Magnus Mills is quite a character. Quite a character. And a man of few words, both in terms of the length of his novels and when answering questions about his works.
Whether it was uneasiness of being in the spotlight in front of an audience that made him read a painfully long 35 minutes from his latest book The Maintenance of Headway, remains unanswered. Even chair Paul Johnston looked nervously at his watch after 20 minutes. It was too long, although the book is as funny and quirky as you could have hoped for in a Mills opus. If people come to Book Festival events to hear an author read from his or her work, this reviewer is not one of them.
The payback, however, for having endured the introductory 35 minutes, was a 25 minute question and answer session as hilarious as anything I have encountered at any Book Festival. Magnus Mills is a deadpan, funny kind of guy.
He was a London
bus driver before becoming a best-selling author. It turns out that he
couldn’t really live without his day job, so he’s back behind the
wheel. He was, appropriately, driving a bus 24 hours before appearing
at this “Fine Fiction” literary event in Edinburgh.
The truth is,
Magnus Mills is a character from his books. His attempt to return to a
normal working life is a scene out of a Mills novel:
“After about a
year, I’d written Three to See the King, I had nothing to do. I
actually went to the Job Centre to see what they had on offer. And the
bloke said to me, ‘Have you got a CV?’. I thought, not really. I didn’t
want to say ‘I am a novelist, I’ve just been pottering about’, so I
said ‘no, I haven’t, really’. He said ‘have you got any children?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘why is that?’ He said, “They could show you how to write
a CV.’”
“Have you always been a great reader?” asked chair Johnston.
“No.” Pause.
Prompted
to elaborate, Mills said: “No, when I was at school I read what I was
told to read. Listened to the Book at Bedtime. I’ve read more since I
was a writer, ‘cause I get free books from my publisher.”
But Paul Johnston was not giving up. He asked: “Influences, then?”
“I’ve got me list,” Mills replied, “eh…Aesop?” Long pause.
“You can add comments, if you like,” Johnston pressed.
Mills had a huge list of influences, but couldn’t remember it all. Some of them were Orwell, Conrad and Hunter S. Thompson.
Magnus Mills is quite a character. Quite a character. His latest book is about bus drivers and highly recommended.