The Three Evangelists by Fred Vargas
Published 1995 · 304 pages · 80,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Mystery & Crime
How hard is The Three Evangelists to read?
The Three Evangelists scores 35 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 40 out of 100
- Translated from French. Historical and archaeological vocabulary. Vargas's whimsical tone survives translation.
- Sentence structure: 38 out of 100
- Conversational, digressive prose. The historians' arguments provide intellectual texture.
- Abstraction: 38 out of 100
- History as detective method. The application of academic thinking to criminal investigation.
- Information density: 40 out of 100
- Three historians' specialties, the mystery of the tree, Paris bohemian life.
- Narrative indirection: 35 out of 100
- The mystery begins with impossibility (the tree) and builds through the historians' eccentric investigations.
- Symbolic density: 30 out of 100
- The beech tree as impossibility. The three periods of history as lenses. Light symbolism.
- Ironic distance: 45 out of 100
- Vargas's whimsical tone maintains amused distance. The historians' academic arguments about crime are inherently ironic.
- Resolution withholding: 25 out of 100
- The mystery is solved. The impossible is explained. Satisfying resolution.
- Structural complexity: 30 out of 100
- Three-historian narrative with police subplot. Quirky but well-organized.
How The Three Evangelists is regarded
The Three Evangelists holds a literary regard score of 68 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.