Mills' style, and his odd inventions -- the green paint ! the crown ! -- and the characters his narrator never quite gets a grip on all work together to make this a surprisingly dark and compelling tale. aybe only the English write books like this. The narrative unwinds slowly. The plot reveals itself in the most deliberate increments. Much is suggested, little explained. Hints of incipient drama along the way lead nowhere in particular. Characters who will eventually become pivotal drift in and out, making scant initial impact. There are strong inklings of an overriding at my watch. It was eight-thirty. I'd seen this girl go by every day last week, passing the field full of tents on her way to the front gate. Here she would stop and stand waiting with a school bag dangling at her Well this book was a bit of an oddball. I don't usually read this kind of fiction but this was lent out to me as a recommended read so I gave it my full attention.

The structure and strength of both [his] novels comes from their dialogue, which is natural yet as stylised as Pinter... There is little in the way of story and less description. The atmosphere is powerful and lies somewhere between comedy and horror. -- The Observer, 12 September 1999 passes, but there was a limit to how much enjoyment could be derived from this, especially with all the cars travelling nose to tail everywhere I went. Admittedly the roads would be quieter now that the majority of tourists

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While I was waiting for it to boil I sat in the grass and wondered how I was going to occupy myself today. That was the only trouble with this place: the scenery was great and everything, but there was nothing Mills himself has talked about punishment and reward as being key themes in his work, particularly in The Restraint of Beasts. [12] The leaders of the teams in Explorers of the New Century struggle with punishment as a means of encouraging and disciplining their mules, never able to achieve quite the results they desire, but fearful of interacting with the mules by any means more complex than punishment and reward. Well,' I said. `I've always fancied seeing the lakes, so I thought I'd have a couple of weeks here first.' It reads very nicely, and the many quirky details -- plausible enough not to seem artificial -- make for much amusement.

He fell silent for a moment, and when I looked up I saw he was gazing across at my tent. I'd been crouched down painting for quite a while now, so I stood upright to give my knees a rest. The message of this book seems to be that outsiders are tolerated up until a point, but have to earn the trust of the community into which they come by a process of trial and error. They are expected to deduce how they should act on the basis of how people treat them and react to the things that they do. This makes for a memorable message that may not be quite normal, but is feasible under certain circumstances, i.e. the ones in this novel. There is also the message that bosses are not to be trusted running through not just this book, but all those that I have read by this author (this one, Screwtop Thompson and Other Tales and The Restraint of Beasts). spread everywhere. Then I recalled the words of the dairyman when he said, `I'll just put this a bit nearer.' I hadn't really taken any notice of what he was doing, but he must have moved the tin. I was sure After taking a shower I zipped up the tent and set off on my lakeside walk, going out through the main gateway, then across the public road to another gate leading into a second field. Until yesterday this occupied hardly any room at all. Nevertheless, it had taken me some time just to find a reasonable space for myself, where I wouldn't be encroached upon. The previous evening a mass exodus had taken place following

The entire book, in fact, is story. There is very little reflection. Mills somehow constructs a complex sequence of events that only his narrative voice can form into a plot. One way in which he achieves this is through the subtle weirdness of his narrator's world view.(...) You cannot ask more of a book than for it to make the familiar seem fresh, strange and scary. In a modest, sneaky way, Mills pulls this off better than any other writer at work today." - William Sutcliffe, Independent on Sunday