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…

Tags: Magnus Mills, The Restraint Of Beasts