The Ringed Castle (II)

[petronia]

*gets bingo card out from desk drawer*
*crosses off 'animal familiar'*

Just, LOL at this series. XD

The book hasn't bothered to explain how Lymond acquired his daemon. (It's very Golden Compass in other obvious ways, too.) I would assume she came via Ivan, though? Flashy tribute gift from the nomadic tribes; one imagines the scene.

Slata Baba: *lookit those purty golden crest feathers*
Slata Baba: *suffocates a grown deer and tears out its eyeballs alive*
Ivan the Terrible: This totally reminds me of somebody!

I watched a bunch of YTubes of golden eagles, out of curiosity, and they are mean scary motherfuckers. You see one drag a goat twice its size off a cliff by its hind leg and let gravity do the hard work. Mongolians train them to kill small wolves. There's one video someone took of a grizzly bear that ran into a nesting pair, and holy shiznit did that bear take off like its ass was on fire. Dunnett wouldn't have had to go to the Caucasus to see one: they still nest in Scotland, causing Daily Mail handwringing over livestock snatchings, so if Lymond wanted to import some impressive falconry practices I suppose he could have. XD; I don't have any confidence the eagle will survive the book, though, because Dunnett is hard on birds. Look at what happened to that freaking aviary!! And I'm still traumatized by the "fried chicken" episode. Birds and baby animals of all stripes, s-sob

Comments

[applegnat.livejournal.com]

I know! That was the point where I lost it. Wait. That was ONE point where I lost it.

How do you feel about w00bie Diccon Chancellor?

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I lose it repeatedly with each book. "Genderswitch, okay, not a square I expected to come up, but..."

Oh, Diccon Chancellor. One so wishes... When Dunnett allows her characters a moment of perfect self-actualized happiness you know it's over. I enjoyed all the side/viewpoint characters here, they kept the Russian bits going far more than Lymond. Attitudinally, I find Danny Hislop the most congenial. XD;

[applegnat.livejournal.com]

Yes, Dunnett uses Lymond PoV so very sparingly with good reason (except in moments of great pressure: there's a memorable one coming up in this book; in PiF I can only remember the point where he's learned that there are two babies and he is thinking of what it means to have an heir / what it means to preserve the life of two children who mean such different things to him. It always amuses me that he thinks of himself impersonally; "If one was Gaultier one would blah blah, if one were Jerott Blyth one would blah blah; as it is, one..." It's almost worse than referring to yourself in the third person, Francis, I hope you know.) -- but she pulls him away from the centre of the action more than ever here. I'm so deeply uncomfortable with the way she describes Russia and uses it to alienate / set her hero adrift, but it's certainly effective. Anyway, for Lymond's edification everything is fair game. Kill a tiny, suffering boy? YES! Torment a (possible) sister by putting her in an impossible position? YES! Essentialise and exoticise other cultures? ...WHY NOT!

Diccon is a great fandom favourite, I keep hearing (all seventeen of us on the Interwebz) but I'm somehow never quite able to get with his program. He's a lovely human being, but after four books of totally unreasonable and wildly adorable Lymond acolytes (Robin Stewart aside) I'm just like, why is someone trying to have an adult relationship with Lymond? WAS THIS PART OF THE PLAN?

Danny is a doll, and I would like to write him a great love story. /a propos of almost nothing

[rondaview.livejournal.com]

GODDAMNIT SABINA YOU ARE GOING TO MAKE ME FAIL MY TEST

[petronia.livejournal.com]

BAWLING DANICA WHY ARE YOU IN THIS ENTRY

I've finished book 5. Insofar as book 6 goes I'm breaking until after Barcelona, though; my nerves can't really take this shiz anymore. XD; I think Lymond has all of two non-stressful conversations in the entire book.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

PiF: and when Salablanca dies, predictably, which I didn't like because Lymond's poor feelings about ppl dying around him should stay implicit insofar as possible. XD I finished tRC, btw, so I'll reboot the conversation into another post, and to keep this one spoiler-free.

I laid the Russia thing at the door of the Cold War. There was a certain amount of... pageantry and colour and concern-trolling... in the Ottoman portrayal but nothing like the othering of Eastern Europe, and therein lies the difference between mid-20th and early-21st. If this book were published in 1986 Lymond would've hopped a Portuguese ship instead and gone to sell small arms to Oda Nobunaga (age 21 in 1555, also reasonably likely to fuck with Lymond's haircut). The question is, does anyone have to be essentialized or can mere distance be malaise-inducing enough to carry the point. :P As for the end of PiF, I don't even feel like Dunnett was fucking with Lymond; as far as I'm irrationally concerned, she was fucking with me. Much as I find myself embarrassingly grokking Lymond's repressed fascist-aesthete strategic-thinking over-achiever problems (being a repressed fascist-aesthete strategic-thinking over-achiever myself), it's nothing compared to the degree to which I overinvested in Marthe. XD; Considering that I didn't even like her much, at the beginning of the book.

Diccon's of the Gideon Somerville / Tom Erskine subtype - a fundamentally decent human being, intelligent and clear-eyed to boot. But it seems to me like those characters are good for the reader to situate oneself with, rather than have an opinion on per se; they're not Jerott Blyths, to take over the story with their emotional arc. XD;

[rondaview.livejournal.com]

I have no intelligent thoughts to offer, but I would just like to say that I enjoyed reading this comment very much. :D

Diccon is a great fandom favourite
NO WAI? I was holding open my eyeballs from boredom.

I hope Danny Hislop crops up more in part three, because thus far he hasn't got enough screen time for me to Get It (that is, him).