Restraint of Beasts will feel familiar to anyone who has held a crappy job. Our narrator, suddenly made "foreman" over Rich and Tam - "Why me?" "There's no one else left" - faces the usual on-the-job problems - his employees are lazy slobs, his boss is remote but demanding, his work is exacting, and there are all those "accidents". He brings to these problems the messy partial fixes we all know and use. Mills's simple narration sucked me in so completely that I was soon a collaborator. But how did I ever think this was just a fencing company? The book reads fast, and the right-on-target ultra-simple style - "Got a fag Rich?" is as complex as it gets - can grow wearing, but the work is quirky and very real. You might like to compare this to holocaust survivor - and later suicide - T. Borowski's horrifyingly straightforward (4 star) "This Way For The Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen", in which a prisoner saves his life by becoming a helper, only to experience inevitable on-the-job problems. We all have those, right?

[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

A funny, funny book. Dark, but hilarious. Other reviewers are right that if you've ever had a hopelessly crappy job, you'll laugh with recognition at many of the brilliant details. Personally, I laughed out loud at the narrator's description of his two co-workers' insistence on endlessly playing their old, and therefore stretched and uneven, heavy metal tapes. It reminded me of a surreal summer I spent working in a warehouse with a couple of death rockers. But there's more than that. Without meaning to over-intellecutalize a straightforward comic novel, it mines the same comic vein as Kafka -- or, if you prefer, the movie "After Hours". The book captures perfectly the sensation of finding yourself in an increasingly hellish scenario without quite understanding how you got there or how you get yourself out. I can understand how a few readers were put off by the book. If your sense of humor doesn't have a morbid streak -- e.g., if you're put off by Martin Amis or by the amputation scene in Monty Python's "The Holy Grail" -- give this a pass. Otherwise, it's a lot of fun to read.

Mills' first two novels, "The Restraint of Beasts" and "All Quiet on the Orient Express", were both masterpieces of absurdist black humor firmly grounded in a rural landscape both recognizable and slightly akilter. In his latest work, Mills again sets up a decidedly odd situation, but this time in a terrain so briefly sketched that it moves beyond the bounds of the "real" world and becomes fable. Here, an unnamed narrator lives alone in a tin house in a desert, separated from his nearest neighbors (also tin house-dwelling bachelors) by several miles. He apparently once harbored dreams of living in a canyon, but now is content to live alone; listening to the wind play against his tin house and sweeping sand clear from his house. If this hermetic existence sounds vaguely biblical, what with solo mediations in the desert and all, it's probably because Mills is riffing on the Book of Genesis.

This is further developed when a sharp and shrewish woman arrives on his doorstep unannounced and declares her intention to stay a while. This, quite naturally, upsets the order of things as the narrator is forced to alter his lifestyle in exchange for sex-which is about all he seems to find worthwhile in this new woman. Presumably the reader is here supposed to recognize Adam and Eve. The plot thickens when the narrator's neighbors, Simon, Philip, and Steve, visit and start to talk about a wonderful and mysterious newcomer to the area named Michael. He is apparently the bee's knees, and more and more people start showing up on the horizon, making their way to see Michael. From here, one doesn't want to give too much away, but the plot seems to serve Mills' desire to comment allegorically on the nature of religion, fanaticism, the search for faith and the meaning of life, free will, civilization, and a parcel of other concerns. The parable of the man who builds his house on a foundation of sand (i.e. no faith), only to have it crumble, appears to be the book's main touchstone, but Mills' playfulness makes the exact nature of his take on the parable somewhat ambiguous.

Those who enjoyed Mills' two previous novels will certainly find much to recommend this one, however it's a bit more distilled and indirect than those, and thus perhaps less striking. It also seems to be one of those books that rely to a certain degree on the reader being fairly conversant with the contents of the Bible. In the end, one has to be impressed by how many ideas Mills' economical prose can pack into a slim novella.

While this book offers very little of what I usually look for in fiction -- character development, clever detail, a rich cultural milieu, philosophizing -- after a certain point the voice got to me and I couldn't stop reading. It's still hard for me to believe I so enjoyed a book about a guy in a tin house in which almost nothing happens. The novel works more like a short story in that it has a single, rather small plot, but it uses the extra pages to savor the small amount of detail and character that it does have. The result is a somewhat slow-moving, spare, funny, charming, and very odd book about a charismatic leader and mass delusion (two very pertinent subjects these days).

Three to See the King is a fable, an ambitious one at that, about two races of people, those who prefer the comfort of their tin houses, and those more daring, ambitious creatures who would like to venture out of their tin houses and make abodes made of clay. This conflict is Mills' way of retelling the book of Genesis; it's all here, the conflict between Adam and Even, the need for faith, the search for God, the treacly conformity of "true believers." I enjoyed this short novel, but prefer Restraint of Beasts and All Quiet on the Orient Express, two novels with both feet deep in the soil.

I really didn't feel that they was much of a plot to this story but what surprised me is how I was able to read it during one weekend and it actually held my interest. Our unnamed hero is virtually thrown into bondage after painting a fence for the campground owner where he was supposed to be on Holiday. He is given more odd jobs by his landlord and is eventually roped into doing his daughters homework. He plays darts at the pub and is on and off the dart team at will. The town locals extend credit to him but his landlord never makes any mention to his wages. He eventually takes over the milk route after the death of the current milkman and nobody seems to question the circumstances of the milkman's death. I have many unanswered questions about this book and the ending but I do recommend reading it.

The only reason that I didn't give this 5 stars is because it is quite similar to 'Restraint of Beasts' although this is really much eerier as the plot centres around a single character 'stranded' in the countryside instead of the 3 characters in Magnus's first book. Therefore, I was more worried the character in this novel. There he is, having spent his holiday so far at camp site that I took to be in the Lake District, on the last week of the 'season' and he is happy to while a few morre days of solitude before continuing on his travels, hopefully to India. He is such an easy going person that he is only to help the owner of the camp-site out by painting a gate. This is actually his point of no return. The owner has a spooky daughter who lets him do all her homework and get the gold stars to go with it. He does get 'sort of' accepted in one the local pubs and even gets as far as making the darts team, only to get himself barred when he fails to turn up for an away game. Of course this was a match that he was really looking forward to and as far he knew he had noted the date correctly. The one time where he does try to leave, the weather is bad that his motorbike packs up and he 'rescued' by the person that has become his boss and landlord. As I'm writing this, I now regret not giving the book 5 stars as it has really preyed on my mind since I read it [all in one sitting]. Please please read this. It is not the sort the of book I would usually pick and I'm also often put off by the author being nominated for the Booker Prize' as Magnus Mills was for his debut novel. Believe me, he is far far better than any other new novelist around. I hope that if I am ever in the Brixton area waiting for a bus that he is the driver.

Strange story about a young man who decides to take a short camping trip before heading off to explore India. However, while he's camping, the campground's owner asks him if he'd do an odd job in exchange for the camping fees he owed. Soon that odd job is leading to even ODDER odd jobs and before he knows it, he's moved in and started working full-time. But something about the whole thing feels really strange. First, there's all that green paint. Then there's a convenient death. This book really held my attention -- in fact, I read it in one sitting -- but I was disappointed in the ending. It almost seemed like Mills was on a strict deadline and just had to stop working when he got to the end of it, whether he was done with the story or not. At the same time, something about the novel's tone makes me wonder if he didn't do that on purpose just to disappoint the readers. Some kind of satire of contrived sinister-ness? Hard to say, but I'm definitely intrigued and will look for his earlier novel, The Restraint of Beasts.

I do like the blurb on the inside jacket: "the contemporary master of the working-class dystopian fable". My ideal author. But, fourth time at bat, without the tension often provided in his previous fictional settings by their comparative isolation, this urban vision of Mills fails to excite. It reads well, but carries no edge. His other novels thrived on conjuring menace behind simple, repetitive tasks and apparently simple, workaday mates.

Here you get the mates and the repetition, but not the menace. That leaves you with an allegory about capitalism but not the edge of his other fiction, which mixes tranquility with threat.
Also, the lack of a strong female character undercuts the energy often pent up and prowling in Mills' other matey protagonists. Without much of an outlet for the narrator's ambition outside the job, the story lacks mystery. Even his out-of-town jaunts, while they too find (as in other novels) a rather enigmatic assemblage, here seem more suburban than his rural bucolic/haunted landscapes entered by constructors and repairers.

Stick with his other books, and hope that this is only a delayed "sophomore slump." After the perfect endings of his other three novels, we can cut him a little slack--like his all too human characters ludicrously but touchingly reflecting ourselves.

All throughout the country, men are driving UniVans (filled with, you guessed it, UniVan parts) to and from warehouses and getting paid for their time in what is known as The Scheme for Full Employment (or just "the Scheme"). A cute self perpetuating welfare system, the Scheme has been working fine for three decades (except for UniVans constantly clogging city traffic). But now, told through the perspective of a five-year Schemer (who I don't believe is ever named), the Scheme is falling apart. One Schemer, George, is trafficking decorated cakes (can anyone say "drugs"?). Some workers are pushing for early swerves (getting off early). In response, other workers start campaigning as "flat-dayers" (8 hours work for 8 hours pay). The two groups clash antagonisticly but nonviolently, only to be crushed (and the Scheme too) once and for all by, yes again you guessed it -- a woman.

I had some trouble deciding whether to give THE SCHEME FOR FULL EMPLOYMENT two stars or three, but finally decided on three because the book was delightfully easy to read and without unneccesary verbiage. This little novel has a singular purpose and is also devoid of subplots, home scenes, and anything else beyond the scope of the Scheme. Our narrator's belief in the Scheme allows for a deadpan sort of humor that isn't terribly funny, but does coax a few smiles. The narrator never joins either the early-swervers or the flat-dayers, but gets sucked up by the self corruption just the same. And the portrayal of the supervisors and their behavior is good enough to earn the third star all by itself.

While not great literature or even a good mystery, THE SCHEME FOR FULL EMPLOYMENT is a lightly entertaining, tongue-in-cheek poke at the welfare system.

So many reviews here are complaining that Mills wasn't up to snuff in relation to his other books. Well, this is the first book of his I've read, and man!, now I want to read the rest.

This is an excellent light comedic satire on work, welfare, social schemes, and the tendency of humans to "give an inch, take a mile." Sure, it's light and frothy but there's also a lot going on behind the scenes here, that is worthy of a bit more reader introspection. Highly recommended.

If this is Mills' slightest work, then his other novels must be truly over the top.