Ellen Kushner on Dorothy Dunnett
Ellen Kushner, author of Swordspoint
Without Dorothy Dunnett, I would never have written my first novel, or published my first short story. Both were written in conversation with – maybe even to counter, a little – the bodyslam that The Lymond Chronicles had dealt me since I’d begun on The Game of Kings at university a few years previous.
Then and now, I refer to The Lymond Chronicles as “Dorothy Dunnett’s Six-Volume School for Young Authors.” As I read the series, and she put me through the wringer with each book, I became obsessed with her technique. I knew she was pulling all sorts of tricks – but how? How?? I was an unsuccessful English Literature student. Writing papers on the virtues of Wordsworth’s poetry was not for me: What was the point? But considering the words of a living writer with an eye to learning to improve my own writing, that made sense. It was useful. It gave my literary teeth something to chew on – to suck out the juices, to devour.
And so my novel, Swordspoint: a Melodrama of Manners (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987 etc.), was an attempt to engage the reader utterly with the affairs of a charismatic yet villainous couple, while keeping the narrative as spare and devious as possible. The story (which I was writing at the same time, but managed to finish and publish much sooner), “The Unicorn Masque,” (in Elsewhere, New York: Ace Books, 1981) is about an altogether too perfect, too brilliant, too attractive deadly lutenist courtier (who is secretly a woman, transformed).
Dorothy Dunnett is a part of my literary DNA. I will never get her out of my system now. And I never want to.
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