Three to See the King by Magnus Mills, #NovNov24

Somehow I managed to miss reading Mills’ third novel, published in 2001, before. Time to put that right. Although Mills’ novels are always about work, and usually and specifically, men and their work (or hobbies) – they do fall into two camps. About half are set in the real world of today – from the biker who stayed in All Quiet on the Orient Express, and the bus drivers of The Maintenance of Headway, to the record collectors of The Forensic Records Society. The others are all set in their own historically non-defined worlds, each a kind of Ruritanian fantasy of a different sort – from the Prisoner-esque A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In to the Medieval fun of camping in The Field of the Cloth of Gold and a homage to Scott v Amundsen in Explorers of the New Century.

Three to See the King is of the latter type. It could be set anywhere, anywhen almost. It’s sort of biblical in its frame of reference – but in the same way as the Python’s Life of Brian is a satire of those who surround a cult rather the actual religion. It begins thus:

I live in a house built entirely from tin, with four tin wall, a roof of tin, a chimney and door. Entirely from tin.
[…] 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. […] … 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 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.

When you read how he has to shovel the sand away from the door every morning, I was reminded instantly of the biblical parable of the man who built his house on the sand, and the one who built his house on rock. Although he seems happy in his tin house, he dreams of living in a canyon.

No sooner have you turned the first page than shock, horror! Mills introduces a female character who just turns up, ‘so this is where you’ve been hiding.’ Our unnamed narrator agrees to let the woman stay. It appears they are acquainted in their previous lives. Mary Petrie takes upstairs, he down. Soon she is prettifying the house, always busy, making our narrator restless, although they are enjoying each other’s companionship. One morning he says, ‘I’m going out,’ and takes himself off to his nearest neighbour, Simon Painter who lives a couple of miles away, also in a tin house, as do Steve Treacle and Philip Sibling, further on still.

They tell of another man living yet further still, Michael Hawkins, who has a grand design. They’re seriously thinking of packing up and going to join him, dismantling their tin homes and rebuilding in his new settlement. The narrator isn’t happy at being abandoned, and they fall out. His neighbours go, and eventually Mary pushes the narrator into going and seeing what this new settlement is all about, and off he goes following the now well-worn trail of pilgrims’ footsteps like Oz’s yellow-brick road.

When he gets there he finds a growing town of tin houses, all butting up together, and is welcomed by all who had been expecting him. But where is Martin? He’s masterminding his project, creating – a canyon! There is a distinct Field of Dreams ‘If you build it, they will come,’ vibe added to the mix now.

Martin does have charisma and clarity in his plans, although he hasn’t revealed them all yet. He and the narrator strike up a friendship rooted in the narrator’s fear of heights climbing down into the canyon. However, the rest of the makeshift village’s inhabitants are beginning to question what the grand project is all about. Here, the parable takes a distinctly Pythonesque turn and I shall say no more.

It’s good that Mills introduced a female character. Although Mary is very much the enabler, getting the narrator out of his various ruts, she, too, is looking for something, and she challenges the narrator:

‘I’ll tell you why you’re here,’ she said. ‘You’re here because you think it makes you different. You think this silly little tinpot life of yours, this self-imposed isolation, makes you more interesting than other people. Don’t you? Eh? You’re convinced that if everybody had the chance that they too would live in a house built entirely from tin. You can’t see that all you’re doing is playing , the same as Simon, Steve and Philip were playing before they grew out of it! You’re playing at being a loner who can get by without anyone else. That’s why you cut yourself off like some recluse! You couldn’t find a cabin in a canyon so you chose this place instead. A gleaming, grey, two-storey edifice with a slopin roof and a tin-plate chimney.! You believe it’s a fortress, but I’ll tell you something: it’s tinny and it’s temporary and one of these days it’s going to fall down around your ears!’ […]

Mary Petrie sighed. ‘You still don’t understand,’ she said. ‘What I mean is, it’s not where you are that counts but who you’re with.’

That last sentence is so wise. In a Mills novel, whenever there is a female character, that’s where the wisdom and common sense most often lies. Mills enjoys extracting the comedy of exasperation from Mary, while pandering to her need to be wanted. While there’s something to be said for enjoying solitude, when it turns into loneliness, life isn’t such fun; even Mills’ men who relish their routines seem to love getting together once in a while. Mills is so good at dialogue that shows the thought processes behind it. Each of the lonely men living in their tin shacks has a different dominant trait, be it Steve’s DIY, Philip’s self-importance, or Simon’s gift-bringing. He has also got it spot on with the (thankfully) benign cult of Martin though, the way that mob mentality can turn in a moment and the way that cliques form.

This is a fine novella indeed. One of these days I shall rank Mills’ novels, but this one will be in the top half for sure.

Source: Own Copy. Magnus Mills, Three to See the King, Flamingo paperback 2001, 176 pages.

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