identifies, without explaining, such phenomena as why when you arrive at the bus stop early, the bus comes late, or, when you’re just on time, the bus has already arrived and left early. This latter enigma – which researchers have long tried to calculate with the use of the universal constant, Sod’s Law – takes a step closer to solution with the publication of Magnus Mills’ novel The Maintenance Of Headway.
The maintenance of headway, now you ask, is defined by Edward, one of the novel’s bus driver characters, as, “The notion that a fixed interval between buses on a regular service can be attained and adhered to.” As the unnamed narrator of The Maintenance Of Headway reveals, it’s difficult, perhaps impossible, for a bus to arrive at bus stops at their scheduled times. In a world where minutes matter, the variables are too various. The management have tried their best to model all possible outcomes, but, as Edward says, you can’t calculate the behaviour of people: “People who haven’t got the correct fare. People who get on buses just because they happen to be loitering near a bus stop. People who clamour to get on the buses that are already full. People who expect buses to wait for them.”
The key people are not passengers, however; they are the bus drivers. The drivers, if possible, like to shave off a few minutes from their rounds, arriving and leaving stops early so they have a little longer to lavish on a tea or toilet break.
For the inspectors who police the times, “There’s no excuse for being early.” It’s a driver’s worst crime. Often though it’s out of a driver’s hands as to whether he’s early or late, depending on how empty or manic the roads are. In essence, drivers are managing chaos while giving the impression order is being upheld. Very British, that, appearances trumping reality.
The authorities are happy to dump passengers off an early bus and send it on a pointless detour merely to correct its headway. “People aren’t important... Only bus movements.” The inspectors – jobsworths to a man – object to earliness, but are oddly relaxed about lateness: “There’s no excuse for being early but there are plenty for being late.” By the novel’s close, some inspectors are talking about headway with a religious fervour: “The only true path is the maintenance of headway.... Do you believe in it?” Edward’s idea, that timetables should be abandoned, is dismissed as “heresy”.
Nothing much in the way of action happens in The Maintenance Of Headway; Speed it isn’t. Like previous Mills novels, the language is as plain and repetitious as, well, a bus timetable, and it is much concerned with the tension between freedom and authority, specifically where the individual fits into the immoveable plans of the bureaucratic class. Mills’ vision of Britain is of a stratified society where laziness masquerades as observance of the rules. The drivers complain about the inspectors’ petty regulations, yet happily enforce ones that suit them; they will, for example, zoom past a full bus stop if they think the would-be passengers haven’t given them the correct signal to stop (arm straight out at 90 degrees, apparently). The passengers are oddly passive in the face of such provocation. Despite the odd grumble, the drivers are also passive; it’s not a coincidence that no driver is sacked no matter how many times he’s booked. Despite this, everyone appears somewhat numbed by the system, reluctant to cause trouble in case it loses them their job or place in the queue.
At first Mills, a former bus driver himself, appears to have alighted upon a micro-subject, droll but not crucial. By the close of The Maintenance Of Headway, you begin to wonder whether the author, in his own artfully subdued way, has in fact diagnosed just why so little ever seems to change in Britain. Caught in the bus headlights, you don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
The Maintenance of Headway
Magnus Mills Bloomsbury £10
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