King Hereafter
I'm about halfway through Dorothy Dunnett's King Hereafter. Oh damn, it's really getting good. Dunnett is a Scottish writer (now unfortunately passed) that was suggested to me first in Iceland, by my fellow student Scott (a professor by trade). While her style can sometimes be a bit dense (others also complain it can be slow), it is very entertaining, suspenseful, and challenges you as a reader, which I think more writers should do. And the geek of me rejoices that she uses so many different languages and references so many medieval texts. Her main characters are strikingly intelligent and she guides the reader so that at times we are perhaps one or two steps behind their masterful minds, and every time it blows your mind a little how and why they managed to do what they do. I really think that Dunnett shall join Tolkien in my mini-fandom of authors I'd like to emulate in one fashion or another.
King Hereafter is, compared to the first book of her Lymond Chronicles, more parsable in my opinion. Then again, it is dealing with things Norse, so maybe it's just because of the subject that I find it so easy. Through a little bit of research I found out that she was contracted to write "the first properly researched historical novel on the real Macbeth, on which there is ample academic material." (The site is, to a point, full of spoilers, so I have not read all of it) It then took her four years of research before she came to a choice of either writing a historical novel as intended or publish a non-fiction case for a new theory about MacBeth that she came to during her research (she said it's the only way for the story to make sense). It took her another year to write this novel.
Ya...if you've never read her, I do suggest it. I really can't wait to finish this book. I started it a while ago, picked it back up several weeks ago, and went from a third to a half of the book in the last few days. It's really hard to put it down. And I think I'm going to go back to it right now.
King Hereafter is, compared to the first book of her Lymond Chronicles, more parsable in my opinion. Then again, it is dealing with things Norse, so maybe it's just because of the subject that I find it so easy. Through a little bit of research I found out that she was contracted to write "the first properly researched historical novel on the real Macbeth, on which there is ample academic material." (The site is, to a point, full of spoilers, so I have not read all of it) It then took her four years of research before she came to a choice of either writing a historical novel as intended or publish a non-fiction case for a new theory about MacBeth that she came to during her research (she said it's the only way for the story to make sense). It took her another year to write this novel.
Ya...if you've never read her, I do suggest it. I really can't wait to finish this book. I started it a while ago, picked it back up several weeks ago, and went from a third to a half of the book in the last few days. It's really hard to put it down. And I think I'm going to go back to it right now.