Deborah Harkness on Dorothy Dunnett
Deborah Harkness, author of the All Souls trilogy
I ADORE Dorothy Dunnett and as I type I’m looking at my full set of novels on the “precious items” shelf in my office.
I bought the entire Lymond Chronicles between 8/15/1986 and 8/26/1986. I bought the first one to take on my very first business trip on the recommendation of my undergraduate honors thesis advisers. I devoured it in two days, and had to roam the bookstores of Colorado in search of Volume II. Having learned my lesson, I bought all the rest of them the moment I got back home so I wouldn’t be caught short during an all-night reading binge.
“Lymond is back.” I remember the tingle of excitement I got reading that first line of The Game of Kings. Then, I didn’t know who Lymond was, or why he was important, or where he had been—I just knew I had to hear more. And I did, devouring all fourteen volumes of my favorite historical series. I also remember the sense of satisfaction when I read the last line of Gemini: “Here endis the buke of the ches.” Those two lines capture Dunnett’s ability to control her story, plot, and characters.
As a budding historian, I was thrilled with the inside jokes and snatches of song and phrases in foreign tongues, intent on the easter eggs I needed to track down, and awestruck by Dunnett’s mastery of what was happening across Europe during a critical and complicated moment in the past. She plunged you into the sixteenth and fifteenth centuries without apology or coddling, and you wanted to swim in it forever. Dunnett’s work was—and remains—utterly immersive. When reading it, one is swept away on a magic carpet stitched with painstaking care and incredible attention to detail, stopping in Scotland and Venice, Bruges and Rhodes. Her mind was formidable, and her insights into the human experience, refracted through the lens of history, are nothing short of breathtaking.
I wouldn’t be a historian or a novelist were it not for Dorothy Dunnett’s magical ability to interweave fact and fiction.
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