The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Three to See the King, by Magnus Mills
reviewed by Brian Evenson

Picador USA, 2001. 167 pp. $19.00.

Mills’s third novel, Three to See the King, has many of the qualities that made his first novel, The Restraint of Beasts, a finalist for the Booker Prize. The narrator and the prose are stripped and laconic, the situations absurd and comic, and the human relations at once vital and parodic. Like a happier and less existential Kobo Abe, Mills has an ability to render the absurd with a light touch that nevertheless preserves its profundity. Three to See the King is the story of a man living alone on a flat plain in a house made of tin, spending his days listening to the sound of the wind. Out of nowhere a woman he hardly knows shows up and moves in, gradually structuring his life. As the book progresses, distant neighbors who also live in tin houses show up, eventually bringing with them word of one Michael Hawkins, a sort of guru intent on building a society in the bottom of a man-made canyon. The narrator, trying at first to maintain his solitary life, is slowly incorporated into Michael’s world, finding himself occupying a role in regard to the developing cultish society that he can’t quite understand. Functioning at once symbolically and literally, the novel has a great deal to say about the dynamics of power, the role of religion, and people’s ability to become fixated on an idea. Yet it is finally Mills’s ability to render these larger themes through daily concerns (whether or not to have a weather vane, what sort of plank to use to make a sidewalk for a wheelbarrow) that renders the novel effective and unique. Three to See the King lives up to the promise of The Restraint of Beasts.