BOOKISHGAL

You could almost call this the sequel to yesterday’s post about The Summer Tree. Certainly, my reading that book led pretty directly to my reading today’s “earthquake book.”

Yesterday I mentioned how Guy Gavriel Kay recommended a few books to me. One of them was The Game of Kings, by Dorothy Dunnett, because his character of Prince Diarmuid of Brennin was patterned after Francis Crawford, the main character in Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles.

So I bought the book, the first in a series of six. One Saturday afternoon I laid down, thought, “I’ll read a chapter or so before taking a nap,” and started in.

And was still reading, if I remember correctly, at ten o’clock that night.

Kay’s character of Diarmuid was bright and impulsive and brilliant and dashing, never pinned down, and always about ten intellectual steps ahead of everyone around him — including his longsuffering, more stolid older brother who never quite understood him or approved of him.

But compared to Francis Crawford, Diarmuid was a pale shadow. Francis was everything Diarmuid was, with about twenty extra layers. He was a young Scottish nobleman in the 16th century, returning to his country as an outlaw, and had a tragic story behind him (and ahead of him), but he never gave up, was always more educated and skilled and brilliant and scintillating than everyone around him, and could quote Latin poetry one moment and launch into a bawdy song the next, then spout beautiful Islamic proverbs while crossing swords with five or ten opponents at once.

He was maddening and hilarious, and drove his stolid older brother half-mad with misunderstanding. Seeking the means to clear the reputation that had been destroyed a few years earlier through the machinations of Henry VIII, he played a metaphorical chess game with the law in both Scotland and England, coming pretty close to losing his life more than a few times along the way. Yet through all the daring, defiant, reckless actions, through all the snarly (drunk) bad moods and his determination to keep everyone around him at an emotional arm’s length, you discovered a tenderness and a high respect for women, and recognized the soul of a poet.

Francis wasn’t the only character, of course. Dunnett’s historical novels are absolutely crammed with the most fascinating people, each one unique, with his or her own vividly real foibles and ticks and attitudes. I never read an individual in any of Dunnett’s stories who seemed like a “stock character” or was a reminder of another character in a different part of the story. It takes considerable skill for a writer to make each separate character so unique, complex, and real.

But of course Francis was the shining star at the centre. And all through this book — through all six books — Francis Crawford made me laugh, made me cry, taught me a whole lot of Scottish and English history (and eventually French and Turkish and Russian too), and above all, made me envious. I wanted to know that much poetry, and that many languages, and be able to quote all those great thinkers and writers from past history!

Thanks to this book, I found and avidly devoured the remaining five books in the Lymond Chronicles, and then the eight books that were written later, in the House of Niccolo series, about Francis Crawford’s ancestor. To say Dorothy Dunnett is my favourite author in the world is a vast understatement. To say that the ripples of my picking up The Summer Tree that day in 1985 seem to be never-ending…that’s an understatement too.

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