How about stale baked beans in a mud-encrusted pan, for breakfast? (The Restraint of Beasts - Magnus Mills)

Member Name: chris105

Product:	The Restraint of Beasts - Magnus Mills
Date:	02/09/01 (93 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: deadpan humour, snapshot of males in rural life

Disadvantages: can be a bit slow-moving if you don't like the subject-matter

Today I want to speak to you about THE RESTRAINT OF BEASTS by Magnus Mills. Those who have heard of the book will have done so on any one (or more) of these three accounts:

1. it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award in 1998.
2. its author, who was at his debut with this novel, is a former bus driver for whom book-writing constituted yet another job deviation.
3. in its latest edition, available in "all good bookstores", it has one of the most luscious* covers imaginable.

[*luscious adj. ... 3 richly luxurious or appealing to the senses ... Middle English lucius, perhaps alteration of licius, short for delicious]


Let us proceed in reverse. The cover, a study in understatement, is black with the most warm of chocolate hues, and a focused photo of the foot of a pub with the work-stained boots and jeans legs of two men, presumably drinking, sullying an otherwise spotless pub floor. Spot-laminated onto the cover, dulcis in fundo, are beer-circles... eerily realistic - I nearly thought I had a damaged copy at first. This cover is, of course, not the one shown at the top of the op.


The author has aroused as much curiosity as the book. The reverse-chic effect of a bus driver writing an "intellectual" book has apparently tickled the intelligentsia's fancy no end, and Mills has bafflingly become their darling. I say bafflingly not out of disrespect to the author's capabilities - au contraire - but in view of certain statements made by him against intelligentsia-itis. Mills has now, not surprisingly, left his previous employment and is a full-time writer with two bestselling novels (the follow-up is ALL QUIET ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS) and a third one gestating. The first words of the traditional "about the author" page of the book are:

"Magnus Mills failed his 11-plus in 1965 and was then placed in the hands of Gloucestershire Education Authority.&qu
ot;


The book, THE RESTRAINT OF BEASTS, is the zenith of nothingness. That is an option.
The book, THE RESTRAINT OF BEASTS, is a study of the consciousness of man and the realities of rural existence. That is another, slightly more pretentious, option.

Much has been made of this book. It has been described as "Kafkaesque", as having undertones of the best contemporary philosophers, as a subtle and ironic dissertation on mankind. Others have stripped away at the perceived babble, and have decried the book as "nothingness personified", a 215-page waste of ink where nothing happens, nothing is said and nothing is thought. I will give you my opinion in a second. First, though, let me say something about the novel itself.

The story is that of two Scottish fence-builders in the employ of the eccentric and penny-pinching Donald, and of their English foreman - the narrator - who is given charge of these two would-be heavy-metal rockers. Tam and Richie - even the names are "tutto un programma" (roughly translated: a show in itself) - are unnervingly untalkative, compulsively lazy with the predisposition for fag breaks interrupted by the odd spot of grudging work. They live for their beer - using up all their earnings, and more (Tam is constantly in debt with his colleagues), in the nearest pub whiling away the long Scottish and English nights. Donald's firm is renowned for erecting sophisticated high-tensile (not high-tension, as he pains to clarify) agricultural fencing, used for keeping animals in, and unwanted guests of all species out. When they are contracted to build a fence in England, they travel by caravan - and for the duration of the project they live in the self-imposed squalor of this caravan, increasingly dirt-infested with an accumulation of dirty dishes, clothes and mud. While building this English fence, our trio encounters the animosity of an entire populace and specifically of the local f
ence-builders, the Hall Brothers - jacks of all trades who function as village fence-builders, butchers, bullies and playboys. To keep the interest factor cranked up, Mills inserts a few (quite a few, actually) wild and drastic surprises throughout the book, which I choose not to reveal for the benefit of would-be readers (although many a summary of the book gives it away). The utter surprise of the fact jolted me and added immensely to my "Mills" experience. Just one hint: Peter Carty's review in "Time Out" is spot-on, for reasons you'll understand upon reading the book:

"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."


So now you want to hear my opinion. I am, of course, not qualified to adjudicate on the Kafkaesque and other allusions so profoundly extracted by other reviewers. I can only comment on my personal reaction to this book. Contrary to all expectations (I am not the farming type of person, barely being able to recognise a cow from a sheep) I enjoyed the book immensely, gnawing through it in a weekend. It's true that nothing much happens, exception made for the incidents alluded to but not mentioned above. Action, if it may be called so, is akin to a Sunday drive through a country road on a donkey. It's the human hum of conversation, or rather of non-conversation, which did it for me. Whatever the literary and philosophical connotations attributed to the book, or even if Mills indeed did nothing of the sort and let others attribute to the novel profundities not concocted by him, THE RESTRAINT OF BEASTS is a fascinating and real snapshot of males living and working together. With no women around to impress, or indeed to help them with everyday chores (both Tam and Richie live with their parents, and in the few moments we see them at home they are your
typical grown-up kids whose mothers wash their clothes, their dishes and cooks their meals - we know nothing, on the other hand, of the narrator's marital status), the three "heroes" live and think and act in manly (as distinguished from macho) manner. They live in a rural existence where the nearest form of life (excluding the sheep) is a darts-contest in a pub a few miles away. The narrator tries, with scant success, to instill a work ethos and a hygiene routine into Tam and Richie's everyday lives. The caravan soon becomes a pigsty, where the cooking pan doubles as a hair-washing sink for the fencers' long hair, where the only change of clothes they brought along is strewed on the floor, and where the onset of rain encrusts the inside of the caravan with mud.

Work is perceived as useless by Tam and Richie, who expect their wages to be punctual by divine right. Even getting them to wake up in the morning and get dressed for another spot of fence-erecting is a chore for the narrator.


"Mr McCrindle had a sloping field. A sloping field! As if a farmer didn't have enough to worry about ... the bottom part of the field was so steep it was no use to him because his cows wouldn't go down there. And if they did they wouldn't come back! ...

'Sounds like you'd be better off with sheep,' I remarked.

Mr McCrindle looked at me. 'Sheep?'

'Yes,' I said. 'With it being sloping, like. They might prefer it.'

'I'm a dairy farmer,' he said. 'What whould I want with sheep?'

'Er... don't know. Just a suggestion., really.' "


And so it goes on. The calm, unhurried rural atmosphere brought to life. And whatever else is attributed, or un-attributed, to the author, he has in my opinion the great talent of reproducing a way of life of which he obviously has first-hand experience. (Prior to being a b
us driver he worked in Scotland for a few years building fences - the mind boggles as to whether he was the narrator or Tam or Richie.) The fun of the book is reading of these highlights of their lives: the nights out at the pub, making wages last throughout the pints of Guinness (sorry, Mills doesn't say Guinness, that's the after-effects of my Dublin trip...), trying to impress girls (there are only two in the pub for the entire duration of their stay) by resolutely remaining in their corner drinking beer and ignoring said girls - needless to say this latin-lover-not technique has scant success! Thus, wittingly or unwittingly, Mills has described in uncanny detail and brought to life a reality - a reality so different from ours (from mine, at least, the non-city-people among the dooyoo community might beg to differ of course).

Speaking of this novel in an interview, Mills - tongue firmly in cheek and, I suspect, in an orchestrated attempt to confuse the "intellectuals" who have so loved him - describes his writing technique thus:

"I tried to structure the book like I was building a fence: tension; major turning points, so that the xxxxx or the xxxxx* were the turning points; then it keeps going in a straight direction and in the end it comes back to where it started."

[* the author didn't use xxxxx, of course, but I excised the words in order to retain the surprise factor - this may be infuriating some of you, but believe me it'll add to your fun immensely if you don't know what's round the corner.]

There's nothing more left for me to say, other than to qualify that this is not the sort of book with universal appeal, but I do highly recommend this book if you're the kind of person who occasionally enjoys a tranquil walk in the countryside (the uncultivated rough countryside, I mean, not the roses and dandelions variety!) with endless stretches of seemingly barren land punctuate
d by the odd rhino stampede (ok, I'm being needlessly melodramatic here - that's as good an indication as any that I should stop, else you'll soon be hearing of alien invasions and Elvis apparitions!).

Before I leave you, there's one recommendation I thought you shouldn't be without, and that's by your very own MP (or is it ex-MP? I'm not that au courant with Brit pols - isn't he the one of the Northern Ireland Ministry and of the loan-for-posh-house mess-up?) Peter Mandelson including this book in his Books of the Year nominations for the Sunday Times:

"To keep them amused, I will be suggesting to my colleagues they pick up a copy of Magnus Mills's The Restraint of Beasts."

THE RESTRAINT OF BEASTS
Magnus Mills
Flamingo, ISBN 0-00-655114-9

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