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The Restraint Of Beasts (1999)

The Restraint of Beasts (1999)

Book Info

Author
Rating
3.9 of 5 Votes: 5
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ISBN
0684865114 (ISBN13: 9780684865119)
Language
English
Publisher
touchstone

About book The Restraint Of Beasts (1999)

Even before we turn to the first page, Magnus Mills ensures he gets the ball rolling with a title that adumbrates many of the novel’s thematic concerns. Who exactly are the beasts, we hear ourselves asking; who is restraining whom? These existential questions build at a creeping pace, gaining in magnitude with every newly erected fence.The opening sequence of The Restraint of Beasts plunges us into mundanity, governed by dialogue rather than description, and written in a terse, dry tone that only heightens the monotony. A fence needs redoing, we learn, and the work is pretty boring stuff, where characters Tam, Richie, and our unnamed narrator, labour under the watchful eye of Mr McCrindle. Fifteen pages on, however, and we’re confronted with our first untimely murder, in trademark Mills’ fashion. As our narrator tells it:Any distant observer of this scene would have probably assumed that the three figures standing by the new fence were in deep conversation about something. In fact, there were only two participants in the conversation.Apparently, in Mills’ nightmarish yet altogether familiar world, the living and the dead cannot be distinguished, and this, of course, is the whole point. We work tedious jobs, Mills seems to be saying, we squander meagre pay, and then we die an ironically banal death. The novel’s fencing metaphor proves particularly trenchant here, confirming suspicions that it us who enact the role of beasts, restrained by back breaking societal norms.Needless to say, as the trio plod on to our narrator’s homeland, such implicit ideas begin to take hold. We realise that the torturous repetition is appeased, albeit temporarily, by trips to the pub, where smoking, drinking, and sexual encounters become commonplace. However, it is a relievement that merely creates a warped cycle of punishment and reward; in actuality, freedom is never an option. Mills captures this in subtle ways, from the repossession of Richie’s guitar (triggered by the same system that enables him to buy it), to the slow debilitation of our unknown narrator.Mills illustrates this permeating malaise well – writing in a ‘deceptively simple’ prose, which fires ammunition at more conventionally descriptive language. His characters too, adopt the everyday man persona that we see manifest in All Quiet on the Orient Express, and to our delight, themes in the latter appear to persist. Many critics have paired Mills’ style with Franz Kafka, primarily in their shared ability to transcend unfortunate heroes into a state of powerlessness. This is indicative of later chapters, as Mills layers dream like events with the ever-constant grind of the capitalist machine. And yet, it is possible that these surreal and absurd deaths are all part of the narrator’s ultimate defence mechanism. Perhaps, in the end, it is the imagination with its bizarre and comic twists, which provide our narrator with the power of both liberation and restraint.

In Magnus Mill's first, Booker prize nominated novel, layabout Scottish labourers Tam and Richie find themselves with a new foreman after a string of sloppy jobs erecting the firms high-tensile fences, most recently at Mr. McCrindle's farm. Sent to correct their poor work under supervision, the new gang of three are also informed that they will need to travel down to England to do their next job.Reluctant workers at the best of time, traveling south and staying in a mobile caravan is hardly their idea of fun, nor is the constant drive towards 'efficiency' of the company's obsessive boss, Donald. Still, provided Richie keeps providing the fags, the foreman keeps providing 'subs' for Tam and there is a decent pub nearby, the boys might just make it through another fence.Mills set his stall out early with this deceptive tale of workers vs customers and bosses. Told in the simplest language and prose conceivable, via a deadpan narrator completely without guile or any kind of interior voice, Mills channels the distinctly english comic spirit found in P. G. Wodehouse and Dad's Army, full of ingenuous eccentrics and low-key absurdism.Completely unique to himself, however, is a facility for injecting something highly existential deep within the heart of the facile, which he manages here as the mostly innocuous mishaps of our trio of fencers take on a fatal character, as the sinister, white-coated John Hall ("He has the school dinners") begins to show an interest in their work. Kafka crossed with Croft & Perry.

Do You like book The Restraint Of Beasts (1999)?

This was a curious but ultimately dissatisfying read.It shook me off right at the start when our heroes accidentally kill someone and don't seem to care. I didn't buy it. They wouldn't act like that. For a book that relies so heavily on realism and strong characters (granted, Tam and Richie are great), having them behave so unnaturally from the get go really put me off. So I thought I was reading a comedy novel with a poor sense of human psychology. Or sloppy plotting that wanted to spice up the
—Robin

Having read the book, closely followed by several reviews, there seems to me an air of 'The Emperor's New Clothes' about 'The Restraint of Beasts'. A lot of the positive reviews herald the stylistic mimicry of the mundaneness of life, the ambiguity of 'the beasts' a metaphor for a capitalistic prison, parallels to Kafka and lavish praise on a book that, amongst all this clamour of praise, I stare incredulous and dumbfounded at its seemingly obvious indecency! I mean, it has no end, does it? A wh
—Kevin Trigg

As any universe built by Magnus Mills, this one dresses its weirdness in the everyday clothes of a seemingly banal story: a team of unsophisticated Scottish fence-builders out on a job to the English countryside, where rain and weak beer form the bookends of days spent in drudgery and mischief – the title is an obvious ambiguity, referring both to the animals being fenced in and the builders doing the fencing – but the unexpected twists culminate in an unexplained ending that casts a different light over the entire story.
—Frank Jacobs

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