The Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett

The Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book, and how I feeeeeel about this book. They demand flights of eloquence and rhetorical brilliance that I just don’t have right now. Or probably ever, if I’m honest, not for this.



It’s only the second time I’ve read this cover-to-cover. But pieces of this book are graven into me. Particular turns of phrase from scenes I’ve read over again – “I despised men who accepted their fate. I shaped mine twenty times and had it broken twenty times in my hands.” And more fundamental things. I remembered the fact of Lymond’s speech about patriotism, but not it’s chilling, blazing content. Yet when I got to it again, it rang my whole brain like a bell because it turns out I did remember, I just remembered so far down it felt like it came from me.



It’s a book with speeches, let me just repeat that.



Okay, some actual content. This is Scotland, 1547, conflict sparking with England, France circling. It’s a story of nations, but mostly it’s about the lost son coming home, about his brother’s marriage bending and bending until the cracks show, it’s about his extraordinary mother, and their friends, and a long, awful, painful coming in from the cold. I love them all so much I am helpless about it. This is a ridiculous, absurd book where the main character is incomprehensible 75% of the time if you don’t have a Ph.D. in sixteenth-century literature, and you don’t have the faintest idea what anything means for about 500 pages, and I love it as passionately and unreservedly as all its excesses demand. It's about the flaw, the break, the shattering, and building strength from personal anialation. And in the last, a humanitarianism so strong, it feels brutal.



...Nope, definitely don't have it in me.



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