[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.

(Reviewed:16-Jul-01)

Grade: (B) Orrin C. Judd

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