Dorothy Dunnett's CHECKMATE

There was a big part of me that did not ever, ever want to read Checkmate, because that would mean coming to the end of the Lymond Chronicles, and you only get one first read through of things and I didn't want my first read of these books to end, ever.

But... Since about halfway through the third or fourth book I knew I wanted to start the series over again because I obviously had missed some things, or missed the importance of some things, or misinterpreted some things and... look, I can see why some people call Dorothy Dunnett the only author you'll ever need, because it's obvious that many a reader could be perfectly happy just reading these books over and over again over a lifetime. And I might do that, though there's still the House of Niccolo series of which to partake, yet, too.*

In order to engage in either of those reading projects, though, I had to rip off the band-aid and let the Lymond Chronicles end for me.

And I gotta tell you, guys, I kind of wish I hadn't. But not for the reasons one might expect.

I'm not going to say that Checkmate is awful; it's still Dorothy Dunnett, still a Lymond novel, which means it's way, way better than 99.999999% of the books that have yet been, or ever will be written, but...

Gosh, I wasn't ready for this grand and elegant tale to descend into melodrama. And not just melodrama but the kind of melodrama in which the reader fantasizes about slapping the hero (as the hero's amazing mother, Sybilla Crawford, gets to do -- has to do -- at one point late in the novel) and heroine silly. Because both hero and heroine -- but especially the hero -- are being whiny little emo bitches.

Married to the awesome Philippa Somerville, who has been taking no crap from him for five novels now, since the end of the fourth novel (Pawn in Frankincense), Lymond has been sort of half-assedly trying to wiggle his way out of his marriage, assuming, for the most part rightly, that Philippa, who started out the Chronicles hating his guts, would probably rather be married to somebody else; they only tied the knot to preserve her reputation after she spent some considerable time as a (still undeflowered) part of the Ottoman Emperor's harem and had to travel some considerable distance with a lot of men who weren't related to her, but without a suitable female chaperon (unless you count the mysterious Crawford by-blow, Marthe, but you really shouldn't. Ever). As Checkmate opens, he is given an offer he can't refuse by the King of France, who dangles a divorce before Lymond's jaded eyes as an inducement to stick around and put his and his company's martial talents in the service of France against Bloody Mary's dear husband Philip of Spain. So of course he accepts.

But then...

But then circumstances first lead Philippa to realize she's had the hots for him all along, and then lead Lymond to reveal that he has also, at some point, realized that they're perfect for each other, which should be great but isn't because Emo Lymond has decided that passionate love is the worst possible basis for a marriage and is actually the worst and most destructive thing that can happen to two people (which, he has a point there, IMHO) and so he still insists on the divorce. He's got his next bride -- a high-ranking French heiress -- all lined up, and Philippa, in true Ugly-Duckling-to-Swan-by-way-of-Seraglio fashion has more suitors than can fit comfortably into a massive royal audience chamber, so really, they'll both be fine.

Except, of course, they're not fine, because they're in LURVE. And also because there is still all the untidy mess of Lymond's lineage and parentage and all of the enemies he's made around the world that are still alive and people who still insist on willfully misunderstanding him and his motives and gossiping about him and plotting to kill him (and his wife, too -- their escape from a whole passel of murderers early in the novel is one of the best scenes in all of these chronicles, exciting and ridiculous and hilarious and perfect in every way until Pip has to spoil it all by saying something stupid like "Francis, you fool. This is what you should be." Which, durr, but anyway.

But amid all that I'm complaining of, there are still some marvelous bits, like the aforementioned chase, and the reunion with Lymond and his readers of so many of his former sidekicks and helpers and partners in not-quite-crime. Archie Abernathy above all, but also Jerrot Blythe and Adam Blacklock and Alec Guthrie and... the list goes on. We even get to see Lymond's older brother and learn a thing or two about him we weren't expecting. I would not have been surprised at all to finally get another appearance of the entertaining and annoying Lady Agnes from The Game of Kings. Which is to say that narratively and in terms of character arcs, the loose ends mostly get tied up very well.

And there are seriously WTS moments like a visit to a possibly haunted house where the mysterious Dame de Doubtance once lived and told fortunes and collected alchemical and other junk. And so on.

But mostly what there is, is being annoyed at Lymond and Philippa, suddenly acting like teenagers continually inventing new excuses for being unhappy. And let me just say that these are two people who are very, very good at everything they do, so the excuses they generate for their continued misery are staggering, and more than a little icky.

So, like so many readers before me, I have terribly mixed feelings about this last volume of the Lymond Chronicles. Yes, it gives everything a proper and mostly happy ending, but if you're not a reader who gets off on "will they or won't they" "hurry up and make out already" drama, the path to that ending is a bit like, well, like this:




But yes, I still want to go back and re-read these books right from the beginning. Perhaps even more so than before I hit Checkmate, because I am longing quite passionately to hang out with Lymond while he was still awesome and enigmatic. Sigh.

*I actually started the first book of that series as a teenager, but got bored about 20% into it. I might again, but I'm far from being a teenager now; my tastes have changed, my attention span has grown, my knowledge of the period and appreciation of the mercantile/economic side of life have deepened, so I'm thinking maybe I'll actually enjoy it this time. We'll see.

Dorothy Dunnett's THE RINGED CASTLE

I could just make this a three word review, you guys. Lymond in Russia. Got that? Lymond in Russia. LYMOND IN RUSSIA YOU GUYS okay that is five but maybe you get it.

But The Ringed Castle, being a Dorothy Dunnett novel and a volume of the Lymond Chronicles, of course has even more than that going on. And a lot of what is going on concerns Lymond only indirectly; it may be all about him, but the action, the intrigue, the driving force, mostly comes from the great and mighty Philippa nee Somerville, his child-bride-on-paper, whom he has sent along back to the British isles while he has moved on to Russia, there to train and equip Ivan the Terrible's army. As one does when one is a mercenary captain, sort-of-nobleman and stubborn Renaissance Man of whom no one is the boss.

Philippa has landed on her feet, back home in England, by which I mean landed a position in the court of Bloody Mary. She's a first-hand witness to that sad queen's phantom pregnancy, frustrating marriage, paranoia about her sister Elizabeth, and all the intrigues of court life ca. Mary Tudor's reign -- but that's not what interests Philippa. No. What interests Philippa is the strange case of Marthe, who traveled with Team Lymond last novel, caused lots of ruckus in her own right, then totally upset the spinet cart by revealing that actually, she's Lymond's sister. But she, ah, didn't grow up in Culter, did she? And she looks pretty much exactly like a female Lymond, so no one thinks she's just an illegitimate half-sister. Something funny was clearly going on in the Crawford family a generation ago. And Philippa is hell-bent on finding out. Go Philippa! The Renaissance Nancy Drew!

Meanwhile and far away, Lymond. Oh, Lymond. For all the magnificence and splendor in which he sets himself up in Russia (with a lot of help from Guzel, former bosswoman of the Suleiman the Great's seraglio) and all the magnificent busy work he get up to trying to bring Russia kicking and screaming into at least the middle ages if not the Renaissance, Lymond is pretty much just sulking. He's got very good reason to sulk, to shut himself down, to withdraw -- the events at the close of Pawn in Frankincense would fell, emotionally, far greater heroes than he, if indeed there are any. But still, he's lost his sparkle, exercising in Russia a mere competence. Admittedly, his mere competence is still far more than most people could hope to strive for, but still. He needs a miracle. He needs Philippa.

But still. This is Lymond. So, even though he's down at the mouth and wounded and scarred and pissed off, he's still making things happen. Politics, social change, sex, action. Oh my goodness, action. Like a midnight hand-to-hand bout in an aviary-cum-orangerie at the top of Lymond's Kremlin palace. Like a moonlit, reindeer-powered sledge race above the Artic Circle brought to fast-paced ruin by the untimely release of Lymond's hunting eagle.* Which just happens to hunt deer.

You're not even coming close to imagining the brilliant chaos of that scene.

But Russia and all of it's crazed and gory glory is only part of the story, which is really and mostly about how Lymond almost gets sucked into the dynastic politics of, that's right, England. Ivan the Terrible decides to send him there to bully negotiate a shipment of weapons and men to teach Russia to make weapons. And Lymond is now the Tsar's man. So off he goes, to the England of Mary Tudor and her consort Phillip, poised to become Elizabethan England, maybe with the help of a little of that Lymond magic? Which no court in Europe can do without? Except of course, Lymond wants just to be left alone to be Lymond, divorce Phillipa (no!) and go back to Russia to play tinpot general and not be married to Guzel. Right?

Oh, things are never so simple where this guy is concerned. We know that, now, surely?

But we also know is that in Phillipa, Lymond has finally met his match.

*Yes, eagle. Lesser men train and hunt with falcons. Lymond has a golden eagle, eight-foot wingspan and all.

Dorothy Dunnett's PAWN IN FRANKINCENSE

The character of Philippa Somerville pretty well stole my heart in the second half of the prior Lymond novel, The Disorderly Knights, as I watched her turn from passionate Lymond-hater to grudging Lymond supporter largely via her well-developed sense of fair play. You've got to enjoy any character who can not only admit she's wrong, but take all the necessary steps to redress the wrongs she's done in thought or deed. Philippa is, in other words, a character with character. And she's not even a grown-up yet as that novel ends!

In Pawn in Frankincense, she is still quite young* but that doesn't stop her doing exactly what she wants, which in this case is to take off in search of Lymond that she might continue to make up for her earlier bad opinion of him by helping him in his current quest in a way that, she has decided, only she can. Even though she really doesn't know nothing about nursing no babies, as it were.

Babies? Yes, babies. For it turns out that Lymond is a daddy, having apparently fathered an illegitimate son on the lovely but perhaps slightly foolish Oonagh O'Dwyer in between bouts of derring do back in Queen's Play. Which son, partly through Oonagh's own questionable choices and partly through the machinations of Graham Reid Mallett, revealed last novel as the Moriarty to Lymond's Holmes, has been hidden away somewhere in the Ottoman Empire (!) and, as Pawn in Frankincense opens, is basically being used as the titular pawn by Mallett. Lymond, of course, claims not to care all that much about a mere by-blow but he'll be damned if anybody gets used as a human shield by his enemy. Philippa, though, dear Philippa, is not fooled, and bullies her way onto the team solely by means of her advanced emotional intelligence, even though she has no idea how she can really be of help. So she just starts learning stuff along the way. Like, oh, Arabic and Turkish, for a start. Go, Philippa, go!

Meanwhile, another remarkable woman has shown up on the scene, the fabulous and enigmatic Marthe, who is attached to Team Lymond as the assistant to the builder of the world's most expensive spinet, which TL is charged with delivering on behalf of the King of France (remember, Lymond's prior exploits on behalf of the current Queen of Scots who is also the Dauphine of France have landed him a French title even though he's Scottish) to the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Thus giving TL the perfect cover for looking for the baby McGuffin.

But back to Marthe. Marthe, Marthe, Marthe. She is blond and blue-eyed and comes off as kind of cold hearted and genuinely doesn't care if other people think poorly of her and devastatingly cunning and intelligent and manipulative and cynical and... sound like anyone we know? I mean, Sebastian and Viola called, they want their bit back, amirite?

No, seriously, amirite? Because all we get are hints that somehow, this French woman with a French name might possibly be, somehow, rather closely related to Lymond. Whom, by the way, she cannot stand. Um, wow. Just wow.

And it all ends, bizarrely and very excitingly, in a live chess (but not Doctor Who live; in this case, live means "people used as pieces" not "currents of electricity running through the pieces") game deep in the seraglio of the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. And things get tense and tragic. And also weirdly satisfying in a way I totally did not see coming.

I now already want to go back to the first book and read all these again -- and I'm not even finished with the series!

The blurb for the next Lymond novel, The Ringed Castle, indicates that his next adventure is largely in Russia. But with things as they've ended here, I cannot imagine how that's going to come to pass. But I don't have to. The brilliant, the wonderful, the mind boggling Dorothy Dunnett done it for me.

*But turns out to be not quite as young as I've been thinking. Lymond speaks of her and treats her as younger than she is for a variety of good, if irritating, reasons, and since a lot of the fun of reading these books is being misled by Lymond, well, there you go. At any rate, as becomes clear in this novel, Philippa is 15 going on 16, so probably newly nubile, and given the adventures she has, it's probably just as well that most everybody believes she's still a kid -- though, of course, the concept of the teenager had a few centuries before it really became a thing. As such.

Dorothy Dunnet's THE DISORDERLY KNIGHTS #OneBookAtATime

Oh, Lymond, Lymond, how I do want to love thee. And every book you almost, almost talk me out of it. Every book you look guilty as hell of whatever crimes most have all of Scotland/France/Malta/Wherever up in arms, and every book you turn out to be, well, I'm trying not to spoil anything here, but there are three more books in this series, so certain truths are probably pretty evident, even to the kinds of people you're so very, very good at fooling...

The Disorderly Knights, the third in the great Dorothy Dunnet's great Lymond Chronicles, broadens the geographic, political and moral scope of our favorite Renaissance bad boy considerably. The Knights of the title are none other than the famous Hospitallers, aka the Knights of Malta -- though an argument could be made for that title also applying to a mercenary company our man forms when he finally gets back to Scotland about halfway through the novel -- and they're in a bit of a pickle, one that the King of France seems to think Lymond might be able to help them out of, or at least bear honest witness to. The King of France being something of a Lymond fanboy after Lymond's exploits last novel in defense of the six-year-old Mary, Queen of Scots, who is engaged to marry the King's son. Ah, dynastic politics!

The problem the Hospitallers face is the same one they were formed to face, namely the Turk, whom they've helped to protect Europe and bits of North Africa from for a good 400 years. But as of the late 16th century, though, well, the Knights have gone a bit to seed. The Grand Master is a bit of a jerk, and a Spanish jerk at that, and the Holy Roman Emperor being Spanish as well, unseating the GM and putting an effective leader in charge is tricky, especially when the good candidates for that job are all either French or Scottish...

Really there's only one Scottish candidate, though, a man in whom our Lymond has definitely met his match. Sir Graham Reid Mallett, nicknamed Gabriel, is everything Lymond is but turned up a notch: a great big gorgeous blue-eyed blonde who is also a genius, a brilliant leader of men, a great strategist, fighter and tactician, but also a holy man, because like the more famous Templars, the Hospitallers are all warrior monks, in the service of God and the Roman Catholic Church, priests with swords. When he and Lymond meet up, the whole world seems fixed to change. Gabriel becomes obsessed with winning Lymond over for Jeebus and won't take no for an answer; Lymond, of course, is loyal only to Scotland and his family and finds religion profoundly unnecessary, if not actually detrimental to a well-lived life. But like I said, Gabriel won't take no for an answer, and soon insinuates himself into every possible aspect of Lymond's life as the duo and a small contingent of Hospitallers first fail to defend various tiny Mediterranean islands from the Turkish onslaught and then, for an encore, lose the famous stronghold city of Tripoli to the Turks. Oops.

Covered in glory like that, what can they do but return to Scotland, where Gabriel has stashed his drop-dead gorgeous sister, Joleta, whom he has already intimated is his ace in the hole (umm) as far as winning Lymond's soul for Christ is concerned, because of course Lymond will convert for the privilege of maybe getting to schtup her. Really, kind of a Lymond thing to hope to do, as Lymond has, more than once, proven that he's not above seducing the odd strategically important round-heeled woman to achieve his goals. Did I mention Lymond has met his match here? Except that now we find there are two of them!

Of course by about two thirds of the way through the novel, the reader discovers she's misread pretty much everything, because the only person better at deception and red herringry than Lymond is his creator, Ms. Dunnett. But when it's artistes like these, it's a pleasure so to be fooled.

Meanwhile, there is everything one would turn to some good historical fiction like this in order to enjoy: more amazing sword fights, sieges, battles of all sorts, border reivers and the Hot Trodd law (and lots of other weird Renaissance English/Scottish border law), sexual politics and oh, about the sexual politics...

I've not yet mentioned the women of The Disorderly Knights, apart from the sex bomb Joleta, who is really the least interesting figure in the book. Most of my old favorites are back and getting good page time, with Lymond's mother Sybilla stealing scenes as usual, but also of note are two others, who come to the fore in this novel after kind of making me yawn in The Game of Kings and Queens Play: Oonagh O'Dwyer -- former mistress of a would-be king of Ireland, who spent most of Queens Play trying to abet her man in his plots to conspire with the French and Scots to throw the English out of Ireland (we all know how well that worked), only to have an encounter with Lymond that looks to turn out to be way more important than it seemed at the time -- and Philippa Somerville, twelve or thirteen-year-old daughter of an English lord who was friendly with Lymond back in the day but who herself hates Lymond like poison and spends a lot of The Disorderly Knights just entertainingly gnashing her teeth at him until circumstances and her own sense of fair play cause her to woman up and kick about 20 kinds of ass all over northern England and southern Scotland and become my new favorite Dorothy Dunnett lady.*

So I find myself so eager to tear into the next book, Pawn in Frankincense, that I don't see any reason not to, even though lots of other good stuff beckons from my to-be-read pile. I was warned that this might happen.

*Though her presence reminds me that my other favorite bratty Dunnett tween, Lady Agnes, has disappeared completely from this narrative, and that makes me a little sad. Agnes does not hold a candle to Philippa in the awesomeness department, but she was terribly amusing in The Game of Kings and I miss her a lot.

Dorothy Dunnett's QUEENS' PLAY #OneBookAtATime

I still think Francis Crawford of Lymond, the Master of Culter, is basically Lord Flashheart from Blackadder in subtler guise. But now, now he actually seems even more over the top than that.

In Queens' Play, the second of the six Lymond Chronicles, Lymond is amuck in France at the behest of the Scottish Dowager Queen Mother, Mary de Guise, whose seven-year-old daughter Mary, Queen of Scots, is being raised at the French court alongside her intended husband, the Dauphin, supposedly to keep her safe from the hated English. The little girl turns out to sorely need a guy like Lymond in her corner, because someone is making some truly outlandish attempts on her life. Elephants and cheetahs are used as would-be murder weapons, to give you some idea.

Ah, but good thing there is Lymond, the most accomplished and capable hero, maybe ever. I kid because I love, but really, there appears to be nothing this guy can't do. He is simply the best at everything, be it dialogue so subtle I'm not even sure he really knows what's going on (I sure never felt like I did, and I supposedly had the third person omniscient narrator on my side), as we already knew from The Game of Kings; fighting and sword play, ditto; disguise, ditto; but also it turns out he can juggle better than a professional entertainer, play all the musical instruments to a similar standard, sing like an angel... seriously, even given that his milieu is Life Before TV and all, who in the world ever had the time and energy to get that good at absolutely everything? I mean, the dude even competes brilliantly at what amounts to Renaissance parkour.

All this, and he spends most of the novel drunk out of his mind, too.

Lymond, in short, is the guy everybody wants on his or her side but whom nobody can be sure actually is, even when they're pretty sure he's said he would be. As in the previous novel, he spends a lot of his time concealing his identity from everyone, including the reader, who often thinks she knows which of the novel's other characters he's impersonating in a given scene but who turns out, often, to be wrong. It makes for maddening reading, but then, this is a great part of the fun, with Lymond, whose mystique Dunnett most carefully maintains by making sure his is the only point of view we never get to share, to whose thoughts we are never privy. Instead, entire, sometimes lengthy, scenes come from the perspective of a throwaway character like, say, a nobleman's wife whose dinner is incommoded, whose superficial impressions of Lymond's appearance and behavior are all we get to work with -- even as Dunnett adds an extra layer of opacity to it all by summarizing dialogue as obliquely as possible. We are often told of, for instance, someone using a unique and colorful phrase, but I guess we are supposed to work out which phrase all on our own? Based on our great erudition regarding all matters lexical, continental and Renaissance?

Sigh.

But amid all the bafflement, there is again some astonishingly good action writing. Swordplay, hunting, horse racing through a tower, the aforementioned Renaissance parkour, all have an immediacy and a breakneck pace that few writers could equal, in any age. It's as though Umberto Eco were writing a script for Tony Scott, or something. And yes, these scenes are well-placed, as if to wake up the reader who is getting a little weary of all the subtlety and archaic wit.

But speaking of wit, or at least of its cousin, humor, the thing that I missed this time around, though, was the entertaining array of supporting characters from the first novel. No Jonathan Crouch types here; everybody is in deadly and often dull earnest, and while the figure of Prince O'Liamroe seems to have been intended as a bit of comic relief in that vein, he's just not as fun. And no counterpart for Sybella or Lady Agnes appears at all. This may be the fault of the setting and the higher stakes, but I missed this element dreadfully, and no amount of cheetah coursing really made up for the lack.

I'm still in for the rest of the Lymond Chronicles, though. I just need some time to rest ze brain a little, from this one.

100 Books #86 - Dorothy Dunnett's THE GAME OF KINGS

Dorothy Dunnett is absolutely the female Bernard Cornwell. Or rather, more temporally accurately, Bernard Cornwell is the male Dorothy Dunnett, since her career as a writer of historical fiction predates his by many years. But anyway, you get my point.

The Game of Kings is Dunnett's first novel of the Lymond Chronicles, which take place in one of the most fascinating periods in European history, the 16th Century. We do not get to see Henry VIII or Francis le Grand Nez, but we do get to see their descendants and relations jockeying for power all over Europe -- but not directly. Oh, a crowned head or aspirant to a crown might turn up here and there for a scene or two, but Dunnett, and by extension we, are more interested in the people immediately below them, the lords and ladies and functionaries and footsoldiers whose lives get warped and changed by the royal/imperial/papal knightly/papal intrigues. And one of these in particular.

Francis Crawford of Lymond is the younger son of a member of the Scottish nobility whose roguish tendencies are so over the top as to be entirely worthy, to judge from this first book, of the six novels Dunnett has devoted to him. In The Game of Kings his sphere of labor is Scotland alone during the time of England's very aggressive campaign to woo/abduct the four-year-old Mary Queen of Scots as a wife for the nine-year-old Edward VI of England -- a campaign which we all know was unsuccessful but maybe not the details of how and why it was so. At least I didn't know much about that, to my shame. Since remedied!

This war is only a backdrop to a dizzying array of plots, conspiracies and mysteries centered on this Lymond character, who isn't even supposed to be in Scotland, so naughty has he been in the past. Oh, he is a fascinating character, dazzlingly well-spoken, crafty, dissembling, mysterious -- in short, the last sort of person you want to be sitting across from at a chess board, unless you just want to watch yourself lose spectacularly in the hopes of gaining some instruction. I am that sort of person, a terrible chess player who can't resist the game's allure nonetheless, and a worse fibber.*

So naturally I love a good rogue, though Lymond sometimes plays rather rougher than I usually like. Isn't that always the way? But Lymond seems to play roughest of all with his allies, as happens early on in The Game of Kings, when he manipulates a new team member into betraying himself as untrustworthy, but does so in such a way that, well, here --

So there it was. First, corporal punishment, carefully applied. Next, spiritual chastisement -- and not the obvious open ridicule. Not with Lymond. Instead, the dreadful humiliation of accepting his own reputation, intact, from the chastising hand. That, and the corollary that Lymond found him so incosiderable that he could cheerfully add to his stature.

Furthermore, part of the humiliation is being rescued by Lymond himself in hilarious fashion, with Lymond disguised as a ridiculous Spanish grandee and all but rolling his eyes and twirling his mustaches as he makes off with his erring teammate, the goods said teammate stole, plus some extra horses the "grandee" has wheedled the teammate's victim into supplying -- hey, they no longer have food for those horses anyway, thanks to Lymond's team. Ho ho!

So yes, Lymond is a character in a million, but he is not the only one. Oh no. There is the "wittily obese" professional prisoner-of-war Jonathan Crouch, who is traded around like "a promissary note on two legs" and who drives his captors/purchasers/hosts crazy with long-winded stories and recollections that go nowhere. There is the Lady Christian, blind but exercising superhuman acumen with her other four senses, whip-smart and managing, despite her sex and station, to involve herself fully in the novel's intrigues. There is Lymond's brother, Richard Lord Culter, the good, boring one who is constantly outshone by Lymond's entertaining but sometimes deadly antics. There are those amazing biddies, Richard's and Lymond's mother, Sybilla, the Dowager Lady Culter, who is a Wodehousian/Wildean Aunt centuries before her time, as is the Dowager Lady Hunter, ruling a world from her sickbed. There is a holy terror of a 13-year-old heiress, Lady Agnes, whose dreams of romance and chivalry wind up thickening the plot more than I would have thought possible. And there is a host of other nobles and their hangers-on, Scottish and English, who spend a lot of the novel trying to figure out whose side Lymond is on, if he's on any at all -- and we, the readers don't know either! Even after we've decoded a key signifier regarding identity in this novel, we still don't know.** That's masterful.

But lest we think it's all politics and plotting -- it's not. For one thing, the single greatest literary sword fight I have ever read takes place in this volume, and is followed by one of the most desperate chases.

By the way, I'm totally awarding myself bonus points for almost being able to read this novel without thinking of Lord Flashheart every single page. It was more like every other page. But come on! Even the eye color is about right for Lymond!



Though, to be fair, let's say Lymond is half Lord Flashheart, half Evil Prince Ludwig from the "Chains" Episode of Blackadder the Second. But, you know, Scottish.

*I do not claim to be a poor liar in that people can see through my lies -- I'm actually quite good at that, coming from a long line of bullshitters. It's the coming up with the fibs that eludes me. I'm not quick enough. The pause during which I might come up with a whopper is just a hair too long and gives me away, even though I've schooled myself against all the classic tells. Possibly because I've schooled myself? I don't know. Anyway, I suck at it.

**At least I didn't, not entirely, not until the last ten percent or so of the book, largely taken up with a big trial scene which, while satisfyingly clarifying all of the lingering narrative questions posed within the novel, is really kind of a dreary info-dump. Though within it, I learned about something I'd never really considered before. And that always makes me happy. And now I want to read this.