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kyatic's reviews
894 reviews
Three to See the King by Magnus Mills
2.0
This book was an obvious allegory, yet I found that I was nowhere near interested enough to try and work out what the allegory might be. Religion, maybe? The hive mind of society? The prevailing importance of adhering to social hegemonic values? Who knows? Everything in it is clearly carefully designed to be a symbol for something else, or a metonym, but I just wasn't invested enough in the story to be bothered to decode them.
This is a short book. Some thinly crafted characters do some random things for no real reason. There is a vague sense of events moving from A to B to C to some half-hearted resolution, somehow both anti-climactic and entirely unexpected; the entire latter half of the book seemed to be leading up to a more interesting climax, only to falter and fall flat in the very last sentence. It somehow manages to be a book that is neither plot-heavy nor a character study. The protagonist remains unnamed throughout, which is a device that can work if they are fleshed out in other means, such as having an actual personality. Other characters are always referred to by their full names, first and last, which again is an interesting technique that would have worked if they had ever been more than their names. Instead, they were just cardboard cut-outs, archetypes that moved across the plains of the book (literally, I am not just being poetic here) with no real motivation or characterisation.
For all intents and purposes, this book was marketed as a philosophical comedy, but there was precious little philosophy in it, and even less comedy. The author seems to think that punctuating every tenth sentence or so with an exclamation mark turns it into a punchline, without appearing to realise that a punchline usually follows a comedic remark of sorts. There was even an instance of my least favourite grammatical entity - the double exclamation mark. There was really no going back from that point for me. It struck me as childish, and coupled with the sparse prose - usually a favourite of mine, when not littered with awry !!!!! - it meant that the book read like a high school essay from a B grade student.
The two stars I'm awarding this book are given on the sole two merits I found in the text. Firstly, Mills does have a knack for dialogue, and although it was obviously very artificial and structured with little to no regard for realism, it worked well in the context of the book. I liked that the characters didn't speak like people. For a book that is clearly supposed to be self-aware (although aware of what, I don't know) the stilted dialogue worked for me. Secondly, the surrealism. I genuinely liked the idea, and honestly, if the book weren't clearly trying so hard to make A Philosophical Point, I can see that I might have been quite invested in the story of a man, his house of tin and his neighbours' obsession with the knowledgeable newcomer. That in itself is a great plot, already imbued with a lot of references to a certain doctrine. If only the text had been less blatant about its ulterior motives and let the plot do the talking, then I think I would've enjoyed it a lot more.
I'm sure that there's a very deep meaning to the text if you look hard enough, but like the canyon excavators in the latter half of the book, I just gave up digging.
This is a short book. Some thinly crafted characters do some random things for no real reason. There is a vague sense of events moving from A to B to C to some half-hearted resolution, somehow both anti-climactic and entirely unexpected; the entire latter half of the book seemed to be leading up to a more interesting climax, only to falter and fall flat in the very last sentence. It somehow manages to be a book that is neither plot-heavy nor a character study. The protagonist remains unnamed throughout, which is a device that can work if they are fleshed out in other means, such as having an actual personality. Other characters are always referred to by their full names, first and last, which again is an interesting technique that would have worked if they had ever been more than their names. Instead, they were just cardboard cut-outs, archetypes that moved across the plains of the book (literally, I am not just being poetic here) with no real motivation or characterisation.
For all intents and purposes, this book was marketed as a philosophical comedy, but there was precious little philosophy in it, and even less comedy. The author seems to think that punctuating every tenth sentence or so with an exclamation mark turns it into a punchline, without appearing to realise that a punchline usually follows a comedic remark of sorts. There was even an instance of my least favourite grammatical entity - the double exclamation mark. There was really no going back from that point for me. It struck me as childish, and coupled with the sparse prose - usually a favourite of mine, when not littered with awry !!!!! - it meant that the book read like a high school essay from a B grade student.
The two stars I'm awarding this book are given on the sole two merits I found in the text. Firstly, Mills does have a knack for dialogue, and although it was obviously very artificial and structured with little to no regard for realism, it worked well in the context of the book. I liked that the characters didn't speak like people. For a book that is clearly supposed to be self-aware (although aware of what, I don't know) the stilted dialogue worked for me. Secondly, the surrealism. I genuinely liked the idea, and honestly, if the book weren't clearly trying so hard to make A Philosophical Point, I can see that I might have been quite invested in the story of a man, his house of tin and his neighbours' obsession with the knowledgeable newcomer. That in itself is a great plot, already imbued with a lot of references to a certain doctrine. If only the text had been less blatant about its ulterior motives and let the plot do the talking, then I think I would've enjoyed it a lot more.
I'm sure that there's a very deep meaning to the text if you look hard enough, but like the canyon excavators in the latter half of the book, I just gave up digging.