Even before we turn to the first page, Magnus Mills ensures he gets the ball rolling with a title that adumbrates many of the novel’s thematic concerns. Who exactly are the beasts, we hear ourselves asking; who is restraining whom? These existential questions build at a creeping pace, gaining in ...
It isn't true to say, as the blurb does, that Mills invented the "Kafkaesque novel of work" singlehandedly. Paul Auster might feasibly claim this, specifically the burdensome wall-building in "The Music of Chance." I suspect that Kafka would regard his own handling of "work" in something like...
This short novel has the power of parable, much like Kafka’s best stories, a la “The Hunger Artist”. And in this case, it’s disturbing and memorable, with just enough details to cause a certain amount of long-lasting queasiness, a la Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” or Kafka’s “Penal Colony.” I e...
I first ran across this book in Waterstones years ago, liked the look of it but made the mistake of not buying it there and then and promptly forgot the name of the book and its author and it was only by pure chance—you do realise how many books there are out there—I ran across it again and this ...
I read Restraint of Beasts some time last year, and I appreciated it much more than I had All Quiet on the Orient Express, which I’d read about 10 years ago. Both of these previous Mills books were very funny, and I recall that each began with a simple first-person narrative, each beginning with...
He was surrounded by a circle of traffic cones, in front of which was a red and white sign: ROAD CLOSED. I pulled my bus up and spoke to him through the window. “Morning,” I said. “Morning,” he replied. “Busy?” “Will be in a minute,” he said. &ldquo...
Hogust was far too proud to plead for its return, and he certainly had no intention of paying Hollis’s ‘extortionate fee’ (as he described it). In consequence, he decided the boat could stay exactly where it was for the time being. ‘I’ve no immediate use for it,’ he remarked. ‘If Hollis wants to ...