Stumbling with Precision

According to Dorothy Dunnett’s fans, she is one of Scotland’s greatest writers. They descend on Edinburgh for their annual symposium on Dorothy Dunnett Day. They read the books alongside a 900-page Dorothy Dunnett Companion. They maintain two rival Dorothy Dunnett websites, and a Dorothy Dunnett Twitter feed, squabbling over every detail of the books with a heartfelt but rather off-putting enthusiasm. Since discovering Dorothy’s delights during frequent long railway journeys, I have joined their ranks. What we train commuters require is shaggy-dog stories, the longer the better, funny, intricate and with plenty of dashing about. I close my eyes and listen to the audiobooks, a remarkable performance by the Scottish voice actor David Monteath.

The Lymond Chronicles (1961–75) follow Francis Crawford of Lymond, a younger son – and perhaps not even that – of a minor Scottish noble family, who rises to become one of the leading spies and generals of sixteenth-century Europe. We begin in the war-torn Scotland of the child queen Mary, as the feuding nobility struggles to pull itself together to resist the English invasion by Lord Protector Somerset. Lymond is understood by all to be a traitor and a murderer, and he must battle to clear his name and (reluctantly) save Scotland. It is not too much of a plot spoiler to reveal that he succeeds and survives for a further five books, the last of which is called, ominously, Checkmate. He and his entourage of deliciously treacherous Franco-Scottish aristocrats are carried through a trail of ever more exotic and perilous locations. To the glamorous court of the French king Henri II; to Malta with the Knights of St John; to the dazzling Constantinople of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent; to the cold, crazed Moscow of Ivan the Terrible. Always there is an innocent whom Lymond must protect; always a disguised villain whom Lymond must unmask; always a gaggle of friends and hangers-on whom Lymond cajoles, mesmerizes and terrifies. There is also always a clunky exposition scene in which someone scratches his chin and says something along the lines of ‘I don’t need to tell you, Francis, that Scotland is a pawn of the French king in his desperate power-struggle with the Spanish Emperor, as the continent descends into a ruinous war of religion, menaced by the Ottoman threat. To meddle with these guys would be a BIG mistake.’ We recently passed the centenary of Dunnett’s birth in August 1923. She became a novelist in her thirties: there are two rival stories about how she began writing. The official version is that having finished all the novels of Alexandre Dumas, Georgette Heyer and C. S. Forester, she had simply run out of the kind of books she liked to read. So her husband, Alastair Dunnett, a distinguished newspaper editor, suggested she write her own. The better story is that a family friend, Ian Fleming, announced to the Dunnetts that he was planning to write a novel about ‘a spy to end all spies’. Dunnett thought to herself, well if he can do it, and picked up her pen. One of the worst ways to gain an insight into Dunnett’s life is to listen to her Desert Island Discs interview with Roy Plomley. She presents herself as a respectable Edinburgh housewife, cooking and cleaning all day, creeping to her study to write the novels by night, coming down in the morning to get the children’s breakfast. Plomley is charmed, amused, gelatinous; Dunnett is modest and self-deprecating. She tells him that Lymond was modelled on her husband. No one mentions that her books are studded with poetry quoted in Scots, French, Spanish, Italian, Latin, Greek, Gaelic, Arabic, Persian and Russian. Search for her picture on Google Images. She looks like your school’s adored but formidable headmistress: well-bred, well-read, no-nonsense. She attended the James Gillespie School for Girls in Edinburgh a few years below Muriel Spark. Her best writing has something of Spark’s impatient, witty spikiness – though none of Spark’s compression. Her books also invite comparison with Hilary Mantel’s: they share both a Tudor setting and an interest in the inner emotions of an outwardly ruthless hero. But she has none of Mantel’s otherworldliness, the constant walking with the spirits that haunt Thomas Cromwell (and Mantel herself). Ghosts there are in Dunnett, but the only secrets they whisper are that their death was not an accident but all part of a nefarious plot. Dunnett wrote in the tradition of nineteenth-century writers of bright, sprawling historical romances. There is actually a character in the books called Walter Scott, Laird of Buccleuch – rough, big-hearted and unreliable. The decade that it took Ian Fleming to churn out the first eight James Bond novels, Dunnett spent in the National Library of Scotland, working her way through hundreds of books and piles of original documents. The result, The Game of Kings, appeared in 1961, the year before Sean Connery’s first outing in the film of Dr No. Bond and Lymond are both specimen Scottish swashbucklers, superspies and prize fighters. But there the similarities end. Bond is a little boy, with his fast cars and his expensive watch that does tricks. Lymond is a Renaissance prince: a master-strategist, polymath, poet, musician, clown; he is a Scottish Machiavelli, a Medici, a Michelangelo and a Falstaff. Unlike beefy Bond, Lymond is slender, delicate, with all the younger son’s determination to prove himself. We are repeatedly told that he has flowing golden hair and piercing, long-lashed blue eyes, like a girl’s. We almost never see events from Lymond’s point of view; we can never guess what he is thinking. He goes missing for long periods, and when present he is inaccessible, maddening, hostile. He is superhumanly arrogant and wilfully self-destructive. He is frail. In each book Dunnett devises a yet more inventive method of wounding, weakening or incapacitating him. His vulnerability keeps us turning the pages as it keeps his friends by his side, often against their better judgement. Do not be fooled into thinking this is a Hollywood narrative in which the egotistical hero learns how he has to depend on others. Even while his friends are nursing and protecting him, Lymond is rolling his eyes, telling them what an inconvenience they are, how they diminish his grandeur. The friends still stick by him, just as his enemies always underestimate him. Lymond’s weaknesses prove the springboard for his most demonic strengths: his cunning, his brutality, his endurance. These qualities win the day, but it is never clear how well they can be reconciled, if at all, with his unwanted and painful ability to feel sympathy for others. Dunnett’s books were initially picked up by the American publisher Lois Dwight Cole, also responsible for Gone with the Wind. Early editions were jacketed as bodice-ripping romances – misleadingly, as many readers must have learned to their unpleasant surprise. Still, Lymond is of interest as a kind of anti-Bond, an exemplum of a 1960s thinking woman’s crumpet. A consistent type falls for him in each of the books: youngish, level-headed, brisk, clever women whose job it is to mind the princesses and keep the estates running while the men fight. They inwardly melt but they’re too smart to make fools of themselves. Dunnett has great fun tormenting them with Lymond, who remains distant, courteous, teasing, while the menfolk scowl and shake their heads. Only we know that Lymond in fact harbours a morbid fear of intimacy, and imposes on himself a Spartan discipline, self-denying, self-loathing and (it seems) irresistibly appealing. What Dunnett is really interested in is another kind of attraction. This is the quintessential Renaissance theme of passionate and rivalrous friendship between men. Call it fraternity, or perhaps rather frenmity. Even more than for women, Lymond exerts his most powerful magnetism upon the puppyish, impressionable boys who simultaneously idolize and resent him, who try desperately to impress him while always bungling things. These men sometimes show sexual interest in Lymond, and a few of them – it is strongly hinted, though never shown – are even indulged. The phantom gay subplot is an unfortunate habit that presumably came across to 1960s readers as rather daring, but it seems dated now (critics sometimes refer to it as ‘queer-baiting’). Homosexual desires are often used as a code for unlikeable characters. Elsewhere Dunnett comes up with some ingenious contrivances to enable her male characters to acknowledge their feelings while retaining her sympathy. Dunnett’s plots may be melodramatic; her villains may be paper-thin and her values dated. But her characters have serious emotional depth. Where she reveals her absolute, audacious brilliance is in the set-pieces. Battles, chase scenes, fistfights and pratfalls; all are described in vivid and playful prose, whirling out of control with edge-of-the-seat tension, with gloriously undignified comedy, but also with beckoning shadows of danger and of real damage. A night of frantic dissipation at the French court is described as ‘a vortex of ecstatic improvisation’ – not a bad description of Dunnett’s gift for careering from unhinged clowning to vicious tests of physical endurance. There are riches in every book. Those that stand out for me include a midnight race across the rooftops of Blois, a desperate fight against fire in a cellar in Tripoli, and a treacherous voyage around the Arctic coast of Norway. Without giving too much away, the first book, The Game of Kings, begins with a madcap chase through an Edinburgh townhouse. We are taken to a greasy wrestling match in a Borders tavern and to a bizarre archery contest in which competitors shoot at a ‘papingo’, a parrot that swears with an Aberdeen accent. Dunnett’s speciality is hand-to-hand combat: in The Game of Kings an extended swordfight is described in balletic and excruciating detail. We see Lymond, perhaps for the first time in his life, stretched to the limit, his breath rasping, ‘his concentration a tangible and frightening thing’. Even at this extreme, he remains both beautiful and infuriating, still wisecracking and quoting poetry, still neatly evading his opponent, ‘stumbling with precision’ with a ‘sweet, invisible turn’. The fight – as always in Dunnett – is laced with political tension, as the fate of Scotland hangs on the outcome. But it is also laced, more importantly, with a volatile cocktail of rancour, jealousy and love between the combatants. About the latter, nothing more can be said without spoiling the story. But there is a serious theme at the heart of all Dunnett’s romping and wrestling. She explores, with a grown-up and unromantic interest, the arts of leadership, something that recent experience suggests we might benefit from thinking more about. She is interested in the skills and sheer hard labour involved in getting human beings – querulous and cowardly as we are – to combine their strengths and work together. Lymond knows his band of not-always-trustworthy friends will follow him devotedly, but he also knows that they will make mistakes and get hurt. ‘Handling men is his profession,’ one observer says of him. ‘For you are a leader – don’t you know it?’ demands another. The books follow his struggle to come to terms with his undoubted talent and the responsibilities and costs it imposes.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 81 © Niall Allsopp 2024