By Its Cover is a series of posts wherein I read a book solely on my love of the cover. No reading the jacket, no checking reviews!
I grabbed this book on the way out of the library, drawn by its whimsical rendering of double decker buses. To be honest, I have a rather bad habit of leaving the library with a stack of books that I can barely carry let alone find time to read. But after perusing the first few pages of this short book, I was pulled in by its clever writing and charmingly daft premise: that the perfect timing between buses on any given route (headway) is paramount to the proper functioning of a city.
The narrator is a seasoned bus driver of no name, who drives in a nameless city—which can only be London. He and his fellow drivers are in a daily battle to maintain the perfect distance between all the buses whilst dealing with errant pedestrians, broken water mains, the uncooperative timing of lights and the even more uncooperative bus inspectors who lie in wait along the routes.
It is the inspectors who are determined to adhere to this timing of buses at all cost. If a route schedule has gone awry, they think nothing of telling the driver to head to an overpass, throw off the passengers, cut out part of the route and get back on track. And if a driver is early? Why, he should pull over and fake engine trouble. The tricks and ploys and utter ridiculousness used to maintain the spacing between the buses is hilarious. And author, Magnus Mills, is a bus driver so he should know. You can’t make this kind of crazy up, people.
Throughout, the bus drivers congregate for tea at the bus station where the TV has been stuck on the same channel for 4 years. Here, they discuss the warped logic of the system, the madness of trying to impose order onto chaos and creating rules that cannot be followed and which, quite literally, throw the poor passengers to the kerb.
It is bureaucratic lunacy at its finest; a system that turns on the people it is supposed to be helping. We’ve all experienced it. And by the time you are finished reading you’re left with the distinct impression that in this crazy game we call life, we are all simply being taken for a very long (bus) ride!
