The Maintenance of Headway

Who wouldn't love a book that lets us travel with a London bus driver - and a double-decker at that? This is a thin version of Catch-22. Mills lets us have more fun than the driver or the passengers.Our protagonist is a veteran of the driver corps. He and his driver friends run up against the bureaucracy on a daily basis. Of course, the London bus bureaucracy (like bureaucracies everywhere) loves requiring that things be done in a certain way for the excellent reason that they have always been done that way.While not laugh-out-loud funny, Maintenance of Way will keep a smile on your face for the duration of this all-to-short book. If you like British humour, you will get a kick out of this one. I have ordered two more books by Mills because of this one.

First of all, I am a bus driver myself, and I have also written a novel about this line of work, but Mr. Mills really nails it in a most British way with a wit and humor that is truly unique and superb. Cover to cover, this book is a gem and I enjoyed it tremendously!

I thought it was interesting to read and through the humor you can see how governments really work.

A very different writer. Dark and one of the few who write about work, especially blue collar work. I've since ordered two of his other novels.

It's a very simple and easy read about a guy driving a bus.

I did not really get this book! It is silly in a sense and of course a commentary about life and schedules and fitting in! I think I need to read it again! Perhaps!

unless you are intimately acquainted withs the ins and outs of bus dispatching in London, or find this an interesting topic, I would skip this one

Very cute and instructive for transit newbies.

Or, "the notion that a fixed interval between buses on a regular service can be attained and adhered to."It's as if Magnus Mills selects the most difficult and potentially boring things to write a novel about, and then goes about it. I refer to building fences of course (the very wonderful Restraint of Beasts), as well as in this case, buses. Then I looked at his profile and realised that for 7 years he was a fence builder, and since 2009 has been a London bus driver. Despite this many of his books refer to no town or city which gives him the flexibility to write wonderful sentences like "the southern outpost was a remote and desolate place."Though I fortunately haven't read them all yet, this is less dark than many of his other books, but with that same deadpan humour. It's not 'laugh our loud' but the dialogue is infectious, and thoroughly entertaining.Some memorable quotes:"They feared if all the buses came at once, the walls of their citadel would crumble." (The inspectors)."There's no excuse for being early.""The Law of Cumulative Lateness"

A strange book, but compelling.The unnamed narrator is a bus driver in a city. The city might bear some relation to London, with landmarks such as "the cross", "the arch" and "the circus" - but the location is blurred, dreamlike. Nor is there really a clear story: the narrator relates incidents in his driving life - neither he nor his colleagues seem to exist outside work - and ruminates on "the maintenance of headway", the overriding principle that there must be eight minutes between buses. There is no excuse for being early 9though there are many for being late).The rules are enforced by a team of Inspectors. The Inspectors are all powerful, and can "book" a driver for being early, or "curtail" the route, requiring any passengers on board to be dumped, even at night, on the ring road. Some are more reasonable than others: the worst seem to be recently promoted ex-drivers, one of whom, in the closest this book gets to a plot, hijacks a bus himself.I found this book delightful - Mills has a wonderful, level, cool, tone of writing which exactly matches the absurdity of a transport system run with total regard for timekeeping and utter disdain for passenger convenience.

Magnus Mills' novels are rather like marmite: you either love them or hate them, and I fall firmly in the former category. But this one is a bit different. It certainly has the same format - an unnamed narrator and a rather mundane and routine occupation that is turned into something rather different and absurd by the people who inhabit the world that Mr Mills creates. There is, though, usually a rather dark undercurrent running through the story, and although nothing is openly stated, he reader is left with an uneasy feeling after finishing the book.But that darknes doesn't materialise in this story. It is just about buses and bus drivers and their battles with the inspectors and the maintenance of headway. The drivers would like to finish their journeys early so they can have a nice rest before they move on. But there are no excuses for being early, as the inspectors constantly remind the drivers. There are, however, many excuses for being late! (How very true).It's a short book, and written in the customary short sentences which are mainly dialog and not much descriptive text. I enjoyed it, like I do all of Mr Mills' books, but I felt it was lacking something. It has made me look forward to his next one though.

The Maintenance of Headway could be consumed in an afternoon. It's the sixth novel (it's a novella actually) by one of my favourite British writers; the bus driver who is Magnus Mills.And this book is clearly autobiographical as it is something of an essay on the issues that face bus drivers in an unnamed city sporting an Arch and a Bejewelled Highway that must be Oxford Street. It has certain similarities to his earlier masterpiece (the Scheme for full employment - an allegory based, I think on Napoleon's grand scheme of the same name). Similiar, but totally different, and, I think, less allegorical. It has no real beginning, middle and end. It has no plot to mention but it is a delightful and whimsical take on the little things that drive people's day-to-day existences in whatever line of employment they find themselves.Spats, cliques, politics all brew up as the depot's drivers face up the inspectors in a class ridden micro ecosystem.The mantra that bus drivers should be 'driven' by "the maintenance of headway" challenges individuals on a daily basis. The ultimate goal of every driver is to finish his (or her) shift a few minutes early and keep moving throughout their day. The inspectors are driven barmy by early running buses even though the population at large continue to arrive at bus stops early fully expecting their buses to arrive late.Mills gentle humour is punctuated by the odd outburst of totally unexpected foul language by one of the more aggressive and anti establishment drivers which makes for laugh out loud moments.Magnus Mills is a national treasure. Take this book to your heart. A stunning return to form after his weakest outing to date (Explorers of the New Century). Read it as a companion piece to The Scheme for Full employment then delve into his back catalogue. I promise you much joy.

The book is sheer genius. Magnus Mills takes the dull principle of job creation to a new comic level.He follows the tribulations of the rival delivery drivers who transport their van loads of spare parts between depots and introduces tension between the factions of drivers who share different viewpoints on clocking off early. It may not sound much of a theme, but in the hands of Magus Mills, the riavalry and comedy comes to life while the characters transport the parts between depots... and underlying it all is the that the parts they transport are the parts for the vans they drive. The depots only store and redistribute those parts and the entire purpose of the transpotation / storage and redistribution is to keep the vans on the road... all utterly pointless and extremely funny.