Category: Books

Pawn in Frankincense (1969): Dorothy Dunnett

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The Lymond Chronicles: Book 4
Dorothy Dunnett © Olive Millward. With thanks to the Dorothy Dunnett Society

★★★★★

The Lymond Chronicles: Book IV

After my reservations about The Disorderly Knights, I felt some anxiety as I embarked on Pawn in Frankincense, the fourth book in the Lymond Chronicles. However, there is very little to find fault with here: it is a magnificent novel, richer and more powerful than any of its predecessors in the series. I found it interesting to compare it to Queens’ Play, which I also enjoyed, for very different reasons. While Queens’ Play takes place in a small area of France, Pawn in Frankincense unfurls across the breadth of Europe and North Africa, embracing Switzerland, France, Algiers, Djerba and then Constantinople, the greatest and most dazzling city of all.

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The Disorderly Knights (1966): Dorothy Dunnett

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The Lymond Chronicles: Book 3
Dorothy Dunnett © Olive Millward. With thanks to the Dorothy Dunnett Society

★★★

The Lymond Chronicles: Book III

And so, from the tumbling moors and hills of Scotland, and the stately, chivalric glitter of Blois, we come to Malta, to the sand and dust and bleached blue skies. This third volume in the Lymond Chronicles is a strange beast: after Queens’ Play, which I enjoyed immensely – with its strong, stand-alone story and its clear sense of purpose for Lymond – I feel much more ambivalent about The Disorderly Knights. I know this series well enough by now, and I trust Dunnett enough as a writer, to believe that it all has a purpose. But there were points, especially in the first half of this book, where my faith faltered. In time, when I have read the following books and better understand the foundations being laid here, I am sure I will fully appreciate her decisions; they just left me feeling a little lost at times.

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Queens’ Play (1964): Dorothy Dunnett

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The Lymond Chronicles: Book 2
Dorothy Dunnett © Olive Millward. With thanks to the Dorothy Dunnett Society

★★★★½

The Lymond Chronicles: Book II

It is 1550, two years after the events in The Game of Kings. Mary of Guise plans a journey to France, to visit her eight-year-old daughter Mary, Queen of Scots, who is being brought up at Henri II’s court as the affianced bride of the Dauphin. The fate of Scotland depends on the fate of this little girl and Mary of Guise fears that the vultures have grown more daring. She calls on Lymond (now restored to favour) to accompany her to France and unearth any plots against the little Queen.

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The Game of Kings (1961): Dorothy Dunnett

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The Lymond Chronicles: Book 1
Dorothy Dunnett © Olive Millward. With thanks to the Dorothy Dunnett Society

★★★★

The Lymond Chronicles: Book I

It is Scotland, in the 1540s. Edward VI is on the throne in England, the realm governed by his Protectors. In Edinburgh, Mary of Guise rules as regent for her infant daughter, later to become Mary Queen of Scots. The vultures, French and English, gather around the little queen, hoping to benefit from her marriage, while the Scottish lords beat back wave after wave of concerted English invasion. Into this political powder-keg comes Francis Crawford of Lymond: nobleman, wit, exile and ex-galley-slave, determined to prove himself innocent of a six-year-old charge of treason.  ‘Lymond is back,’ says the first line of the book; and the game can begin.

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The Botticelli Trilogy (1997-2008): Linda Proud

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★★★★

The three books in Linda Proud’s Botticelli Trilogy provide a powerful, moving and life-affirming insight into Renaissance Florence.  Essentially they are three instalments in the same book, so it makes no sense to speak of them individually: they need to be read and appreciated together.  Following the life and career of Tommaso de’ Maffei, the books begin with his boyhood and his journey to Florence, where he earns his living as a scribe.

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Bring up the Bodies (2012): Hilary Mantel

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★★★★ ½

Like many other people (the vast majority of the British public, it seems), I thoroughly enjoyed Wolf Hall and was thrilled when I heard that Hilary Mantel was writing a sequel. I’m pleased to report that Bring up the Bodies offers another satisfying dose of Elizabethan intrigue and treachery, told in Mantel’s strikingly pared-back prose. She focuses not on sets, costumes and locations, but on the events that unfold, the relationships that form and fade between the members of the court, and the man who stands to one side, watching and weighing them.

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The Stranger’s Child (2011): Alan Hollinghurst

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★★★★

This is the third book I’ve read by Alan Hollinghurst, the others being The Line of Beauty and The Swimming Pool Library. Like those two novels, this book was beautifully and lyrically crafted. It occurs to me that Hollinghurst is particularly good at representing the allure of closed circles to outsiders. Those circles can be social, as we see in the third part of this book, when middle-class Paul finds himself in the charmed circle of Mrs Jacobs and her family. They can also be  circles of friendship or love, like the relationship between Cecil and George at the beginning of the book, of which innocent Daphne wants so much to be a part. But at what cost do we join such circles?

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The Song of Achilles (2011): Madeline Miller

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★★★½

I went over to the dark side recently and treated myself to a Kindle. In my defence, it was mainly a matter of expedience. Being a fast reader, I suffer the consequences of long train journeys or business trips.  Things reached a peak when, during a visit to Germany, my copy of World Without End weighed more than the rest of my hand luggage put together.  Rather than heave enormous books around Europe, just in case I run out of something to read, it seems much more sensible to have multiple e-books at my fingertips. And so, for my first Kindle experience, I lighted on Madeleine Miller’s Song of Achilles, which promised to indulge my fascination with the myth cycle of the Trojan War.

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The Sense of an Ending (2011): Julian Barnes

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★★★

In his Booker Prize winner from 2011, Julian Barnes plays with notions of memory and history. When the narrator Tony receives an unexpected bequest, he is motivated to reexamine his past, specifically, his friendship with his brilliant schoolmate Adrian, and his youthful affair with the demanding Veronica. In doing so, he discovers that his neat memories of events are far from true, and that the consequences of these two relationships are still playing themselves out in the present.

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