Can novels be 'too simple'? The case of Magnus Mills and the 'hidden depth' in Literature

 

Occasional readers, or reluctant ones, or those dealing most regularly with texts without enormous literary value, are often stumped when it comes to novels where little happens, where characters are not – in E.M. Forster’s formulation – ‘round’, and where the plot is little more than a vehicle for exploring an idea. Such texts are then described as ‘being about nothing’, or ‘boring’, and the final gesture will be either one of dismissal – ‘I don’t like it, it’s crap’ – or incomprehension tinged with bewilderment: ‘I don’t get it, what is it about?’.

Those reactions are pretty common when it comes to Magnus Mills, author of some fifteen novels so far as well as several works of short-stories. But such reactions also remind us of what most people expect from ‘Literature’: it’s got to be well-written (Oh, it’s so beautiful!), preferably with epigrammatic pronouncements on Life and Human Nature, with characters that evolve and learn, it’s got to be a lesson in living-your-life, an example to us all, resilience, resistance and plenty of other admirable qualities. And yes, we can say it: little of that is to be found in Magnus Mills – at least at first glance.

Mills’ name came to people’s attention with his first novel, The Restraint of Beasts (1998), for at least two reasons, one positive and the other one probably less so.
First, the novel was original, quirky, with rather weird characters and a narrative development that seemed less than concerned with classical approaches, and its tone was pitch-perfect: dead-pan humour,  and consistent –  it was a very good novel (with a cracking cover too).
Second, Mills had been a…bus driver (and still was at the time of writing that first novel), and newspapers were quick to seize on that as it went against the popular image of the literary writer: stuffy, intellectual, using big words and staying at home cozily writing page after page. Does that bus-driving thing matter to us? It may well do when it comes to considering Mills’ favourite themes, and to help understand what is really a socio-political literature and his own take on the world. For now though, let’s say that The Restraint of Beasts introduced what’s almost a canvas for Mills’ other novels: there’s the deadpan voice, both incredibly innocent (ignorant?) yet ambiguous enough to make us ask whether he’s being ironic or not. And there’s the second element of that canvas which is the story: a man (and then two more) are tasked by their boss with fencing a large field in Scotland, even though that field doesn’t not actually contain much. That fence is really being erected because that boss wants to be efficient, and he wants his employees to work hard. The erecting of the fence becomes the reason for the fence to exist in the first place.

I call this a canvas because in that first novel, we see emerge what will be a recurring question in pretty much all of Mills’ novels, tackled from different angles each time, in various situations and with added sub-themes depending on the context. That question is: when do we start doing something purely for the doing of it, instead of doing it for what it gives us? And so a related question is immediately: when does a system become more important than what it is supposed to achieve? In fact, why do we accept that some systems are there simply for themselves, irrespective of what they’re supposed to achieve beyond justifying their own existence? In other words, we do things and follow rules simply because those rules exist and are imposed, not with an eye on possible gains. Worse: we forget the original impetus for doing those things, and concentrate instead on the rule.

These ideas are most apparent in The Scheme for Full Employment (2003), in which a slightly flawed system of truck deliveries has everyone satisfied, from the truck drivers to the clients. Yes, there is a slight abuse of the system but as everyone benefits from it, and no-one suffers, all participants are satisfied. But then a new boss is appointed by the State, whose job is to maximise efficiency and, of course, profits: the system must be re-organised and tightened to become maximally efficient (with targets to reach, obviously). What happens then is a gradual disintegration of the original delivery system, resulting in drivers, clients and management being unhappy as those new rules have stifled the system (‘the scheme’, as it’s called in the novel) instead of making it better. Ultimately, the whole thing collapses, leaving absolutely everyone in the lurch and completely unhappy: what used to work beautifully, if not flawlessly, has been broken in the name of efficiency and profit over people and their lives (Mills will come back to that idea in The Maintenance of Headway, 2009).

Or take Three to See the King (2001), where an unnamed narrator (as is very often the case with Magnus Mills) lives on an empty plain in a house made of tin. He then starts hearing about this Michael who’s digging a canyon with his followers, all of them attracted to the idea of digging for digging, digging as a communal, fraternal activity bringing everyone together. Ah yes, but of course you soon have people there who wants it this way rather than that way, or who oppose change because ‘we’ve always done it like that’, or people who want the power and recognition given by being close to Michael or, perhaps, by replacing him. And what was a beautiful, selfless enterprise is ruined by systematisation, greed, selfishness, power dynamics and, crucially, the forgetting about the original purpose (I should add that another obvious reading of this novel points to religion as well as politics).

This is what happens to most characters in The Forensic Records Society (2017) too: mostly men, we know nothing about them, their background, their work – in fact we know nothing about anything as no details or explanations are given about setting, background etc. At first, some get together to simply listen to their favourite records, and there’s only one rule: you can’t comment on the music listened to. You bring your record(s), play the music, then it’s somebody else’s turn – simple. But here again rules and systematization intervene: some want to be able to comment, some want to listen differently, some want to use listening as a power-grabbing, money-making scheme…and as one female character says to the narrator: yes you listen to music all the time but you don’t actually love music. The narrator is baffled by that distinction but to us it is quite clear: you can find yourself doing something for the sake of doing it and for no other reason.

Both those novels introduce religion and belief as additional themes, where praying is often reduced to a mechanical operation (something you need to do) but where the original idea – the relationship with God – is absent. In The Forensic Records Society, the narrator listens to one song three times before going to bed (the parallel with praying is obvious) but it has become a habit, something mechanical – it’s not about enjoying it, enjoying the music, reveling in the moment, it’s become entirely about the doing of the thing itself. Other novels are more interested in politics and history (A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest, 2001; The Field of the Cloth of Gold, 2015), and specifically England (The Trouble with Sunbathers, 2020). As one of his characters says in The Forensic Records Society: ‘Was it beyond human capacity to create a society that didn’t disintegrate through internal strife?’

At this stage, it’s important to note what else makes Mills’ novels different from most. Mostly, he is not interested in character development, he’s interested in ideas: that’s why so often his characters have no back-story, no emotional depth or deep psychological insights, no name even, and that’s also why the setting is very often a sketch of one rather than a full description. When, in Three to see the King, we are thrown on that plain without name, we are never going to be told what people eat and where they get their food (there are no shops), why there’s no electricity, running water, cars, houses, facilities of any kind, no government, no cities, no industry, no roads, no jobs. Stripped bare this way, the story forces us to focus on the text and the clues it gives us: we are not given that sense of comfort typical narratives give us by having a clear setting, recognizable places and names and the like. Here, Mills asks us to focus on what is going on, he requires us to ask questions of what is going on, why, and, ultimately, to read symbolically. The total absence of indications as to where we are, when, who the people are and what else they do is an encouragement to think beyond Time: it forces us to consider human nature rather than punctual, local forces.

And he does that in that same tone, that same deadpan voice, never harsh, never shrill, with a very simple vocabulary and absolutely no technical pyrotechnics. In fact, all those novels can be easily read (language-wise) by second-language learners at secondary schools, and far, far more easily than the usual staple you tend to find, from Salinger to Goldings and the like. And that’s one of the aspects of Mills’ writing that is so interesting: you could almost mistake his novels for children’s books. And then it hits you: Biblical (and other religions) parables adopt the same strategy – simplify the text and the reading, take away the polluting noise of realism, and trust your readers to see how this parable tells two stories: the one on the surface, and the one behind it – the one that really matters.

There would be much more to say, but to conclude: Mills’ uniqueness, his originality, his consistency, mean that he’s not a best-selling author and never will be. His books are a paradox: they require very little of us in terms of language, details and descriptions but at the same time, they absolutely need us to read them seriously and to constantly seek for a parallel with the real world. They are, to use a Sartrian cliché, ‘engaged novels’ (la littérature engagée), that is, novels that have a social and political core, novels that take a position, novels that dig deep in our, yes, human nature. They are almost Brechtian in their desire to strip the story bare so that we’re not distracted by style, technique and the usual filling-in, but can fully concentrate on the message and on the engagement with the ideas. Brecht wanted his Epic theatre to ‘…be a narrative that turns the spectator into an observer but arouses his capacity for action, forcing him to take decisions [and giving him a] picture of the world’; he opposed ‘Feelings’ to ‘Reason’, and he wanted the spectator to ‘stand outside [the story]’ so as to ‘stud[y] the only object of inquiry: human beings’ (all Brecht quotes from his A short organum for the theatre, 1948).

Fortunately for us, Mills’ works tend to be less lengthy than Brecht’s, and the narrative voices’ tone is rather more approachable. But essentially, one could argue it is the same desire in both authors: to ask us to open our eyes, to think about our own world, not to accept as a given the rules we’re imposed, and not to mistaken the thing for the doing of the thing. And above all, Mills asks us to remember that human agency and human nature are paramount and cannot be made subservient to an impersonal system that ignores them or pretends they don’t matter.

They do matter, and thankfully Magnus Mills reminds us of that every time he takes up the pen.

 

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Allow me here to give you an example I use in class, which plays with that same idea (although not only) of mistaking the system for what it’s originally for; it’s by the great Jim Crace and its only title is n.37 (it’s from his wonderful 2001 collection The Devil’s Larder).

He kept a curved plate in the middle of his kitchen table, with carvings on its edge. The sun, the moon, some leaves, some stars. It wasn't old or valuable, but it was natural wood, unvarnished and hand-decorated. Each day, first thing, once he had done his lifts and bends, he placed his titbits on the plate, food to see off death. Pumpkin seeds to protect the prostate. Bran for bowels. Brazil nuts for their selenium. Dried apricots. French pitted prunes. Linseed. A tomato. There were no supplements or vitamins. He had no confidence in pills. Then he drank his green leaf tea with honey from the comb. He was a regimented man, well-organized, reliable. He kept his diet up, without a break, until the day he died.