Reading list #2: Magnus Mills – The Restraint Of Beasts
I read and loved All Quiet On The Orient Express at the end of last year, and having now completed The Restraint Of Beasts, it’s not unreasonable to assume that there’s a certain formula to Magnus Mills’ novels. However, it’s one in which I imagine I’ll find a great deal of pleasure for a good few more of his tomes. Both of these darkly hilarious tales see their protagonist(s) getting stuck in the bizarre rituals of rural British locations, unable to escape, and wrought through with a sense of foreboding that makes The League Of Gentlemen’s Royston Vasey look like Last Of The Summer Wine’s Holmfirth. In The Restraint Of Beasts, a pair of Scottish itinerant fencers and their foreman are sent to England in the pissy wet depths of December to erect high-tensile fences for a series of increasingly overbearing clients. They hammer in posts all day, come back to the damp caravan where the three of them sleep amid unwashed dishes and festering clothing, then spend the night in the pub, looking at women and finding their popularity waxing and waning depending on which locals they’ve been dealing with. Their lifestyle is unrelentingly bleak, but Mills’ sense of timing and dialogue induces much mirth, and never places any judgement on his characters for their lack of ambition, non-existent hygiene, or the far darker situations in which they accidentally find themselves…
I wouldn’t normally pick up a Hollywood film star’s autobiography, but despite appearing in one of the most feted films of all time as the titular Annie Hall, Diane Keaton’s isn’t your average starry memoir released just in time for Christmas. In fact, there are parts of the book where she almost seems embarrassed of her profession, blushing through the page as she admits that she and Warren Beatty once had a thing, and barely paying lip service to her involvement in Allen’s films apart from Annie Hall. As a massive fan of Father Of The Bride 1 and 2 and Baby Boom (highbrow to the max), I was sad that she didn’t go into detail about them! But it’s understandable why she doesn’t – in entirely non-self-pitying fashion, Keaton is open about the lack of success in her later years, the failure of certain projects, and puts her role as an actress secondary to that as her role as the daughter of Dorothy Hall, whose lifelong-kept diaries are included throughout to provide a counter-point of view to Diane’s. If these often ring sad or raw for the reader, it’s important to remember that that’s entirely secondary to the effect they have on her daughter, whose own recollections are equally frank – revealing that she suffered from bulimia, for example. To a certain extent, it almost doesn’t matter that Then Again was written by a famous film star – it’s fascinating as a look at the art of keeping a journal (particularly as someone who’s never kept one), and the contrast of Dorothy and Diane’s parts allows mother and daughter to exist on their own terms, not remembered through the other’s filter. The use of Dorothy’s diaries is particularly moving given that she succumbs to Alzheimers in later life, with her final hours recounted by Diane in detail that’s horrifying and heartbreaking, but told with trademark dignity.
