writers and books and if so, which ones. He admitted that he is “very critical of other writers, especially the over-use of similes (which are mistakenly referred to as metaphors) and adverbs. I prefer non-fiction writers. I have just finished reading all six volumes of Peter Ackroyd’s History of England. He has a style I admire. Also A History ofEngland by Keith Feiling which I have read several times. The Lion in the North by John Prebble is another highly readable history book (about Scottish history).”
It’ll be no great surprise for Mills’ readers to hear of this preference for historical non-fiction. Immediately prior to The Forensic Records Society came The Field Of The Cloth Of Gold, which appears to model the formation of modern Britain within what are effectively the environs of a rural campsite. A “great field” is duly rendered in that adamant, trademark minimalism, with a promise of “momentous events” forever floating in the ether but less tangible than the provision of milk pudding and biscuits. While not encroaching on Hilary Mantel – you’re really never going to get that from Magnus Mills – the work conceals a lot to unpick for the enthusiastic historian. Fans will also spot the campsite motif as a neat callback to the equally passive but embroiled narrator of All Quiet OnThe Orient Express, his tent pitched within the oddly moneyless, sinister, and favours-based system of an off-season Lakeland. What is it, I asked, that especially intrigues Mills about campsite dynamics? “I spent a lot of time under canvas when I was young. From about 11 to 14 I camped out in the garden every weekend from early spring to late autumn. Once years ago when we were on a camping holiday at World’s End there was an encampment of Boy Scouts nearby. One morning they sent round a message saying they had a surplus of porridge which they were willing to share with other campers. This was the idea for the opening of The Field of the Cloth of Gold.”
We’ve already mentioned The Fall, whom the late John Peel used to enjoy describing as “always different, always the same” – which can be said, too, of Magnus Mills. Recent books have however shown a slightly more pronounced political aspect. The Sunbathers trilogy depicts a sold-off nation that feels fairly Orwellian, as if it might easily descend from its newfound state of anaesthetised public apathy into a version of Airstrip One from Nineteen Eighty-Four, albeit with the dreamlike MacGuffin of a lesser-spotted glamorous female movie star roaming about on elephant-back, as if on some portentous assignment. The Cure For Disgruntlement, meanwhile, looks to be a satire on attitudes to immigration. I mentioned both of these to Mills, who explained that “I had the idea for the Sunbathers trilogy during the pandemic. The government banned social mixing so instead many people headed for the parks and beaches to go sunbathing. The girl on the elephant could be any of a number of 1930’s Hollywood starlets with a bit of Swiss Family Robinson thrown in (accompanied by Glazunov’s Ballet Suite, first movement). The Cure for Disgruntlement is seen through the eyes of a person who somehow finds himself an immigrant in his own country (or at least somewhere very similar).”
On the covers of Mills’s novels, there are many cues – such as the brilliant design for the first edition of All Quiet, a bucolic scene resembling a Ladybird children’s book; the pug-nosed Bedford-like UniVan pootling across TheScheme For Full Employment; or the ‘Boys’ Own Adventure’ -type motifs that abound on Explorers Of The New Century – that nod towards a particularly English nostalgia for certain bygone things, perhaps even that hazy postwar vision in which quiet roads lead us to Ray Davies’ village green. When I brought this up Mills commented that “My favourite Ray Davies song is Waterloo Sunset, although as a thirteen year old from the provinces in 1967 I misunderstood its meaning. I thought Terry and Julie were heading towards Waterloo to escape London. Only later did I discover the attraction of Soho and realise that they were actually going the other way. Obviously Johns in Explorers Of The New Century is based on Captain W. E. Johns who wrote the Biggles books. I have a large collection of original Ladybird books. The designer of All Quiet was an artist called Lee Motley who understood what I was trying to say.”
Magnus Mills the person —as opposed to simply the author— can seem to be in direct opposition to the majority of his perennial narrators, who seldom show any inclination to travel or if they do, are always thwarted by events. In the past he has talked about his trips around the world, experiencing different countries and cultures. I asked if this has in some way sharpened the focus for his representations of (what we have to assume is) England, and he mentioned one example: “When I was at an outdoor party in Australia some years ago a girl glanced up at the sky and said ‘You probably don’t get skies like that in England, do you?’ I wanted to reply that actually the sky in the northern hemisphere is more interesting but instead I politely agreed with her. I used the idea at the end of my latest book.”
Like the others, the latest book will have been the product of a tried and true approach: initial ideas are given time to slowly germinate and develop, often during working days, until finally, perhaps after a number of years, the physical process of writing commences. Did he find that there is something about the nature of bus driving that produces a mental state that is receptive to inspiration, and does he have anything brewing right now? “I had a lot of ideas when I was a bus driver but I also have them in the shower after I’ve been swimming in the public baths. Any bus driver with a few years’ experience could tell you the single reason why buses in London will never be able to provide a satisfactory service. The answer is hidden in my sixth book (The Maintenance of Headway). I do have a very vague idea for another book. Not sure when it will come into fruition.”
At the time of this edition of Albion, Magnus Mills’ current book is The Encouragement of Others. It touches on the enduring notion of (we can but infer – for the country, as usual, is never named) England’s North-South divide which perpetually occludes Mills's Midlands home turf, but with an unfamiliarly prosperous North. When I mentioned this to Mills he commented that when he first travelled North from the Midlands “all the young people I met were better off than me with their own cars, motorbikes and even their own boats. I was astonished in later years, therefore, to hear complaints that the north was somehow hard done by.”
And finally, for those who may be wondering, the question was indeed asked: is Magnus Mills still driving a London bus? To which he replied:
“I no longer work on the buses.”
It merely remains to thank the normally elusive Magnus Mills for generously taking part in this interview. He continues to be a unique voice, and while we should avoid the comparison syndrome mentioned before, it is hard to think of another currently active English novelist who can legitimately be placed in the sphere occupied by Kafka, Sartre, and Camus. Like them, Mills provokes divided opinion and bafflement, while also garnering great admiration and loyalty among readers. Here’s to that, and long may it continue.--Neil Jackson
