Category Archives: Book discussion

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One of the delights of reading Dunnett are those marvellous one-liners and short descriptions that perfectly capture the scene or character that she is writing about. Sometimes they make you laugh out loud, sometimes they give you that perfect visual image that helps cement the moment in your mind.

In the latest issue of Whispering Gallery, the magazine of the DDRA, I mentioned that I felt that one way to try to attract new readers might be to collect some of these little fragments of linguistic magic, and when trying to convert a potential reader to point them to them to whet their literary appetites. So that’s what I intend to do here on the Dunnett Blog, and I’d like your help in doing so.

Send me your favourite quotes, not just the well-known set pieces but those almost incidental ones that enlighten our view of a character or place or critical moment in that way that only she could. I’ll collect them together and publish them here and then archive them on the main site once we have a big enough collection.

Here’s one of my favourite short ones to start you off.

“Quarrelling with the Prince of Barrow was like fighting a curtain.”

Doesn’t that just provide the perfect visual counterpoint to Lymond’s attempts to talk round the singular Phelim O’Liam Roe?

While a slightly longer one gives Will Scott the essence of just how important and burned into Lymond’s psyche is the captive lady in the tower.

My brilliant devil, my imitation queen; my past, my future, my hope of heaven and my knowledge of hell … Margaret, Countess of Lennox.

I’m looking forward to hearing your favourites.

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I was delighted to hear from one of my fellow DDRA committee members that Alastair Dunnett’s book The Canoe Boys has appeared in a new edition. I hadn’t realised that the previous edition had run out, as it was still on the shelves the last time I’d checked for it. Which rather shows how easily, even after 21 years in the book trade, you can lose touch with things once you’re no longer working with them day to day.

Canoe Boys really is a classic. Alastair had a lovely writing style and the descriptions of pre-war West of Scotland life and the people that he and Seumas Adam encountered on their voyage north are truely evocative of a culture which has largely passed into history. At that time the sea was still the main means of communication for much of the west coast – roads were poor and slow going – and apart from the Clyde puffers the areas were pretty much isolated away from the Oban and Fort William railheads. You can get a real sense of the feelings he had for the area and the positive attitudes he would take into his work at the Scottish Office and later as editor of The Scotsman. The book now has an introduction and extra notes by his son Ninian and we must hope that it stays in print for many more years. Though I’ve long had a copy of the previous edition I’ll be buying a copy of this one too.

Published by In Pinn,
ISBN-13: 978-1903238998

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One of the contributors to the Game of Kings discussion list recently uncovered a little gem of information. The name Donati – as in Evangelista Donati, who looks after Joleta and later hands Kuzum into the care of Philippa at Zakynthos – is apparently the Italian form of Dunnett. One of those ‘obvious as soon as you know it’ snippets of knowledge, yet I don’t think anyone had discovered it previously. Well found Viviana.

So like Dorothy to drop such a connection into the story knowing that it might lay undiscovered for years. I can just hear her laughing – ‘oh good, they found one, but there’s plenty more to go’.

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I’m just emerging from a bout of flu and in my disturbed sleep patterns have been trying to catch up with the Game of Kings discussion group on their Lymond re-read. One thing came up in the discussions that gave me pause for thought. Someone suggested that the reason that Margaret Lennox was so determined to wreak revenge on Lymond was that she had fallen in love with him during the period when she had seduced him as a teenager a few years prior to the point we come into the action. That she hadn’t been able to accept that he had held something back and hadn’t fallen for her undoubted charms.

It’s not unusual for Dunnett readers to interpret things completely differently, and this is the exact opposite of what I’d always assumed.

I’d always felt that his journey through life and love was in many ways a coming to terms with love. That he can’t learn to love completely until he’s sorted out his feelings on something that has scarred his emotional psyche. If we look at his relationships through the series there is always something in the way.

Did he love Christian Stewart? I think perhaps as much as he was able at the time. He was as careful as he could be for her safety – it was she who wanted to take risks on his behalf. Her tragic death wasn’t his fault but weighed heavily on him. He cared greatly – we tend to forget that his suicide attempt at the dell comes not just after his shooting but also after Christian’s death, and I suspect that it was partly as a result of it. But not love; he wasn’t really capable of love at that time.

Oonagh is a challenge as part of the plot against the young Queen, and becomes essentially a political conquest. He feels responsible for her and for her child and would have done everything he could to save her had not Jerott’s rock and Gabriel’s treachery prevented him. Her death causes an agonised reaction which demonstrates his anguish and suggests emotional involvement but again there is something lacking.

Guzel provides a political partnership and a cultured companion but when they eventually share a bed there is emotional detachment on both sides.

So what was the reason for all this inability to love? I always felt that it was what Margaret did to him when he was at his most vulnerable – both physically as a prisoner of war, and emotionally as a teenager with a wonderful brain but perhaps an immature and perfectionist outlook.

Margaret was highly attractive, highly articulate, highly cultured, highly placed…. and highly sexed! What would any teenager have done when faced with a woman of this kind seducing him? He’d have fallen in love.

And of course having used him for personal and political ends she then betrayed him and threw him to the galleys. He’d have been emotionally devastated as well as being in peril of his life. And with Lymond’s introspective character (and two years in the galleys to mull it over) it would eat away at his ability to trust anyone else enough to give himself to them. Look at his approach to sex through the series – he never sleeps in the bed or the company of anyone he’s had sex with. Maybe because inwardly he fears betrayal as he sleeps. Only with Philippa at the end can he sleep in security and trust.

And the reason for Margaret’s bitter wrath. Simple. Like any controlling egotist she can’t accept that he is now immune to her seducements. (Of course maybe she found his lovemaking pretty good too and would like to be able to experience it again!) It’s like a blow direct to her self esteem. That is why the small triumph that the ill and assaulted Lymond is able to inflict on her at the end of Checkmate – showing her as no longer beautiful and powerful – is so telling.