Synopsis
When sloth and alcohol lead to a horribly botched job, two fence-builders named Tam and Richie flee their native Scotland to England, where all hell quickly breaks loose, in an offbeat novel in the British comic tradition.
Reviews
Good fences make bad labors in this mordant satire of tensions among the rural British working classes from Mills, a former London bus driver. The trouble begins in Scotland when Tam Finlayson, Richie Campbell and their unnamed English foreman (who narrates the novel) must rebuild a slack fence before leaving for a more extensive job in England. Their on-site supervisor hovers over them nervously until Tam accidentally kills him by releasing a tension wire at the wrong moment. The workers bury the body, hoping his absence will not be missed. Soon after beginning work in England, Richie kills their new supervisor with a clumsily thrown post. The next assignment, involving seven-foot-high electric fences intended for "the restraint of beasts," yields yet another accidental death and coverup. Mills's narrator describes these horrific events in an hilariously controlled and pervasive deadpan. As bodies accumulate and vanish without comment from police or other authorities, the novel moves toward a disturbing?if predictable?conclusion. Mills's satire occasionally loses its edge when he describes the technicalities of fence-building (a conceit he leans on heavily) and spends an awfully long time lending his sharp ears to dreary sessions in village pubs. Yet between the dull stretches, the clash between power-hungry bureaucrats and alcoholic, downtrodden laborers finds haunting, comic expression in this promising debut.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The hopeless task of disciplining two unruly slackers (which is just one of its clever title's implied meanings) gives substanceand allegorical formto this flinty first novel by a British writer whose grim humor has been compared to that of Irvine Welsh. But Mills uses kitchen-sink realism as means rather than end in his curiously fashioned tale of the strange symbiotic relationship binding its narratorthe English foreman of a Scottish company that installs ``high-tension fences''with his obstreperous charges Tam and Richie: skilled laborers who could only work in the day if they had beer to look forward to at night.'' The plot therefore consists of reiterated descriptions of exhausting workdays endured in mostly miserable weather, and compulsive pub-crawling in which the initially reserved narrator becomes an increasingly willing crawl participant. A horrendous accident deftly shifts the story's stark tonebut when it's repeated with only minimal variations, the carefully laid naturalistic surface parts, throwing Tam, Richie, and their boss into the region of Kafkaesque nightmare. Later, at a job in England, a further sequence of ``accidents'' puts them in thrall to Hall Brothers (the local ``fencers''), a mysteriously diversified company that gradually discloses its expertise at building livestock pens and electrified cages'' (for less obvious purposes), and eventually to work as arbiters with the task of bringing the alien fencers to judgment. Until its enigmatic closing pages, the novel works nicely as a taut little drama of rebellion against the injunction that ``All fences had to be straight'' (one thinks of the similar metaphoric action in Alan Sillitoe's ``The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner''). But the expansion of the story's simple contours spells out too much, and blurs its haunting suggestiveness. All the same, a strongly imagined and more than promising first effort. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Who would think that building high-tension fencing in rural Scotland and England could provide such an opportunity for black humor? Tam and Richie, the crew, are any supervisor's worst nightmare. Our narrator, a man with his own astonishing moral lapses, has to cope with their lack of ambition and work ethic, the demands of the company's owner, and a string of quite peculiar clients. Substandard living conditions, boredom, bad food, and irregular wages make for an unpleasant existence and an even worse future, all of which he faces with a matter-of-fact attitude that speaks poorly for his own goals. This startlingly funny novel with its cast of very odd characters will leave readers wondering in the end exactly what or who are the beasts being restrained. In spite of the skewed worldview, readers will remember this book and laugh, long after they have finished reading it. Danise Hoover
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