Bill's Dunnett Blog » Lymond Chronicles

“As a maiden lady, you would wear anyone down…”

bill — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 23:18:20 +0000

The second in a series looking at favourite Dunnett quotations – this time from Checkmate.

“She thinks, as a maiden lady, I should wear my hair down…”
“As a maiden lady, you would wear anyone down…”

“I shall call you mon compere, as the King does the Constable. You haven’t enough artillery, have you?”
“Against you or the Germans?”

These two seemingly casual quotes, dropped in before two of the most dramatic episodes in the series, are amongst my favourites. Both for their examples of Dorothy’s humour and for their subtle and leading insights.

Lymond and Philippa are on their way to the House of Doubtance in Lyon. Lymond is now Captain-General in charge of defending the city and is busy dealing with rich merchants who would rather escape or even switch sides, but must take time out to honour the Dame’s will. Marthe has schemingly arranged that Philippa, who arrived at the house of Marechal de St Andre disguised as a boy, should also be there. Philippa is attempting to discover as much as she can about Lymond’s origins in order to heal the rift between him and Sybilla. We know, but Philippa does not, that he has fallen in love with her but has decided that he cannot pursue such a match despite the fact they are, by force of circumstances in Istambul, married. He is thus trying to keep a certain distance between them, and still desires to obtain a divorce and return to Russia where he is second in power only to the Tzar.

From her escapade as ‘Annibal, Lymond is discovering even more about how resourceful and quick-witted she is, and must find their verbal sparring both a delight and a trial. Here she flits between innocent (or is it?) banter and incisive insight into military status and strategy, and Lymond has to parry almost defensively.

These two quotes, following on from the byplay with the fan and Annibal’s resourceful double bluffing as Lymond unmasks her, show us that the two of them are now much more closely matched. Philippa is more than capable of standing up to him and trading quips, and she is also quite comfortable in befriending the Marechale or twisting the Schiatti brothers round her little finger. No longer is Lymond in undoubted control of the relationship as he was in the Mediterranean. His advantages in age and seniority have seemingly evaporated (”Do you consider I’m old enough to stop calling you Mr Crawford?”), and his aura of untouchability and the scathing tongue that scares his men rigid mean very little to her.

Of course we are being manipulated. Dorothy is preparing us for events that will take place later that night when the heady mix of mortal danger and ingenious escape will combine to provide Philippa with her own revelation of love. But she does it with such a light touch that we are hardly aware of it at this stage. A probing remark, a description of an outrageously ostentatious dress, a pun here, an unexpected change of subject there. We are entertained, lightened, admiring this sophisticated and attractive girl (Jerott doesn’t even recognise her at first) who deals so easily with our irascible and tortured hero. So that when the moment comes it is the most natural development in the world. Yet without those two apparently insignificant pieces of conversation – easily missed or forgotten compared to the high drama of the Dame’s voice from the grave and the chase through the traboules – the following chapters would be far less of an inevitable progression, the rhythm of the narrative weakened.

This is the difference between a talented author and a genius.

Come and be licked…

bill — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 22:12:07 +0000

This is the first in a series I’ve been planning to write that looks at some of the favourite Dunnett quotes that I suggested we collect, and analyses them in the context of the passages they appear in. I’m starting with one of the classics. Or maybe two…

“Kate, my dear? Haven’t your raspberries been marvellous this year? Come and be licked; I haven’t dined yet.”

This has to be one of my favourite quotes in all of Dunnettworld, because it isn’t just a delightful visual image – it tells us so much about the characters and their interaction that it’s almost a backstory in itself. This is something that Dorothy is so very good at; sometimes she will take considerable time describing a scene in great detail, layer upon layer, when the pace of the narrative makes it appropriate, but at other times when it might interfere she has this wonderful ability to encapsulate matters into a short passage, a sentence, or sometimes just a couple of words.

Let us set the scene. We are in the middle of major difficulties, Richard has barred Lymond from his door after the episode with Joleta in Dumbarton, Gabriel is trying to take over St Mary’s, and we have recently had the Hot Trodd and the tragedy of Will Scott’s death. In the midst of this Francis Crawford visits Flaw Valleys, where he hasn’t been since having had to knock out Philippa to save her from harm.

Dorothy then described Kate’s feelings as she sees him approach, and then, as she enters the music room, describes how she looks at him, observing his skin colour and fitness. He turns and delivers that wonderful line.

In this case Dorothy is telling us a number of things:

The brilliant strategist and political schemer, the highly strung athlete and swordsman, who seems constantly above mundane matters, actually has a simpler side to him as well. He observes nature and delights in it, he enjoys the flavours and colours of the countryside.

Despite worries and events that would crush a lesser man, and as we will shortly discover despite severe exhaustion, he still has time and wit to greet Kate with humour and consideration.

He and Kate enjoy a close friendship. He has been shown, or maybe just enters without being shown, straight into the innermost rooms of the house and is clearly trusted to be there by the servants. He is able to tease her lightheartedly with no fear that she will be offended. He understands the demands that running an estate make on her and is immediately aware that she will be embarrassed at not being at her best for his surprise visit. That he can deflect her embarrasment and put her at ease shows both his kindness and affection for her and his wider ability to be comfortable in a woman’s company.

What an amazing amount of information is packed into that one quote!

The prior thoughts we see from Kate also tell us a great deal about her. In Game of Kings we saw how she was able to confidently probe and engage Lymond in a way that few others could manage intellectually and fewer still could get away with without attracting his withering scorn. In some part that was assisted by her being thoroughly grounded in a solid marriage. Now of course Gideon is dead. We’d seen glimpses of what a perceptive man and a loving and engaging father and husband he was. Kate will have mourned him deeply and may have been assisted by her new friends in the Crawford family. Clearly she misses him. But now her relationship with Lymond has taken on new qualities. She is still a young woman and must be very conscious of his attractions while not wanting to risk their friendship. So we see the ever-practical, sensible, down-to-earth Kate, concerned about her daughter’s safety, nevertheless worrying that she isn’t looking her best for him. His presence confuses her and causes conflicts in her mind. While remaining a loyal and concerned friend she is showing signs of being ready to fall in love with him if he were to give the slightest encouragement.

All this of course presages a passage during which we see her appreciating his extreme tiredness (and having the temerity that few others would have of advising him to rest because it will affect his judgement and leadership), showing her intelligence in analysing a series of complex facts and drawing conclusions, and despite receiving a shock about how much danger Philippa is in she is able to appreciate that it is Gabriel who is the danger to Lymond’s leadership of St Mary’s (and maybe a few more things besides.) And at the end of this passage, as Lymond succumbs to fatigue and near despair when for a moment he is afraid that she thought he might strike her, there is another wonderful one-liner. Probably a favourite of most readers, this time spoken only in Kate’s mind, and which acts as a perfectly matched bookend to the first.

“My dear, my dear, I would give you my soul in a blackberry pie; and a knife to cut it with.”

Lymond audiobooks now available on CD in the UK and Europe

bill — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 21:27:42 +0000

For a number of years the Lymond Chronicles have been available as audiobooks on cassette from W F Howes. As cassettes have become an increasingly outdated format there has been growing demand for CD versions and in fact the US parent company of Howes have had a CD version which was only available in America. Now however Howes have released UK editions of the first three Lymonds and the rest will follow in the next few months. Game of Kings and Disorderly Knights are priced at £34.99 while Queens’ Play is £29.99

They can be ordered from the Dunnett page at Whole Story Audio which is the new retail site for Howes’ output.

Note:
This post replaces an earlier one which I made when the audiobooks on CD were first announced but details were not yet available. Something very odd happened to that post as I discovered that it had been taken off-line and was stuffed full of spam links. It looks as if someone made an only partially successful attempt to put in comment spam. So apologies if you saw an earlier announcement on one of the email lists and were confused by the lack of a post. I’ll shortly be upgrading the version of Wordpress in use here to ensure that all the security patches are up to date. If I have time I’ll also be introducing a new look for the blog.

Lymond re-reads and the writer as Dunnett fan

bill — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 21:23:17 +0000

Reading Lymond en-mass

For anyone who doesn’t keep up to date with the various discussion groups but might like to follow along with a Lymond Chronicles group read, one has just started on the Game of Kings Yahoo group list. From what’s already been posted it looks like it’s going to be interesting!

I’ve made a couple of posts myself although I’ve been working 12 hours and more a day for the last 10 days and have only managed the posts when sleep was beyond my over-tired brain. I’m trying to recapture the feelings I had on that very first read, how unexpectedly but completely at home I felt as I was plunged headlong into DunnettWorld, and how I was soon being beguiled by the wordsmith’s sorcery.

I’ll quote a section of one of my posts because I feel the descriptions mentioned are worthy of wider viewing, since it’s all too easy to rush through the first few pages in our haste to get into the meat of the story. These refer to material early on page 2 (and page 1 was only half a page!) where Lymond is about to enter the water of the Nor’ Loch.

“Across four hundred feet of black lake, friezelike on their ridge, towered the houses of Edinburgh”.
“Friezelike”; what an evocative description. Anyone who has looked up at the high tenements of the Old Town from Princes St on a dark night will recognise this at once – the way the buildings seem 2-dimensional against the sky compared to the emphatically 3-dimensional bulk of the castle.

And the next sentence – “Tonight the Castle on its pinnacle was fully lit, laying constellations on the water;”
Note firstly the capitalisation of Castle; subtly giving it a greater sense of size and power (if you’ve seen it you’ll know that’s exactly what it has). But then that fabulous description – not the easy descriptive “reflecting on the water”, not even something flowery like “myriad scintillations”.

“Laying constellations” gives us in two words a complete picture of the scene in front of us. It is an early suggestion of the sort of wizardry that she will conjure up as the books progress. We are _in_ the scene in the most complete way and yet we are only a quarter of the way down page 2. We sometimes think of GK as a little over-decorated, yet here is the most elegant economy of words.

And remember this was the first book of a new author; still finding her literary feet. You can almost feel the assurance growing as you penetrate further into the story – in fact in the next paragraph she throws in “oriflamme” and you know for certain that you’re not in the company of any ordinary writer!

Then you start wishing you had a large dictionary to hand, and a French one, and maybe a Latin one….

Authors who read and admire Dunnett

When I wrote the last newsletter/first blog I stopped at the end of 2005. It was around that time that I’d been contacted by a fairly new author who wondered if I could build her a website. This was Linda Gillard, previously an actress, journalist and teacher, who now lives on the lovely Isle of Skye. She knew of me through the Dunnett website as she was a long-time reader and admirer of Dorothy. With a bit of a false start caused by flu and bronchitis on my part we soon forged an excellent rapport and the result was www.lindagillard.co.uk which was one of the most enjoyable and satisfying design jobs I’ve done.

Unlike Dorothy, Linda writes about modern times, but is already an accomplished author who isn’t afraid to tackle difficult and controversial themes. She sent me her first novel – Emotional Geology – prior to starting the site design and I read it in one go pausing only to eat. Based on South Uist in the Hebrides, it’s a complex story of a woman recovering from manic depression and concentrating on her work as a textile artist to blot out the unhappy end of a love affair. I highly recommend it, particularly for its sympathetic depiction of the male characters and the insight into the psychology of the female ones.

Her second novel – A Lifetime Burning – treads such difficult emotional territory that it is almost impossible to describe, set in the very different world of English village life, the local manse, and musical virtuosity, with a number of doomed relationships central to the story. It’s the sort of challenging read that Dunnett readers are likely to enjoy.

Linda’s website was completed without us having met, and we only got that opportunity during the Edinburgh Festival a couple of months ago. We spent a most enjoyable evening in a New Town hostelry talking at great length like old friends… about Dunnett!

Linda was recently asked by Norm Geras to write a piece about her favourite books for his blog, so naturally she chose Lymond. You can read a copy of her piece on her site at
www.lindagillard.co.uk/further-reading.php – an eloquent and heart-felt description which with any luck will bring Dorothy to the attention of some potential new readers when it appears on Norm’s pages.

I should also mention another author, Carla Nayland, whose blog http://carlanayland.blogspot.com/ is well worth a visit. I came across it while looking for Dunnett mentions due to her succinct but complimentary review of King Hereafter. Welcome Carla, and thanks for the comment on the previous blog entry.