Rags to riches. First it was reported (erroneously) that London bus driver Magnus Mills received a million for his debut novel. And then (rightly) that Thomas Pynchon has seen fit bestow the cover blurb. All publicity, they say, is good publicity. And then the Booker committee only went and short-listed him alongside McEwan and Barnes and whoever among the six great and good for the year.

The surprise is that The Restraint of Beasts is not only good, but very good. It speaks of Tam and Richie, two itinerant, monosyllabic Scots fencers. Tam and Richie, Richie and Tam. They are all but indistinguishable; a heavy drinking, fag-sucking double act. At the book’s opening they are given just what they don’t want: a new English foreman -- our narrator -- and a job down South. Which is pretty much all that happens. They sit and fester in a ramshackle caravan to the sound of an ever-stretching Black Sabbath tape, building fences by day, frequenting the local hostelry by night. And killing people. They kill more than one. But never maliciously, always accidentally. ‘Well...I suppose we better bury him,’ they say with a reluctant shrug of collective shoulders. And occasionally they moonlight for the Halls -- farmer brothers who run the sinister local sausage factory.

Mills’ dialogue is laconic and repetitive. His novel is repetitive too, forging tension out of ennui, its narrative essentially the leisurely passage of time. Much of its deadpan humour springs from confrontations that don’t explode. Control is demonstrated throughout -- this is essentially a book of smoke and mirrors. We are never looking in the right direction, and the loose-ends he kites are never tied neatly off. The result is a high-wire act, with all the tension of one of Tam and Richie’s fences: a thin story stretched to absolute limits. Mills has somehow conjured drama out of clock-watching. It will be a tough act to follow.