The Lymond Chronicles by Dorothy Dunnett

The Game of Kings, Queen's Play, The Disorderly Knights, Pawn in Frankincense, The Ringed Castle, Checkmate

Being a chronicle of a decade in the life of Francis Crawford, brilliant younger son of a Scottish noble family in the full flower of the sixteenth century. Soldier, spy, poet, musician, cold bastard, political thinker ahead of his time, possessed by a humanitarianism so deep it turns right back around into viciousness. The six books take us through his tumultuous twenties in Scotland, France, Malta, Turkey, Russia. He is an outlaw and an advisor to kings by turns, and he has a line of poetry for every occasion.

I plowed through all three thousand pages two weeks ago, actually, staying up until dawn more than once. It's taken me this long to write about first because of exams, and second because I needed some time to breathe a bit and stop frantically flipping through to reread favorite bits while making high-pitched squeaking noises.

I . . . oh. I have not loved books like this in . . . it's been years. The first one takes a few hundred pages, but when it hits it hits hard, and the next thing you know you're shrieking into your pillow at three in the morning. These books are hysterically funny, achingly painful, sharp enough to cut yourself on nearly every page. They work so well as a block of dense, erudite, complex machinery that they gather up their own flaws and repurpose them into brilliance. The purple prose opens up hearts otherwise left opaque by the omniscient narrator. The repeatedly slow starts transform when you're not looking into the sort of grinding tension that keeps your hands shaking through hundreds of pages. The literary references, so numerous as to be laughable in anyone else's hands, are so carefully selected as to be comprehensible even when I couldn't place the source.
Please note: the above paragraph was written in an attempt to bring coherence to the urge to go 'Francis Crawford! EEEEEE!' Success may vary.

Brilliant, complicated to the point of baroqueness, extraordinarily demanding books. Worth every second.

The Unicorn Hunt, To Lie With Lions by Dorothy Dunnett

Faced with the impossible question of what you read after the Lymond chronicles, I went for more Dunnett. Books 4-6 of the post-written prequel series, set 90 years earlier. Nicholas, firmly in command of his fortunes, has just received a pair of grievous shocks on his wedding night. The Unicorn Hunt takes him to Scotland for the first time, and from there to Egypt and back, and then to Iceland. And it takes the length of both these large books for the full scope of his response to tragedy to unfold.

Okay, the problem is, coming straight off Lymond, these books are really cold. Particularly these two, in which Nicholas's detachment reaches frightening proportions. But more than that, these books don't have a holding center. That's the point, really – that's what Nicholas is trying to build while it's what Francis Crawford inherits in Scotland and his family. But I felt the lack a lot.

They're gorgeous books though, of course. Exquisitely balanced, screamingly funny, quite painful in places. And massive points for the portrayal of an actual friendship between a man and a woman. I really know her game at this point, though, so I called over half the major plot twists. Dunnett dances along that fine line between beautifully recursive plots that circle on themselves like an intricate spiral, and just plain repetition. It definitely works, though.