SOLVED. Book about sheep and fences [s]

[Nathan]

Hi All,

This book is from the UK, adult fiction. Rather surreal book, about a guy with a summer job to build fences. Other than the main character, everyone is strange - his boss who shows up to demand more fences and his co-workers who speak strangely, the one pub they visit. I'd like to read it again, but no idea what the title is!

Cheers,
Nathan

[Evan]

Googling gives me The Restraint of Beasts by Magnus Mills

Description from Amazon:
Good fences may make good neighbors, but in Magnus Mills's first novel, bad fences make for high tension indeed. An eerie noir fable told in a grim, deadpan voice, The Restraint of Beasts begins as an unnamed English fence builder finds himself promoted to foreman over Tam and Richie, two undermotivated Scots laborers. They've just been sent out to fix a high-tension fence when events go horribly awry--and that's just the beginning. For the rest of the novel, as his charges drink, smoke, loaf, and pound the occasional post, things go wrong over and over again. In a sense, that's all you can truly rely on in Mills's fictional world. It is not giving away too much to say that with these particular fencers on the job, you'd best watch your back. And your front, for that matter. And maybe keep a firm eye on the skies, just in case.
The team travels south to England, where they live out of a damp, cold caravan in the town of Upper Bowland. They're soon at loggerheads with the sinister Hall brothers, whose business enterprises seem to combine fencing, butchering, sausage-making, and a fierce attachment to school meals. "We committed no end of good deeds!" cries John Hall. "Yet still we lost the school dinners! Always the authorities laying down some new requirement, one thing after another! This time is seems we must provide more living space. Very well! If that's the way they want it, we'll go on building fences for ever if necessary! We'll build pens and compounds and enclosures! And we'll make sure we never lose them again!"
--Mary Park

[Kate]

I second The Restraint of Beasts. Man, was that book weird.

[Nathan]

Yep, that's the book I was trying to remember. Thanks for your help!