The Restraint of Beasts : A Comedic Novel

Shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award: a modern comic classic from 'A British writer to be treasured' (Independent on Sunday) The news couldn't be worse for Tam, Richie and their new supervisor: Mr McCrindle's fence has gone slack. The three of them are duly dispatched to the McCrindle farm, where they finish off the work, then go to England where, after rain-sodden days bashing in fence posts, they wolf down baked beans in their shared caravan and spend their evenings and cash in the local pub. But then they encounter the Hall Brothers -- butchers, rival fencers and local heroes! Amazon.com Review Good fences may make good neighbors, but in Magnus Mills's first novel, bad fences make for high tension indeed. An eerie noir fable told in a grim, deadpan voice, The Restraint of Beasts begins as an unnamed English fence builder finds himself promoted to foreman over Tam and Richie, two undermotivated Scots laborers. They've just been sent out to fix a high-tension fence when events go horribly awry--and that's just the beginning. For the rest of the novel, as his charges drink, smoke, loaf, and pound the occasional post, things go wrong 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 with these particular fencers on the job, you'd best watch your back. And your front, for that matter. And maybe 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. They're soon at loggerheads with the sinister Hall brothers, whose business enterprises seem to combine fencing, butchering, sausage-making, and a fierce attachment to school meals. "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 thing 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 debut 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 without success to read. No doubt about it, The Restraint of Beasts is a strange novel that only grows stranger as it progresses; with luck, it augurs more brilliant, odd work from Mills. --Mary Park From Publishers Weekly Good fences make bad labors in this mordant satire of tensions among the rural British working classes from Mills, a former London bus driver. The trouble begins in Scotland when Tam Finlayson, Richie Campbell and their unnamed English foreman (who narrates the novel) must rebuild a slack fence before leaving for a more extensive job in England. Their on-site supervisor hovers over them nervously until Tam accidentally kills him by releasing a tension wire at the wrong moment. The workers bury the body, hoping his absence will not be missed. Soon after beginning work in England, Richie kills their new supervisor with a clumsily thrown post. The next assignment, involving seven-foot-high electric fences intended for "the restraint of beasts," yields yet another accidental death and coverup. Mills's narrator describes these horrific events in an hilariously controlled and pervasive deadpan. As bodies accumulate and vanish without comment from police or other authorities, the novel moves toward a disturbing?if predictable?conclusion. Mills's satire occasionally loses its edge when he describes the technicalities of fence-building (a conceit he leans on heavily) and spends an awfully long time lending his sharp ears to dreary sessions in village pubs. Yet between the dull stretches, the clash between power-hungry bureaucrats and alcoholic, downtrodden laborers finds haunting, comic expression in this promising debut. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. After the twin evils of sloth and alcohol lead to a horribly botched job, three fence builders flee South in Magnus Mills’ surreal black comedy.Tam and Richie’s long-suffering foreman narrates Magnus Mills’ debut novel, which begins with a hapless trio of fence builders being exiled from Scotland to England after a particularly unsuccessful job. The result is a black comedy in which all hell constantly breaks loose, despite the narrator’s endless attempts to mitigate disaster."(A) witty, intricate fable about a working-class hell constructed by its own inhabitants. Mills, himself a former fence builder and bus driver, writes merciless deadpan dialogue." - Anthony Bourdain, The New York Times Book Review"As dull as this sounds, the pleasure achieved by Mills' text comes when a reader self-consciously realizes he's become riveted to a shaggy-dog story about fence-building and death, a story that will not make a lick of sense until the last sentence in the book." - David Bowman, San Francisco ChronicleMagnus Mills is the author of The Field of the Cloth of Gold and eight other novels, including The Restraint of Beasts - which won the McKitterick Prize and was shortlisted for the Whitbread (now the Costa) First Novel Award in 1999. His novel The Field of the Cloth of Gold was published to great critical acclaim and was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize in 2015.

CHOSEN AS ONE OF THE BEST NOVELS OF 1998 BY THE "LOS ANGELES TIMES" AND WINNER OF ENGLAND'S MCKITTERICK PRICE

This award-winning literary tour de force, shortlisted for both the Whitbread and the Booker prizes, tells the captivating tale of three men: Tam and Richie, good Scots lads at heart who have turned loafing into an art form, and their ever exasperated English foreman. Carefully laid plans go haywire from the start, and as they cover their tracks the best they can, the hapless trio heads south from Scotland to do a job in England, where they find that their reputation has preceded them, to say the least.

This outrageous and brilliant tale is riveting from beginning to end, introducing a magnetic new voice.

Alexandra Lange

This black-as-pitch satire was written by a London bus driver. . . don't be lulled by the tedium of post-driving -- Mills's last chapter slaps the reader awake, and into the realization the The Restraint of Beasts is as much biting social commentary as it is comedy. -- New York Magazine

Once upon a time in Scotland, there were three men who built high-tension fences, the kind that keep animals in and humans out—or maybe the other way around. Magnus Mills gives us a wiry novel of tensile strength that proves him a writer of ferocious talent. Eerie, resonant, spare yet rich in tones both hilarious and ominous—as if a work by Irvine Welsh, or perhaps Macbeth, had been adapted by the Coen brothers—his story has a finale so ingenious, insidious, and satisfying, it remains locked in the mind long after the last wire has been strung into place. A black comedy on the British workman. It features three men who erect fences and whose minds are on their beer at the end of the day. This preoccupation makes them accident prone with unfortunate consequences for those supervising them. A first novel To arbejdssky skotter og deres engelske formand sendes til England. Deres håbløse projekter rammes af de besynderligste selvforskyldte uheld, og kampånden holdes oppe af de daglige pubbesøg When sloth and alcohol lead to a horribly botched job, two fence builders named Tam and Richie flee their native Scotland to England, where all hell quickly breaks loose