Tag: historical fiction

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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As Meat Loves Salt (2001): Maria McCann

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★★★★½

A new edition of As Meat Loves Salt has just been published in paperback.  The cover, aimed at the burgeoning understated-historical-romance market, shows a close-up of a woman’s torso, her hands in her lap. This amuses me, because although there are certainly women in the book, this cover completely fails to convey any of the story’s spirit or major themes. It would be like putting a fin-de-siècle lady with a parasol on the cover of Death in Venice. I much prefer the cover of my edition, which I’ve used to illustrate this post. Here is darkness, brooding, and a fragment of a young man’s face looming out of the shadow.

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Troy: Fact and Fiction

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Troy

Imagine you’re at a party.  You’re in the middle of a crowded room with conversation going on all around you, but suddenly in the midst of the hubbub you hear a word which immediately makes your ears prick up.  What words or phrases would catch your ear like that?  I have a few, but one of them is ‘Troy’.  If I overheard someone talking about Troy, I’d be compelled to shuffle closer and eavesdrop quite shamelessly until they either changed the subject or let me into their conversation.  There’s a magic to the name, a grandeur, not unlike that conjured up by the word ‘Byzantium’.  Unfortunately, if you hear the word ‘Troy’ nowadays it’s most likely that people would be talking about the film.

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In praise of Dorothy Dunnett

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Dorothy Dunnett

I’d never heard of Dorothy Dunnett until one afternoon when I was in the library, seeking out my next stash of books.  Methodically going through the racks, I stumbled across The Spring of the Ram, the second book in her House of Niccolò series.  Although I don’t like reading series out of order, the first book was nowhere to be found in the library and there was a synopsis at the start of The Spring of the Ram.  I took it home and, very shortly, was absolutely hooked.

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