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Simon & Schuster
November 1999
On Sale: November 1, 1999
224 pages
ISBN: 0684865114
EAN: 9780684865119
Paperback (reprint)
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Fiction Family Life
Here is the captivating tale of three men who work for a
company specializing in high-tension fences, the kind that
keep beasts in and humans out--or maybe the other way
around. Tam and Richie are good Scots lads at heart
(taciturn and suspicious of authority) who have turned
loafing and pub-crawling into an art form. They try the
patience of their foreman, the narrator of the novel, who
has the misfortune of being British. His thankless task is
keeping Tam and Richie from going too far astray, and
maintaining some semblance of order in their fence-building
labors.
Carefully laid plans go haywire from the start. The fence
they built for Mr. McCrindle has gone slack, and while he
watches them attempt to set things right, things go
horribly, terribly wrong. Covering their tracks as best they
can, the hapless trio head south from Scotland to do a job
in England. But sometimes good fences make disastrous neighbors. Magnus Mills gives us a wiry novel of tensile strength that
proves him a writer of ferocious talent. Eerie, resonant,
spare yet rich in tones both hilarious and ominous--as if a
work by Irvine Welsh, or perhaps Macbeth,had been adapted by
the Coen brothers--his story has an ending so ingenious,
insidious, and satisfying, that it remains locked in the
mind long after the last spellbinding sentence has been
strung into place. The Restraint of Beastsseems destined to
become a classic.
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