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

[petronia.livejournal.com]

These are the books rondaview happens to be reading XD It's fun, though, on occasions when that option is available, to start at the beginning and watch an author's style develop. It smoothed out quite a bit from the first page of Game of Kings to the last. Structurally speaking it mostly just seemed from the outside like she had a lot of balls in the air, and that the difficult part was shuffling all the right people into the right geographic location at the right (or wrong) time. It made for an odd psychogeography of Scotland and northern England. XD; I'd be willing to believe that aspect goes invisible later on.

the first appearance of the Dunnett trademark dialogue set piece where characters just stand there and have these amazing ten-page-plus verbal takedown matches

Bawling, while writing this I was thinking, "How much will Cat want to kill me ded if I said this reminded me of those long scenes in Melusine of people being aggressively unpleasant at each other, only... infinitely better written..." Why does that series keep coming up in conversation!! It's actually the other reason I was reminded of Becket et al, because that's theatre when you get down to it. My instinctive answer to your rhetorical question was "Assume you've cast a great actress," which makes no sense and yet... it's probably what I would do if I had to. (A scene like that would be uncharted waters for me writing-wise. XD;)

Lymond does canonically sleep with a few guys along the way, at least one in Queen's Play

Bawling x 2, thx for letting me know, otherwise I would be there scratching my head for 15min like "did that actually happen" I'm sure.

I couldn't get a bead on Lymond in GoK? Like during the Margaret Lennox scene I actually thought, "I'm having trouble picturing this dude having sex with anybody." Part of that was circumstantial - like, here's a person who primo has a SMORGASBORD of control issues of uncertain provenance, secundo is very very very stressed out. XD; (While reading the second book I'm trying to get a feel for the slightly less stressed out Lymond.)

[supacat.livejournal.com]

"How much will Cat want to kill me ded if I said this reminded me of those long scenes in Melusine of people being aggressively unpleasant at each other, only... infinitely better written..."

COMPARING LYMOND TO FELIX, BRB KILLING YOU THEN KILLING MYSELF

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Narrative mechanics, not character! /crying Unless someone puts magic mushrooms in Lymond's soup so that he wanders around with all the symptoms of raging schizophrenia for a whole book thereafter. (At this remove I would not bet against something like that happening.)