Three To See The King by Magnus Mills – #NovNov Day 24

I live in a house built entirely from tin, with four tin walls, a roof of tin, a chimney and door. Entirely from tin.

My house has no windows because there’s nothing to see. Oh, there are shutters that can be used to let the light in when required, but they remain closed against the weather for most of the time. It stands in a wild place, my house, high up on the plain. At night it creaks and groans as the wind batters it for hour after hour, in search of a gap to get inside. Even the door has to be bolted top and bottom to stop it from being blown open. I used to worry in case one day I might lose the roof, but so far that hasn’t happened and now I’m certain the structure is quite sound. The man who built it made sure of that. I found the house empty a few years ago, and adopted it for my own use. At first sight I knew it had everything I could need: somewhere to eat and drink and sleep without disturbance, protected from the elements by a layer of corrugated metal and nothing more. A very modest dwelling I must say, but it looked clean and tidy so I moved in. For a long while I was quite content here, and remained convinced I would find no better place to be. Then one day a woman arrived at my door and said, ‘So this is where you’ve been hiding.’

This is the opening to Magnus Mills’s strange, brilliant Three To See The King from 2001. It’s the sixth of his books I’ve read, though the third to be published, and there are certainly hallmarks that I recognise. A short narrative, told in a sparse way from a first-person narrator who doesn’t entirely know what’s happening to him. And the reader certainly doesn’t know either.

The anonymous ‘I’ lives in this tin house in a seemingly endless desert. He has a neighbour, Simon Painter, about three miles away – and knows another couple of men living in two other tin houses a bit further off. This is his entire community, though it can hardly be called that because he lives in contented isolation. We never learn how we gets his supplies, or how he ended up there, or why there are a handful of tin hits in a sandy wasteland. As other reviewers have noted, it is a bit Beckettian – though the tone feels less bleak and more like amiable confusion.

The woman who turns up and says ‘So this is where you’ve been hiding’ is Mary Petrie, a ‘friend of a friend’, who rather imposes upon the narrator. He can’t turn her away – and she ends up moving in. But she is quickly dissatisfied with the way he does things. She is an enigma, and becomes one that he doesn’t wish to leave.

Things start to change when the three other men in his makeshift community become interested in a man they meet who lives a little further off – Michael Hawkins. The narrator hasn’t met him, but Michael Hawkins clearly has charisma and personality. This newcomer – or is he? – begins to shift the dynamics of this peculiar environment. And then other people to start to appear.

Mills is a brilliantly careful writer, and his greatest talent is the way he can pervade a novel[la] with atmosphere – without ever revealing how it’s done. Three To See The King is unsettling almost from the beginning. What makes it all the more unsettling is that it isn’t at all clear WHY it’s unsettling. It seems to be a simple story of harmless people doing numbingly ordinary things. And yet the reader feels constantly anxious, as though there is something around the corner; some horror that has perhaps been in full sight the whole time.

Many of Mills’ novels have the cadence of a parable or fable, even if it isn’t clear what the hidden depth is. While this novella certainly has things to say about communities, power, and even cults, there is no ‘a-ha!’ moment where the puzzle falls into place and a central meaning is unveiled. The title puts you in mind of the Magi visiting Jesus, of course, as does the cover design of my edition – but that might just be another red herring. I feel rather unnerved, after finishing Three To See The King. But in a good way. I have spent time in the presence of a master.