The outsider on this year’s Booker Prize shortlist is a bus driver. Peter Kingston caught a ride
You’re sprinting for the bus. The driver spots your imploring wave and appears to be waiting, but just as catching the bus looks a real possibility, it pulls away.
Why do they do that? “It’s the only pleasure we get, it’s the only satisfying thing about the job,” says Magnus Mills, almost deadpan. But he quickly corrects himself. “No … I mean I don’t like leaving people behind. But you can’t hang around at bus stops because you quickly get behind schedule.”
Meeting this intriguing man, you are torn between two urges – to discuss The Restraint of Beasts (Flamingo), his first novel, which is on the 1998 Booker Prize shortlist, and to natter about his career (12 years to date) driving London double-deckers.
How, you want to know, can a long- limbed fellow of at least six-foot-two stand being cooped up in a driver’s cab for nine hours at a time, shuttling the same clogged route day after day?
“Are we going to talk about the book?” Mills asks. Flamingo paid ten grand for The Restraint of Beasts, he says, and he’s had “a bit more” from an agent for first option on film rights. “I think that’s not bad for a first novel.”
The Restraint of Beasts is a very good first novel. Even the reclusive Thomas Pynchon has peeped from purdah to bestow his blessing. Mills displays the quote on the back of his book: “A demented, deadpan comic wonder, this rude salute to the darker side of contract employment has the exuberant power of a magic word it might be impossibly dangerous (like the title of a certain other Scottish tale) to speak out loud.”
Mills grins. “Don’t quite get it, but it sounds good.” His own cardinal rule is clarity. The book’s story of a small gang of fencing labourers who come down from Scotland to work the west Midlands is limpidly told. It’s an unfrilly style, which he admits he has to work very hard at. The narrator, who is gang foreman, mostly avoids reflection and whimsical sidesteps because there is more than ample in his plain description of the daily grind of the labouring and of his two workmates, Tam and Richie.
The title is from the job specification for the “high-tensile” fencing that the trio erect. It is designed to restrain beasts – but which beasts? Certainly Tam and Richie are bestial in their primitive needs, unflinching daily beer-and-fags ritual, their utter resignation and lack of wonderment and curiosity.
Like his speech, Mills’s written humour is almost deadpan. He writes good dialogue, sealing in the utterly authentic flavour of labouring gang life. In first-novel tradition, he has written what he knows.
He grew up in Bristol. He studied economics at Wolverhampton Polytechnic in the early 1970s. He is 44.
A defining moment came when he was a student hitch-hiking one day in the pouring rain. “I was picked up by a chap in an executive car. It was very nice of him to pick up a long-haired, dripping-wet student. There was a BBC Radio Two disc jockey smarming on the radio and I thought that as much as it’s nice and comfortable in here, I don’t want to live like this.”
After graduation all he wanted to do was live in the Lake District. He got a job as a fencer. In 1986, at his wife’s request, they moved to London and he took a job on the buses.
Today he should have been shuttling between Baker Street and Streatham, perched in the small double-decker driver’s bubble of a number 159, but the bus company has generously given him the day off, he says, to face the explosion of media interest in him. The first his workmates knew of his book was a febrile Sunday newspaper piece about his million-pound advance.
“Everybody has been brilliant, very generous, congratulating me. Nobody’s asked me for a loan,” he chuckles.
He began writing occasional newspaper pieces seven years ago on travel, rock music and a London-bus-driver-writes series. He started the book three years ago on an Olivetti portable.
Joseph Conrad is his favourite writer – “so impressive, but I don’t write descriptions like that”. He admires Harold Pinter for dialogue and, for humour, Flann O’Brien. “I’d like to think that some bits of my dialogue are like Flann O’Brien.”
He would like to stop full-time bus driving, keeping his hand in on a part-time basis, although his wife and friends say he shouldn’t. “What I’d really like to do is stand on a hillside watching them film The Restraint of Beasts and then go to a pub and drink some beer, and write when I fancy it.”
He adds that Flamingo, too, would prefer him to keep bus driving for now – good for publicity – but then instantly asks me to scrub that out. I say nothing, making an indistinct gesture to suggest that I’ll comply. Let’s just call it a passenger’s revenge, the journalist’s equivalent of pulling away from the stop just as the poor punter thinks he’s caught the bus.