The Restraint of Beasts [Paperback]

Building high-tension fencing with a couple of rural Scots louts--what could be a more likely premise for a black comedy? An eerie noir fable told in a grim, deadpan voice, The Restraint of Beasts tells the story of an English fence-builder promoted to foreman over two under-motivated labourers. They've just been sent out to fix a badly done fence when events go horribly awry--and not for the last time either. For the rest of the novel, as his charges drink, loaf and pound the occasional fence-post, events go badly amiss over and over again. In a sense, that's all you can truly rely on in Mills's fictional world. It is not giving away too much to say that if you hire these workers to assemble your high-tension fence, you'd best watch your back. Or your front, for that matter. And keep a firm eye on the skies, just in case.

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

‘A demented, deadpan comic wonder, this rude salute to the dark side of contract employment has the exuberant power of a magic word it might possibly be dangerous (like the title of a certain other Scottish tale) to speak out loud.’
Thomas Pynchon

'A heaving cauldron of black humour ... You'll never look at a stretch of high-tensile agricultural fencing in quite the same way ever again' Time Out 'With a tone that wavers as unsettlingly between Ken Loach and Franz Kafka as its locale switches from Scotland to England, Magnus Mill's first novel is a work of rare originality and power ... It is very, very good' Independent 'Extremely unusual, finely crafted and funny' Observer 'Unpretentious, comic and intelligent' Daily Telegraph --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

A queasy, spooky, murderously funny tale from the driver of the number 18 bus…

• What do you do when you’re asked to supervise the unsupervisable? You go along with it, of course…
• Meet Tam and Richie: two dour Scots labourers. Clad in denim, workshy, permanently discontented, intent on getting to the pub every night come hell or high water – in short, akin to your average British workers. But Tam and Richie, with their new supervisor, begin to display hidden depths.
• Despatched to a farmsite on the Hereford-Powys border by their building contractor bosses, they in turn despatch first one client then another, all the while sticking unbendingly to their rituals until comeuppance comes to herd them away.
• What fresh hell is this they inhabit?

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Prize
'A demented, deadpan comic wonder' Thomas Pynchon

'Extremely unusual, finely crafted and funny… Tam and Richie are two itinerant Scots fencers and would-be heavy rockers with a predilection for beer, distressed denim and long silences. Supervising their work is a task that the narrator understandably regards with some trepidation, particularly after the boss's dramatic announcement that "Mr McCrindle's fence has gone slack". The three are duly dispatched to the McCrindle farm, where they finish off the work… then off to England where, after rain-sodden days bashing in fence posts, they wolf down baked beans in their shared squalid caravan and spend their evenings and their hard-earned cash in the local pub. Things become more complicated when they encounter the Hall Brothers – butchers, fencers and local heroes… Shot through with farcical understatement, ironic and melodramatic climaxes and highly idiosyncratic comic motifs, the novel casts a sharp, merciless eye on the vagaries of contract employment and the work/drink/debt cycle that defines the lives of so many.' Christina Patterson, Observer

'Mills's first novel really is good… The terseness of his vocabulary produces an effect that is oblique and elliptical, yawning with sinister implication, in a manner which may be called Kafkaesque… a forceful and original first novel, clever and funny and rewardingly strange.' Jenny Turner, Independent on Sunday

'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.' Peter Carty, Time Out

'With a tone that wavers as unsettlingly between Ken Loach and Franz Kafka as its locale switches from Scotland to England, Magnus Mills's first novel is a work of rare originality and power… very, very good." Kim Newman, Independent

'Worth shouting about… A comedy which is as black as a pint of Guinness and as dry as a salted peanut.' Harry Ritchie, Mail on Sunday --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Meet Tam and Richie: two dour Scots labourers. Fond of denim, workshy, permanently discontented, intent on getting to the pub every night come hell or high water – in short, just your average workmen. But Tam and Richie, with their new supervisor, begin to display hidden depths. Despatched to a farmsite in England by their boss Donald, they deal conclusively with first one then another client, all the while sticking unbendingly to their rituals until comeuppance arrives to herd them away. But just who exactly are the Hall Brothers, and what do they farm?

'The Restraint of Beasts' is a brilliant, blackly comic debut from a writer of uncanny abilities.

“A demented, deadpan comic wonder, this rude salute to the dark side of contract employment has the exuberant power of a magic word it might possibly be dangerous (like the title of a certain Scottish tale) to speak out loud.”
THOMAS PYNCHON

Magnus Mills has had more jobs than you’ve had hot dinners. Lately, pretty much by accident, his writing skills were brought to the attention of the Independent newspaper, where he wrote about Life on the Buses for a year or so; then, he decided to write a novel. He still drives the 18 bus and other routes, and operates out of Brixton depot.