“He’s called Thorfinn,” agreed Thorkel shortly. A pagan name, like his own, but that was not why he didn’t use it. With a boy like that, you had to watch your back as well as your front. Attaching a name to him wouldn’t improve your authority.
I’ve spent the last few years working my way through first the Lymond Chronicles, then the House of Niccolo series, and now, finally, the last of the new-to-me historical Dorothy Dunnett novels, the standalone tale of the man more popularly known as Macbeth, King Hereafter. Sipping and savoring them, rather than binging, taking breaks in the middle when I felt more in the mood for a potato chip read than the filet mignon feast that is a Dunnett novel. Layered, at times dense, brimming with weighty emotion, brave in its tackling of unlovely subjects using lovely prose, her work is unmatched. Startlingly funny in moments, heartbreaking in others, she manages absurd, swashbuckling adventures alongside devastating tragedy, and an attention for historical detail that focuses not merely on the country at hand, but the world as a whole in that time period.
Gosh, that sounds like a blurb, doesn’t it? I always feel like I owe her something of a polished, proper review, when it feels impossible to ever encapsulate the scope of what she accomplished with each book.
This book in particular was unique for me because I found that, as I went through, I never doubted Thorfinn in the ways I did Francis and Nicholas. Thorfinn could be called charmless by comparison, I suppose. Francis is the most mercurial, the most fascinating...and infuriating leading man of her tales. Nicholas the most complex, his transformation from Claes to the Nicholas with whom we walk in Gemini a thing of wonder. Thorfinn, however, is stoic from the first. We don’t see him transform so much as we see him learn to love, and love passionately; his still waters run very deep, and we see his grief, and his joy, and his hope - for his family, his people, his kingdom - in all that he doesn’t say. His silences, and thoughtful gazes convey his great wealth of quiet emotion in eloquent Dunnett fashion. He’s stalwart, King Thorfinn, and though I love Francis and Nicholas, and treasure their books, on a purely personal level, Thorfinn is my favorite.
I’m not a Dunnett scholar, and so I don’t offer any new insight to the discussion of her works, but there is one thing I keep coming back to. The thing for which I think she might be most beloved. From the postmodern era onward, the goal of fiction far too often is to revel in the ruin and debasement of seemingly great men. To build sandcastles with the express purpose of kicking them apart. To savage, slowly and with great relish, a character’s morality, sanity, and standing, until all that’s left is the wreckage, and we are spectators at the Colosseum, dazzled by the blood, swatting the flies, hollow inside. I won’t say that sort of fiction doesn’t have its place, it’s purpose, its audience. But the reason I *love* Dorothy Dunnett is because she wrote of great men. Flawed, challenged and challenging, bereaved, bold...and prideful, and foolish, and as mortal as all of us. But theirs are stories about achieving greatness; fulfilling their greatest potential. Their journeys reward us in this way, and the moment we’ve turned the last page, we want to go back to the beginning, and walk with them once more.
No one writes of great men like Dorothy Dunnett, and we’re all made greater writers for having read her.
“You have everything there is of me, save a little I gave to my people. Now you hold that as well.”
No comments:
Post a Comment