Dorothy Dunnett pt.2

[petronia]

(At some point I will update the current book list. Other than Dunnett, it now contains Ballard, Delany, Bujold, Novik, Iain M. Banks, and more dark elves - I forgot about that part. XD;)

Done with The Game of Kings, a few chapters into book 2. I was talking to charmian - actually, quite a while back I remember telling Charmian that The Scarlet Pimpernel is a far more compelling experience when you're 11 and cannot guess the plot. Dunnett without the benefit of metagaming, on the other hand, strikes one as a recipe for disorder. XD; Primo, you have to know it's a freaking hexology, so you can afford to operate on the assumption (otherwise unsupported for great swathes of initial pagecount) that your protagonist has an actual motive for his actions. Secundo, it's one of those books where ghosts of authors both earlier and later crop up as plot-signposts at every turn, which is fine because there's quite enough plot to go around. It's sort of a picaresque novel scooshed into a spy novel (Le Carre) scooshed into a mystery novel (Christie) scooshed into a family drama scooshed into A YAWNING PIT OF HURT/COMFORT. Which I found pretty funny, because for h/c to work you need minimum theory of the emotional life of the character in question. XD; It's not a high bar and, at the point Dunnett kicks you off the cliff, you've crossed it - if your last name is Holmes or Poirot. I was in the act of craning around to pat myself on the back, proud of having figured out whoactuallydunnit - ahead of time, I foolishly thought - and suddenly Lymond was swooning prettily and getting shot with arrows. It was a change of pace. Mind you, he'd already had amnesia for like 30 seconds at that point.

Some notes:

1) The emotional life of the character... is, I have a horrible feeling, not tremendously different from T.E. Lawrence's. Like if this book were first person POV, which is structurally almost unimaginable; just much, much bitchier.

2) Not that you'd be reading this if you've not finished the book, but the mystery plays fair - if I'd known that I'd've brained harder. Mostly I sped along entertained by the trainwreck of Lymond's relationships with pretty much everyone ever. (Apart from Kristin Christian Stewart, who had an inappropriately Victorian finale.) It's weird because it's not that slashy, but I can't think of anything outside origslash where grown men start as much ridic *DRAMA* with each other as, say, Will Scott does with Lymond. At one point Lymond is like, son, I got 99 problems and you ain't even a... It dawned on me thereafter that he liked the kid. As a person. Much later Richard's all: out of sheer morbid curiosity, does Will Scott have any idea how old you are? And you're like, OH GOD. DON'T TELL ME. THAT ACTUALLY EXPLAINS SO MUCH.

Dunnett, of course, then proceeds not to tell you. All the information flow in the book basically happens like this.

3) That ineffable mid-20th-century style of historical fiction that makes no attempt to restrict its characters to period vocabulary or indeed thought paradigms (Becket, The Lion in Winter...). Lymond has access to all of his period and beyond, so I'm not saying Dunnett didn't research - she must've researched extensively. I'm saying these days she probably would have pitched this directly to HBO or the BBC.

4) And then, Lymond spends a couple of years... bumming around the Culter estate? Getting Mariotta to teach him Irish, apparently. It seems highly awkward. XD

I put a hold on book 4, but investigation of the catalogue indicates that book 3 is the only Dunnett book the library doesn't have, orz.

Comments

[rondaview.livejournal.com]

Lymond during book 1 was quite difficult for me to get. This may or may not have had something to do with the fact that I am not used to putting that level of effort into unraveling snarls and snarls of plot threads (see: Sabina's remark above about Dunnett's maddening but effective tendency to tell you just enough about something to perk up your ears, but then WITHHOLDING THE REST OF THE JUICY BITS until the end of the book), and so b/c of the lack of steady grounding re: plot and also Lymond's motivations I spent a lot of book 1 engaged in much puzzled noggin scratching. But in books 2 through 4 (which is all I've read so far) Lymond's character is much more transparent. Whereas the motivations of other characters puzzle me, eg. Philippa at the beginning of PiF, Marthe at the end of PiF, the Jerott and Lymond relationship, etc.

(HI I AM A BIG FAN :D LET US EGG SABINA ON THROUGH BOOKS 2-6 TOGETHER!)

[supacat.livejournal.com]

Hihi and yes! I am super excite about us egging and having millions of Dunnett conversations :DD

Niccolo is better! Niccolo is flawless. I think it tends to be less popular in fannish hearts because it doesn't have Lymond of the cornflower blue eyes in it. I love Lymond ridiculously, he owns my sixteen-year-old soul, but Niccolo is a much better drawn antihero, much more complex than Lymond. He doesn't have the glorious id quality of Lymond as a character but Dunnett is working on a completely different level in Niccolo and the insane levels of plotting and writing in those books create tensions and situations that ultimately blow Lymond out of the water.

I think with Lymond most of the tension and drive in the series comes from the internal tensions within Lymond himself. Or to put it another way, if Lymond would just take a chill pill and relax, there would be no story. Whereas in Niccolo the tensions within Niccolo are matched and even exceeded by the external tensions and the cause-and-effect situations that Niccolo is caught up in.

The character motivation stuff -- I wonder if there's an element with Dunnett of -- you have to be comfortable with uncertainty, and letting characters be spaces of possibility, because so often she defines a character space through action that is at odds with what you are being explicitly told, as you said.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Or to put it another way, if Lymond would just take a chill pill and relax, there would be no story.

Oh gawd I so wish he would take a chill pill!!!1 But no. Cocaine, I swear it, missed his true calling by 300 years.

I don't know that there wouldn't be a story... I mean, there's a full-fledged self-contained spy novel cum mystery novel in each of these. But it would be a lot more James Bondian.

[rondaview.livejournal.com]

Just so you know, I've ordered books 1 and 2 of the Niccolo series on the strength of your rec. :D:D:D I AM INCREDIBLY EXCITED. My love for multi-volume works knows no bounds. Have you read King Hereafter, btw?

you have to be comfortable with uncertainty, and letting characters be spaces of possibility
See, this is something that constantly puzzles me about this series. On one hand, clearly there are things that I missed in GoK that Sabina (and probably you, too) found simple enough to understand. As I accustomed myself to Dunnett's writing style, her stories read a lot more easily, but there are still things that give me trouble. (I didn't realize, for example, why Lymond did that thing that he did in PiF, which incites Jerott to a towering fury, until someone pointed it out to me in an email.) OTOH, could it simply be that whatever was giving me trouble -- be it a character arc or a plot twist -- was underdeveloped? I hesitate to draw a direct line from my lack of understanding to Dunnett's culpability; it's entirely possible that she left a lovingly laid crumb trail to help her readers draw the appropriate conclusions. At the same time, I remember how poorly developed the Richard/Mariotta relationship was in GoK; it wasn't just my slash bias, I really did not understand or sympathize with that union at all. The problem then becomes one of distinguishing where I went wrong and missed the trail and where Dunnett failed to prop up her characters with an adequate amount of exposition/back-story/what have you. Which isn't very easy but that's why I dragged Sabina into this with me, because I'm pretty sure she'd get it even if I didn't. XD

[petronia.livejournal.com]

The problem with the Richard/Mariotta relationship is that the courtship is missing. It's like a 12-volume shoujo manga you start reading at book 6: you don't see them fall in love and get together, you see them generating massive misunderstandings and being miserable, and then you hit the conclusion and are like, Ohhhh they were CRAZY IN LOVE with each other all this time, that's why so much drama!

Dunnett's crumb trail that allows you to derive this ahead of time:

1) Everyone else behaves like this is a real relationship worth saving, esp. Sybilla (if it had been an arranged marriage her attitude would've been different methinks).

2) If they weren't in love with each other they wouldn't have been able to make each other that miserable out of sheer shoujo manga stupidity.

Not gonna lie, though, I wanted to bitchslap Mariotta through the entire sorry sequence. XD; I mean Richard was a dumbass but he was a dumbass like all manly men are dumbasses, basically, as a woman you have to give up the idea that dudes can read your mind, yanno? And I mean, when you look back on the story and realize Lymond didn't send those jewels and therefore had zero idea this was even happening until Mariotta landed on his doorstep. His life, man.