Boards
DiS Bookclub 2009 -------- Book 3: The Restraint of Beasts by Magnus Mills
"The beasts in Magnus Mills's dark and funny first novel are its three central characters: the nameless narrator, a rather unassertive English foreman for a fence contractor in rural Scotland, and his assistants, Tam and Richie, slacker metalheads and lifelong drinking buddies.
(It) slyly reveals itself to be much more than a black comedy about mind-numbed laborers building an endless series of fences; rather, it is a witty, intricate fable about a working-class hell constructed by its own inhabitants. Mills, himself a former fence builder and bus driver, writes merciless deadpan dialogue. And he uses it to create a clever, uncompromising fever dream, similar in mood to the Coen brothers' film Barton Fink with its increasingly compromised central character and escalating atmosphere of unseen menace."
Yeah?