The Forensic Records Society

Magnus Mills

Bloomsbury £18.99

Review by Keith Bruce

ALTHOUGH my sister was occasionally permitted to take a few 45s to parties in the 1970s, the Bruce record collection has survived more-or-less intact to greet the recent revival of interest in vinyl. A fit of generosity led me to pass on Black Sabbath Vol 4 to a younger cousin, and the regrettable sale of Robin Williamson's Myrrh album sometimes disturbs my sleep even yet, but on the plus side, through the acquisition of hand-me-down hi-fi separates, I now have the sort of set-up on which to play my discs that I could only dream of back in the day. Moving house is, of course, unthinkable.

All of which makes me, surely, the target demographic for the new topic for the deadpan humour of the much-admired Magnus Mills. The Forensic Record Society is not an account of modern criminal detection techniques catching up with the murderous fence-building protagonists in his award-winning and Booker short-listed breakthrough novel The Restraint of Beasts (as some might perhaps hope). Rather, it sees Mills applying his distinctive over-literal first-person narrative style to that corner of male geek-dom celebrated by Nick Hornby in High Fidelity. The narrator and his imperious pal James decide to take their love of a fine sonic platter (principally singles, but that in itself is a contentious issue in the story) beyond their homes and into a back room at their local pub, seeking out like-minded music fans with whom to compare notes. Except – this being a Mills world where expected behaviour is never quite fulfilled – the rules of The Forensic Records Society, as outlined on-the-hoof by James, expressly forbid comment on the choice of three records brought to the weekly gathering by other participants. Listening is silently forensic (our narrator helpfully describes the possible attitudes that can be adopted to indicate this as "serene, solemn, mesmerised and so forth") but subsequent analysis is forbidden.

Obviously that restriction invites competition, and the back room at the Half Moon quickly becomes the venue for a rival record club with a different agenda, on another day of the week.

In this male-only world, women are strange unfathomable creatures, at least through the eyes of our storyteller. But then he fails to see what is happening in front of his very eyes between his pal and the barmaid with the mysterious musical past. And of course, one of the especially normality-challenged characters here is called Keith, as they always are, just as Mike Leigh, Alan Ayckbourn and Martin Amis have decreed must always be the case.

I have tried not to allow that, or the easy prey we vinyl junkies certainly are, to colour my judgement, but it still seems to me that the author's comedy muscles are not working at full stretch here. There are some wonderful aspects to The Forensic Records Society – the naivety of the narrator is at least the equal of his predecessors in the Mills canon, and the device of naming only the titles and never the artists of all the records cited makes a pop quiz of the book's pages that even those whose obsessiveness is being ridiculed are bound to enjoy.

It is also possible to contend that Mills brings together the prosaic and precisely limited setting of this and other books and the more fantastical world of his 2011 novel A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In in what is a pithy allegorical critique of how wider contemporary society works. It is not unusual to see Mills's writing described as Kafka-esque or Python-esque, but many readers miss the comedy in the former and Mills is rarely as laugh-out-loud as the latter – nor, indeed, as Flann O'Brien, who seems a more obvious influence. Here, however, his understated, precise, observational prose rarely raises more than a wry smile, although it still proves a brisk and entertaining read.

And Bloomsbury have pushed the boat out with the packaging, which is a wonderful pastiche of the sort of vintage 1960s 7-inch single sleeve collectors covet at record fairs, and will really make you think there must be three minutes of music as well as 180 pages of prose to discover inside. Here's a thing though: my first singles – still carefully alphabetically stored – cost me eight shillings and sixpence (42.5p in new money), which makes this pretty little book look a little expensive for the few hours it will distract you.