The Restraint of Beasts

Rating:
Summary: Darkly Comic Debut
Review: Magnus Mills, bus driver and first time novelist, has created a darkly humorous portrait of blue-collar work in Britain with Restraint of Beasts. I can't share much wisdom that previous reviews haven't already imparted although I do have to agree with some who have said they didn't find this as hilarious as they were led to believe. I found it darkly amusing but not laugh out loud funny. What impressed me most about the novelist and his story was the fact that he took events to an extreme - not content to let his characters deal with one bad situation, Mills makes it worse. An appropriate subtitle for Restraint of Beasts could easily be "when bad things happen to bad people...and get worse all the time." Yet he's constructed his characters in such a way that you do feel for them.

While the end is somewhat unsatisfying, Restraint of Beasts is an excellent first novel. Mills' All Quiet on the Orient Express is also recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Darkly Comic Debut
Review: Magnus Mills, bus driver and first time novelist, has created a darkly humorous portrait of blue-collar work in Britain with Restraint of Beasts. I can't share much wisdom that previous reviews haven't already imparted although I do have to agree with some who have said they didn't find this as hilarious as they were led to believe. I found it darkly amusing but not laugh out loud funny. What impressed me most about the novelist and his story was the fact that he took events to an extreme - not content to let his characters deal with one bad situation, Mills makes it worse. An appropriate subtitle for Restraint of Beasts could easily be "when bad things happen to bad people...and get worse all the time." Yet he's constructed his characters in such a way that you do feel for them.

While the end is somewhat unsatisfying, Restraint of Beasts is an excellent first novel. Mills' All Quiet on the Orient Express is also recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Kafka meets Bukowski
Review: Restraint of beasts is the most accessable, and probably the best of the Mills work trilogy (All Quiet on the Orient Express and Scheme for Full Employment are the others). A darkly funny exposition of our views of work and community that never fails to frighten and amuse. A sense of brooding doom hangs over all of Mills' work; this is is no exception. Our brave hero is continuously undermined by his co-workers, two Scotts that make indolence an art, harassed by the evil Hall brothers and stands witness to several accidental deaths that are dealt with by immediate burial under the fence. Hysterical. We must restrain these beasts.

Rating:
Summary: Simply hysterical
Review: The writing is completely simple and understated, and the plot is minimal, but this book was absolutely hysterical. It's an easy, really fun read.

Rating:
Summary: forget the hype, enjoy the book
Review: [T]he main concern of farmers was that their fences should be tight. Without this the restraint of beasts was impossible. -The Restraint of Beasts

Take a forty-something, bus-driving, first time novelist; start some rumors of a huge advance; for good measure, add in a cover blurb from the notoriously reclusive Thomas Pynchon; and you've got the recipe for a hype machine that just won't quit. Not surprisingly, the book was nominated for both the Booker and the Whitbread, though it didn't win either. Meanwhile, obscured in all of this is the fact that, like many a neophyte before him, Magnus Mills has a very clever idea for a novel here, but in the end doesn't really seem sure what to do with it.

The basic story is simple enough : a nameless English narrator works for a Scottish company building fences. He's made foreman of a crew which consists of two sullen and lazy Scotsmen, Tam and Richie. The three of them are sent to England on a special job where they spend their days laying fence, often quite lackadaisically, and their nights drinking up all their wages in local pubs. They leave a trail of dissatisfied customers in their wake, but fortunately, a series of accidents contrives to also leave these customers quite dead, and buried, unceremoniously, beneath fence posts.

Mills presents the story in utterly straightforward fashion, the narration so affectless that the deaths are barely noticed. Considering the author's working class origins and the monotonous existence of the work gang, it's natural to expect the story to turn into a parable about labor and exploitation, but there's nary a complaint, and he makes no effort to make the workers the least bit sympathetic. It's all just work, drink, death, work, drink... If they're the beasts, we'd just as soon they be restrained.

This is actually pretty funny, especially at first. You can't help expecting the narrator to explain away the deaths, but the story just moves right on past them. Eventually though, Mills needs to do something with the scenario he's concocted, and here he falls somewhat short.

Absent all the hype, this would be a perfectly acceptable first effort. And I don't know that it's fair to judge the book by the expectations that extraneous factors raised. Just forget all the award nominations and other nonsense and approach it like any other first novel and you'll enjoy it well enough.

GRADE : B