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]

I wrote a comment last night here that didn't post, which is just as well as I think it was very muddled. XD; Basically it related my persistent sense of "metagaming" to the sort of extrapolation one does while creating fanon - filling in blanks with reasonable guesswork based on one's preexisting knowledge of... life and everything. But usually you know when you're analyzing canon or extrapolating fanon, yanno? XD I mean, FWIW I'm extrapolating what Dunnett wants me to extrapolate, since the plot then builds on these points; but either 1) the information is encoded in a way that I can't point to, or 2) a certain percentage of readers are going to go left instead of right and get lost. Given comments on Goodreads it seems to be the latter. XD;

IDK, maybe some readers do this all the time. XD; I know quite a few ppl who say they "metagame" all shoujo manga. But in 99% of books this is an optional approach.

[supacat.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if I'm metagaming when I read Dunnett, my experience feels more like I encounter a delineated character space that is sometimes an ambiguous space, and I just sort of -- hold it in my mind, until I receive the information that allows it to resolve. But, that's not a conscious or effortful process for me, I don't think about it as I'm doing it. I enjoy holding ambiguities or spaces inside myself as I read -- assuming the ambiguities are deliberate, that's an exciting experience of reading to me.

(Is this a Sensing-S/Intuiting-N divide in information processing?)

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I don't know! Are you an S? I have working hypotheses - behavioural prediction models - of people (that I meet in real life, that is) and unknown knowns. My N means I come to the working hypotheses without intaking all the information potentially available over time, but because something about the initial pattern matches my experience. As I get older and meet more people (RL and fictional XD) this process has definitely gotten way faster and more accurate. Of course, I can still be wrong and often am. It's also not a consciously engaged effort.