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Amazon.co.uk Review
The team travels south to England, where they live out of a damp, cold caravan in the town of Upper Bowland. Here they soon find themselves at loggerheads with the sinister Hall brothers, whose business enterprises seem to combine fencing, butchering, sausage-making and the mysterious "school dinners". "We committed no end of good deeds!" cries John Hall. "Yet still we lost the school dinners! Always the authorities laying down some new requirement, one things after another! This time is seems we must provide more living space. Very well! If that's the way they want it, we'll go on building fences for ever if necessary! We'll build pens and compounds and enclosures! And we'll make sure we never lose them again!"
In between placing Kafkaesque obstacles in his narrator's path, Mills seeds his novel with small, darkly comic touches: Tam's father, whom we last see erecting a stockade round his house "to stop you from coming home any more"; the sound of Richie's Black Sabbath tapes "slowly being stretched in an under-powered cassette player"; the caravan's encroaching squalor; An Early Bath for Thompson, the book that Richie tries in vain to read when they run out of money for pubs. No doubt about it, this is a strange book that only grows stranger as it progresses; with any luck it augurs well for more brilliant, odd work from debut novelist Mills. --Mary Park --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
'A demented, deadpan comic wonder' Thomas Pynchon
'A heaving cauldron of black humour… I can guarantee that if you buy this book you'll never look at a stretch of high-tensile agricultural fencing in quite the same way ever again' Time Out
'Extremely unusual, finely crafted and funny' Observer
'Clever and funny and rewardingly strange … in a manner which may be called Kafkaesque' Independent on Sunday
'Unpretentious, comic and intelligent' Daily Telegraph
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Customer Reviews
Magnus Mills' debut novel would have been a possible 5-star contender for most of the journey. However, the novel becomes significantly blacker and less humourous in the final stages with no apparently good reason, ending most abruptly in an annoying and unsatisfying manner. Nevertheless, 'The Restraint of Beasts' is a highly entertaining, off-beat black comedy that accurately portrays the lifestyle of workers fenced in by economic forces.
The only problem is the way it is finished off - the story has been carefully crafted and the possibility of some more delicious moments meticulously set up. And then .... nothing! As I was reading it I was thinking, "this is good, how is it going to be resolved?" It wasn't, much to my annoyance.
There isn't much else you can say about it. All I would say is, don't expect an in-depth character study or a deeply moving novel. Relax before you read it, then laugh your head off when you do read it - I did.
The ending is top notch, once you think laterally
It's the grim tale of 3 fence builders and their adventures in Scotland and England. Read more
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