Lymond
I am reading Queen’s Play and what an awesome book it is. When I first read it, years ago, it was my least favorite of the bunch (though I did like it a lot) but now I adore it.
Her writing is so beautiful. And once again, I am strcuk by parallels. The night Lymond spends with Oonagh, where he gives her a gift of forgetting who she is (and even who he is) is both similar and different from his night at the very end of LC with Philippa, because there too, with Philippa, he is able to let go of everything and forget everything but the “needs of his body” but there is no forgetting of whom he is with because the whole point is that he is with Philippa, whom he loves more than anything.
I am also loving Richard here but what I want to talk about is Robin Stewart. I was much younger when I first read this and I didn’t reread it since, so it completely escaped me that he is in love with Lymond. Thwarted and obsessive love. I think Robin (and his reactions, and his death) are a big part of the reason why Lymond reacts to Philippa the way he does in CM, by holding on to the believe that her love is infatuation, brought by his ‘glamor’ and that it would hurt her. Because part of it is his usual dichotomy: he knows he is gorgeous outside but believes himself to be hideous monster inside, and that is why the Thady disguise: I think part of it is his belief to match the outside to inside and part to see if he can achieve things disburdened of his looks. But a part of it is because Robin brought most forcefully home to him how someone can fall under his spell, without knowing the real Lymond and suffer for it.
I think perhaps (jumping ahead) that is why his struggle with Gabriel is the scariest. Gabriel is Lymond’s dark mirror, what Lymond would be if he abandoned his overwhelming humanity and was what people in GoK thought he was, down to the incest.
Her writing is so beautiful. And once again, I am strcuk by parallels. The night Lymond spends with Oonagh, where he gives her a gift of forgetting who she is (and even who he is) is both similar and different from his night at the very end of LC with Philippa, because there too, with Philippa, he is able to let go of everything and forget everything but the “needs of his body” but there is no forgetting of whom he is with because the whole point is that he is with Philippa, whom he loves more than anything.
I am also loving Richard here but what I want to talk about is Robin Stewart. I was much younger when I first read this and I didn’t reread it since, so it completely escaped me that he is in love with Lymond. Thwarted and obsessive love. I think Robin (and his reactions, and his death) are a big part of the reason why Lymond reacts to Philippa the way he does in CM, by holding on to the believe that her love is infatuation, brought by his ‘glamor’ and that it would hurt her. Because part of it is his usual dichotomy: he knows he is gorgeous outside but believes himself to be hideous monster inside, and that is why the Thady disguise: I think part of it is his belief to match the outside to inside and part to see if he can achieve things disburdened of his looks. But a part of it is because Robin brought most forcefully home to him how someone can fall under his spell, without knowing the real Lymond and suffer for it.
I think perhaps (jumping ahead) that is why his struggle with Gabriel is the scariest. Gabriel is Lymond’s dark mirror, what Lymond would be if he abandoned his overwhelming humanity and was what people in GoK thought he was, down to the incest.