It’s been a week and I find that I’m still, despite reading other books, reflecting back on Dorothy Dunnett’s King Hereafter. I’d love to write a post focused on the women of Dunnett’s novels, but I’ll save that for another day, when I’ve had more coffee (and hopefully once I’m no longer blogging from my phone). This post is dedicated to all the ways the book continues to inspire me a week after turning the last page. Mostly, I’m thinking of all the things Dunnett doesn’t say, and how they impact characterization.
Speaking of the women, Groa specifically in this case, Dunnett’s gift for understatement shines most especially in her depiction of Lady Macbeth.
For me, the beauty of Dunnett’s work lies not in the story itself - though her stories are rich, and sprawling, and encompass every aspect of her characters’ lives - but in her prose. The blend of absurdity, tragedy, and triumph would be clumsy and disjointed in lesser hands. I think the secret of her success - her memorable impact on the reader - lies in the careful dovetailing of the lyrical and the understated. The tiny diction choices that paint a scene to best effect.
For instance: she sets scenes before the reader in richly-layered oils. The glow and flicker of sunlight on water; the bustle of a crowded wharf; the sumptuous receiving rooms of a palace. And the close, dark moments when devastating news is delivered; I will never look at a candle flame again without thinking of Lymond’s “coin-bright head” bowed in silent reception of said devastating news. And therein lie the moments of magic: we watch the physical restraint of emotion, and either know or can guess how the character is feeling. Sometimes it’s an incorrect guess - an intentional misdirect in which the reader is as frustrated as the character’s friends - and the truth is revealed in due time.
With Groa, we see her fear and anguish as a very young widow as coldness, indifference. No doubt she hates Thorfinn, though there was certainly no love for her first, dead husband. She is a war prize and a tool used for ruling, and she knows this, and holds herself with poise, but of a cutting sort. That tension between them in the early days is all bristling undercurrents, a silent reader’s fear that disaster lies ahead.
We meet Groa as a widow, and that’s how we leave her. Dunnett doesn’t wax poetic over her sorrow:
“Of course,” she says, but we know her pain because we’ve watched her love for Thorfinn take root, and unfurl, and thrive over the course of the novel. Understatement, again; emotion rendered more poignant because we admire Groa’s steel backbone, and can only marvel at her reaction, as we imagine ourselves falling apart upon hearing such news.
For me, the success of a novel - and by that I mean “its resonance with me as a reader” - is fumbled or fostered line by line, in the unglamorous turning of each sentence. The drama of Dunnett’s prose - the ebb and surge of action and stillness, the dynamic shifts in imagery, and the restraint to allow characters their inner privacy in key moments, is what sets her work apart. You can have the most dynamic and intriguing concept in history, and flub it on the page. Dunnett’s work is always suggested as instructional for writers and would-be writers, and the prose itself is, to my mind, the aspect most worth studying.
Talking about it now makes me want to embark on a Lymond reread. I have other books to read, books I’ve never read; should I spend that time retreading old ground? But with books like hers, the reread is where most of the learning occurs...so can I really afford not to do it?
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