The Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “Are you ever likely to have a normal life?” Have you heard? Frances Crawford of Lymond is back in Scotland! You know, the villain guilty of “reaving, ruttery, and all manner of vice and treason,” the woman-hating scoundrel who blew up his sister and a bunch of nuns, sold intel to England to cause a devastating Scottish loss on the battlefield, and spent the last five years in the “stews and alleyways of Europe” womanizing and drugging and thieving! What’s Lymond (with a big price on his head) doing back home? Well, about the first thing he does (with his merry band of sixty outlaws) is to crash a party his mother is hosting in the family castle, rob forty ladies of their jewelry, throw a dagger into one of their shoulders, steal the family silver, flirt with his older brother’s nineteen-year-old wife, and set fire to the castle. Surely, there must be some extenuating circumstances to his supposed crimes? Well, he does, apparently, shoot his brother in the shoulder with an arrow at a Robinhood-esque archery contest and send his sister-in-law numerous pieces of jewelry, involve a blind young noble woman in his machinations, and adopt (corrupt?) as his protege young Will Scott the eldest son of a Scottish lord… Part of the pleasure of reading Dorothy Dunnett’s The Game of Kings (1961) is gradually and suspensefully finding out what Lymond is really up to and how much of his reputation is accurate and how much false. As he rides around Scotland and Northern England scheming and banditing and spying and seducing (?) in his attempt to interview three Englishmen while causing as much trouble as possible to the English army, his honest and resentful big brother Richard, the third Lord Culter, is obsessively trying to catch him to make him stand trial in Edinborough for his manifold crimes. All that personal and family stuff is going on in the 1547 historical context of the Game of Kings of the title, whereby post-Henry VIII France, Spain, and England (at least) are using dinky feisty backwater Scotland to jockey for advantage over each other, sending there a variety of mercenaries from other countries (Italy, Germany, Denmark, etc.) as well as their own countries’ soldiers. Scotland has been walking a tightrope between France and England and will probably need to choose one or the other to be its master in the near future. Five-year-old Queen Mary of Scotland is a valuable prize to win to cement an alliance for either France or England. In that interesting historical international and political situation, Dunnett writes compelling characters. Substantial, strong, and interesting female characters are numerous, from little girls like ten-year-old English girl Philippa Somerville (who can’t quite forgive Lymond for interrogating her in front of her somewhat terrorized parents) to old women like Lymond and Richard’s sixty-year-old mother Sybilla (who knows at least as much about what’s going on as anyone else). Christian Stewart, the open-minded, independent, red haired blind young lady, is great, a match for Lymond. Even Agnes Herries, at first an obnoxious and unpleasant 13-year-old heiress warped by romance stories, becomes a neat character. Lymond, aka the Master, is a wonderful protagonist! He’s charismatic, enigmatic, brilliant, educated, knowledgeable, strategic, tricky, bawdy, witty, playful, and bold. He quips, quotes, and sings in French, Spanish, Latin, German, and (of course) English. He plays a mean guitar and a divine harpsichord. He’s a crack bowshot and an accomplished fencer, wrestler, and brawler (don’t fight him if he’s in boots and you’re in slippers). He can outdrink and outthink anyone. He confesses to a woman at one point that one reason for his bad reputation is that everyone hates a person who excels at too many different things. He has cornflower blue eyes and blond hair. “Every line of him spoke, palimpsest-wise with two voices. The clothes, black and rich, were vaguely slovenly; the skin sun-glazed and cracked; the fine eyes slackly lidded; the mouth insolent and self-indulgent.” Is Lymond too perfect? Well, when he dons a black wig and a Spanish accent to pose as a mercenary captain, it’s a bit too much, but he isn’t invulnerable, capable of being knocked out or seriously wounded or having his spirit obliterated. And the interactions and relationships between all the characters are involving, with many intense conversations and suspenseful action. After numerous raids, skirmishes, battles, duels, bargains, treacheries, interrogations, fortune tellings, alchemical experiments, quarrels, debates, secret meetings, disguisings, hostage takings, and the like, the novel climaxes in an intense courtroom drama. Throughout, Dunnett’s writing is prime: vivid, tight, witty, and elliptical. Bantering lines: “A fine, capable hand. Line of life—hullo! You appear to have died at the age of seven.” “The embalmers are exceedingly skilful nowadays,” she said gravely. Witty lines: “Have you ever lost your memory?... It's an experience pleasant but precarious, like the gentleman who sat under palm trees feeding fruit to a lion.” Cool lines: “God knows I've been wrong politically, legally, conventionally and any other way—in judgments before. But these always seemed to me the more irrelevant aspects of human decency.” Savory lines: “Well; in comes this fellow ordering gloves, and as fussy as a flea in a bathtub over the pattern…” Keen lines: “Patriotism is a fine hot house for maggots. It breeds intolerance.” Vivid, evocative descriptions: “High on the hilltops, among the wet scrub by the burn, a blackbird was singing. The notes, round as syrup, melted into the raw air of dawn and coaxed the cold, reddened sun to its day.” As Dunnet has Lymond speak multiple languages, especially French and Latin, and her characters use some Scottish or archaic English words here and there, it’s probably not possible to understand everything fully in the audiobook. But it’s always entertaining or moving or exciting etc. And audiobook reader David Monteath does superbly with different moods, voices, accents, and characters, without overdramatizing. And listening to the Scottish accent is a great pleasure: “Wait noo, I’ll be doon.” Dunnett brings an exotic past time and place to life with apparent accuracy and authenticity, while working in universal themes that resonate with us today (like family conflict and bad reputation and political scheming). I’m looking forward to the next novel in the series. View all my reviews
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