Helen Hollick on Dorothy Dunnett
Helen Hollick, author of the Pendragon’s Banner trilogy
I left secondary school at the age of sixteen in 1969 and became a library assistant. I’d always had my nose in a book: characters remain good friends (in many instances, for life,) do not tease or bully, and do not mind that you are shy and a little scared of the real world.
The advantage of working in a library was the unlimited access to those wonderful novels waiting to be enjoyed. I discovered historical fiction in the pages of Rosemary Sutcliff. Wanting more, I picked up a Dorothy Dunnett – a new arrival into the library: Checkmate, the sixth in The Lymond Chronicles. I had the pleasure of processing the book, gluing in the return date label and the pocket for the book’s charge card.
Curious, I read the opening lines:
What the celebration at the castle had been, Austin Grey had never discovered. He rode in to his tryst at the Tournai and found the inn ankle-deep in drunk burghers, thronging the common room and spilling out into the courtyard where inoffensive travellers like himself were attempting to sup their bread and mutton and chicory salad in the airless July dusk of Douai.
I confess: I was alone in the office. I abandoned the new books waiting to be processed and continued reading.
I had wanted to be a writer since the age of thirteen. School, apart from my Welsh Dragon of an English teacher, was unhelpful. My careers’ talk: “I want to write,” I whispered. “Don’t be silly, Helen, you can’t type. But maybe a library is for you,” came the reply. The library bit was useful, the rest was, well, condescending. Writers, I thought were clever people who went to university and had degrees. Were not know-nothings like me.
The need to write is compulsive when there is a story to tell and characters are clamouring in your head to be noticed and made real in the pages of a book, even if it is only an exercise book purchased from Woolworths. By my late teens I was experimenting with writing fantasy and science fiction, but then discovered the joy of historical fiction. Reading those wonderful opening lines that afternoon sparked a glowing ember into a raging wildfire of enthralled desire. Wow! I wanted to write like that!
I was interested in King Arthur, discovering that his legend came from post-Roman Britain not the Medieval knights, that early theatre of his possible existence intrigued me. Where to start? How to bring him to life? How could I, a Secondary School girl with a minor grade GCE English have the audacity to think that I could strip away the popular myth and write a novel about a fifth-century Arthur?
Those opening sentences of Dorothy Dunnett’s had shouted at me: “This is how you do it! You see a scene and describe it down to the smallest detail. You climb into your character’s head and become him. You research your facts. You tell a story that is thundering with passion, along with everything else that you can throw at it.”
It took me ten years (and reading every novel of Ms Dunnett’s) to write what eventually became The Kingmaking. A week after my 40th birthday in April 1993, I was accepted for publication for what turned out to be enough written words for parts one and two of a trilogy.
I will never be as good as Dorothy Dunnett, but I’ve tried my best and I thank her for the inspiration behind my enthusiasm.
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