Guardian review

Camaraderie ... the Simon Pegg film The World’s End.
Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

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This deceptively slim novel about blokes at a pub vinyl night could be read as a disguised retelling of the Russian revolution, or any great human falling out

In the house of fiction, blokes are the cavity wall insulation. Usually they are out of sight and mostly they are taken for granted. If a bloke appears in a contemporary British novel, he will be there to pop round and fix something, to give someone a lift into town or – at his most prominent – to take all the blame for stifling the life chances of an intelligent and passionate woman.

A few writers have dared to put lots of blokes in their novels. But Martin Amis’s characters aren’t really blokes because they are too wordy; when you cut them open you find Amis and a slang dictionary. Nick Hornby’s may be blokes when we meet them, but his novels are often about the long and difficult climb out of blokehood. Magnus Mills, though, ever since his 1998 debut The Restraint of Beasts, has made blokes the absolute centre of his fictional universe.

It is a modestly sized universe, because blokes above all want to relish and do honour to what is right there in front of them – be that a meat pie, a diesel locomotive or, in the case of the Forensic Records Society, 7in singles.

Where else but in a novel about blokes, and where else but in a novel by Magnus Mills, would you get a highly emotional scene that reads like this?

I swiftly averted my gaze when James rejoined me carrying two full glasses. He placed them between us and sat down; then he slipped the record from its sleeve and put it on the deck. At this point I sensed that James wished to say something, but being constrained by his own rules he was obliged to remain silent. Instead, we passed a minute or so watching the froth on our beers settle.

You wouldn’t know it, but this is the moment the entire novel has been building towards. It’s the resurrection of a dead friendship through the sharing of a great secret – a demo 7in single recorded by a barmaid called Alice.

We are in the back room of the Half Moon, the pub where the narrator and his best friend have established a Monday night gathering. James is top dog, and his rules are simple. Each member of the society brings along three 7in singles. In strict rotation, these are put on his portable turntable, played and listened to silently, forensically. Afterwards, there are “no comments, judgments or quotations”. Language is to be avoided as totally as possible. Why?

In a piece called “Writing for the Theatre”, Harold Pinter wrote: “We have heard many times that tired, grimy phrase: ‘Failure of communication’… and this phrase has been fixed to my work quite consistently. I believe the contrary. I think that we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves.”

That’s why blokes, even when they are actually pledging their undying loyalty to one another, do it by apparently sitting and watching the froth settle on their beers. Blokes are men who keep themselves to themselves.

Mills uses some blokes in the back of a pub to tell a massively ambitious story But Mills has far greater ambitions for the forensic records society than just to tell a story about some blokes in the back room of a pub. Or rather, he wants to use some blokes in the back of a pub to tell a massively ambitious story. His agenda is there in the title, in the word “society”. It also slips out in a few suspiciously rhetorical sentences midway through the book.

Was it really beyond human capacity, I pondered, to create a society which didn’t ultimately disintegrate through internal strife? Or collapse under the weight of its own laws? Or suffer damaging rivalries with other societies?

Within weeks of the narrator and James placing their first advertisement, they have been joined in their listening sessions by Chris, Mike, Dave, Barry and Rupert. Apart from a brief description of their hair, these blokes are only distinguished from one another by their musical tastes. (A playlist compiled from the novel would include lots of classic 60s rock but also some ska, funk and post-punk.) The Forensic Records Society’s idyll of pint-drinking and beard-stroking is destroyed when a rival society establishes itself on Tuesdays in the same small back room. It calls itself the Confessional Records Society, and has fundamentally different values.

For reasons of their own … they regarded records in a completely different light to us. They viewed them as little more than props and accessories, and saw no intrinsic value in the records themselves. Accordingly there existed a gulf between the two persuasions which could never be bridged.

This leads to “bickering, desertion, subterfuge and rivalry”. It also leads to a story that could be read as a disguised retelling of the Russian revolution, or the Reformation, or the Sunni-Shia schism, or any great human falling out. As soon as you form any kind of “us”, Mills suggests, a “them” will form in response. In this, The Forensic Records Society is like Animal Farm but with blokes for pigs, and much better songs.

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