The Lymond Chronicles by Dorothy Dunnett

[lightreads]

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.

Comments

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

I think you, in particular, will like these. I mean, I think anyone worth knowing will like these in that way you do when you love something that much, but certain strands of Dunnett have a lot fo congruiety with the bits you've written out from Bujold.