Book review: The Maintenance of Headway

Published on Saturday 25 July 2009 13:18

THE MAINTENANCE OF HEADWAY Magnus Mills Bloomsbury, £10 Review: Marc Lambert

AT 152 small-format pages The Maintenance Of Headway is a novella about bus drivers, and perhaps even less than that. It is difficult to tell. Magnus Mills' version of English whimsy is so determinedly whimsical and plotless that each of the ten chapters reads like an exercise in saying exactly the same thing in slightly different ways. It could almost be a book of reiterative short stories.

None of which ought to be taken as a criticism on behalf of the writing, I hasten to add. Because Mills' tale of London bus drivers and their peculiar world is entertaining all the same. He does have a good comic style. Slyly, in his trademark deadpan way, he unfolds a gentle satire on English working culture which illustrates why it is both so infuriating and so strangely fascinating at the same time.

For this group of drivers, stuck as they are in the solipsistic world of the Board of Transport, the science and system of bus driving is everything, a matter of the gravest importance, and the subject of most of their conversation and complaint. They are so experienced that they can tell from afar who the driver ahead of them is, from the "body language of the bus". But central to their experience, we learn from the narrator, is the holy grail of headway and how to keep it, this being the notion that a fixed interval between buses on a regular service can be attained and adhered to. We the public know by experience that it's impossible, chaos theory rules against it, and all the bus drivers in Mills' book understand that it is a fanciful, utopian ideal. But not the dreaded inspectors.

Herein lies much of the drama, if that it can be called, of Mills' story. Drawn from the ranks of the bus drivers, the inspectors oppress the "proletariat" they have left behind by disrupting their routes in order to reorganise them in the name of headway. The monitoring of timings is an obsession. Running early is a cardinal sin, since it is sure to result in a negation of the ideal. The drivers ever so calmly discuss the feeling they are being harassed. Naturally, this unwelcome attention by officialdom makes the bus drivers mildly – very mildly – exasperated. "The officials don't see it as disruption," said Edward. "Not if the purpose is the maintenance of headway." "But what about the people?" "People aren't important," Edward declared. "Only bus movements." Indeed, the almost complete absence of the public in Mills' story, despite the fact that it is they who populate the buses, underlines the self-obsessed, enclosed world of transport.

This is familiar satiric territory for Mills, who was a bus driver before his first novel, The Restraint Of Beasts, was published to acclaim and promptly shortlisted for the Booker prize. At the time much was made of Mills' bus driving, as the London literati, no doubt feeling good about themselves, clutched him to their distinctly upper middle class breasts. But it is also true to say that despite continuing acclaim for his writing, no-one really knows what to say about him. How else are we to interpret the absurd criticism which compares him to Kafka, Beckett and PG Wodehouse at the same time?

A more illuminating comparison for this book might be drawn with James Kelman, who has a few things to say about bus driving himself, as well as being familiar with Booker strangeness. Unfortunately, it's not a comparison which does Mills any favours. His parody of the English obsession with hierarchy and order isn't nearly nasty or vigorous enough. In this microcosm of class distinction and power everyone uses the same flat language and register. We are ostensibly in London, but the characters most definitely aren't by speech. The effect, possibly desired, is the neat conjuring of a world that floats disembodied above reality, perched on its own little cloud. It's nice up there. But it exemplifies the danger of mixing whimsy and politics.