Wednesday, April 17, 2019

The Forensic Records Society by Magnus Mills

The banal doesn't sit well with fiction. The novel insists, too often, on action of one kind or another. It is left to theatre - "Waiting for Godot" perhaps - or comedy, "Viz" or "Early Doors", to find an artistic mode for the passing of the days. Occasionally attempts like Sylvia Smith's "Misadventures" have not been well received. Yet banality is one of the tropes - perhaps the main trope - at the heart of Magnus Mills' is fiction. Perhaps its because most of his characters are workers of one sort or another that this is the case, although in his latest, "The Forensic Records Society", the whole people who actually work are George and Alice, the licensee and barmaid of the pub where the majority of the (in)action takes place.

Two record collecting nerds would sit round each other's house, listening in turn to three records of the other's choice, an unspoken set of rules meaning that their comments on each were of the minimum. They were beyond taste, seeing that as merely opinion; yet tacitly they shared certain values. I'm reminded of when I was a teenager and three of us would come back from Birmingham laden with records and the rule was that we had to listen to the other's purchases, however much we hated them.

James, the leader of the pair, has a plan, that he suggests to the narrator, as his willing foil, that they should start a Forensic Records Society at their nearby pub on a Monday night. They do so, and gradually, draw in other blokes (always blokes), to their Monday ritual. Like early Christians or prototype Marxists, their club develops rules, and is both rigorous in the applying of them, and solemn in the seriousness of their purpose. Time passes in a vacuum, regardless of how many records they play it is always a surprise when last orders is called.

On ejecting one person from the club for arriving too late they find that he has set up a rival - a "confessional" records club, on the next night. Infiltrating this night they find it is very different. That people confess their feelings brought on by a particular record, and pay £5 for the privilege; it is attended by a mixed crowd, women included, and the leader becomes a bit of an icon.  It's like Simon Bates' "Our Tune" mixed with "The Matrix."

In the mean time, the pettiness of James' rules causes disquiet amongst the members, even as they turn up to listen to classic 7" singles. The song titles are planted throughout the book without explanation, so we too can almost become members of the club. There's a debate going on about the "perfect" song - not because of artistic merit but because it lasts for exactly three minutes, the "three minute pop song" being more a thing of legend than reality. This is the kind of thing that gets the men who attend this club excited.

Our narrator, common to many of Mill's characters, is unworldy whilst having a highly developed sense of his own perceptions. He slowly comes to realise that James is seeing Alice, the barmaid, who nonetheless remains incredibly frosty with himself. She has, it turns out, been singer on a very rare demo single, and the plot of the novel - if there is one - swings around this being heard. Alice, in her turn, has strong views on the narrator, describing him as someone who  doesn't like music.

The humour in "The Forensic Records Society" is in how Mills, as ever, works wonders on a tiny, restricted canvas, and draws out of it all its comic possibilities. The uncertain time keeping of the meetings is part of it. In Magnus Mills' world even physics can bend to the comic possibilities of the narrative.

Things come to a head of sorts, when a 3rd rival organisation, playing records that are more "meaningful", comes into existence. There's quite a few nice digs at the world of the record collector in this narcissism of small differences, from those who fetishise the object, to those who want the innocence of the classic jukebox 45. Amongst the many records listed, there are rap and ska and indie and classic rock and soul, but not much room for ABBA or house music or anything too modern. Even an avid record collector such as myself only recognised about two/thirds of the titles.

Its a short novel, but more packed than the above description can give a sense of, since in talking about the banal and the unimportant, there's clearly bigger things going on here. One reviewer calls it Animal Farm "with much better songs", but I always think Mills is less interested in metaphor, than in the small systems that exist within our everyday mundane society, such as the rules of the forensic records society, or the maintenance of headway that bus drivers pursue in a previous of his books. This fondness for an enclosed, regulated society, and what happens when the rules are broken or not fit for purpose is a way of exploring how men (and it is always men, the "love interest" like Alice, is hardly there at all) negotiate the world. That the world is not quite the one we perceive, is part of their charm.

This latest novel seems the closest in many ways to his debut "Restraint of Beasts", and like that its ending is uncertain, and ambiguous. The return to an every day setting after some of the more fantastical or out of time settings of recent novels is a welcome return to his home turf. It's one of his best.

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