“Fiddle-de-dee’s not English.”

Queens’ Play by Dorothy Dunnett
Vintage (1997) (First published 1964)
432 pages

This is the second book in Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles. To put things simply (and to avoid any spoilers whatsoever for this or the first book), let’s just say that in this instalment, Francis Crawford of Lymond goes to France.

Uh.

Now I’m stuck. I want to keep these things spoiler-free, but at the same time I just want to flail about. Let’s mention the first line then, since everyone does. It goes: “She wanted Crawford of Lymond.” (And I thought, with an exasperated huff, startling the person standing beside me in the bookstore, who doesn’t?, and I just know that anyone who had enjoyed the first book was thinking the same thing.) But then you notice who it is who wants Lymond and for what, and you can’t help but feel sorry for poor old Tom Erskine, who just happens to be there at the moment. I like Tom Erskine. And his wife Margaret. Come to think of it, what this particular book lacks is strong primary female characters. Thankfully this is remedied most wonderfully in the following books.

Whatever I said about this first book still applies here: there are still shenanigans (though I can’t quite remember if the Spanish make any appearances here — perhaps not — but we definitely have the Irish) and impersonations and court intrigue and people quoting stuff, but for some reason this was easier to read than The Game of Kings. Perhaps it’s because I know what to expect, and was able to simply ignore the quotes and the French phrases and the many people named Janet and Margaret and Mary and all the lords and ladies with titles that were pretty much indistinguishable to me and Lymond’s theatrics. Not that his theatrics are necessarily a bad thing — it was just that his behaviour left me confounded for most of the time in the first book. And his self-destructive tendencies. And this strange, strange behaviour of expecting no one would ever understand him and this habit of never asking for help.

The ending of this book didn’t quite pack a punch as The Game of Kings did, and I think this is the last book you’d be able to finish without desperately wanting the next book in the series. Finishing the next book, The Disorderly Knights, without Pawn in Frankincense in hand would just be pure torture.

Also! There are elephants in this book!

Ah, I give up with the no-spoilers policy. Continue with caution!

Spoilers below. (Apparently this doesn’t get cut off anymore in RSS readers? Or is Google Reader acting weird for me?)

I’m more invested in the Scottish characters I guess — Sybilla and Richard and Sir Wat and Will Scott — that being in France felt mostly strange and I kept waiting for familiar faces to appear. I was disappointed we didn’t get to see Sybilla more here. And the sibling dynamics between Richard and Francis fascinate me. The scene that stands out most in my mind is the conversation between Lymond and Richard in Lymond’s rooms, after he was poisoned. I think it was also about the same time that I began wondering in earnest how old Lymond was — I knew he was young, but Richard seems to think he’s very, very young — the earlier conversation in The Game of Kings about Will Scott, and Richard saying that Francis is “only a boy” here — and I actually gave an outburst of surprise when I learned much later (in Pawn in Frankincense) how old he was. And god, what is with this man and his apparent abandon with his life?

Archie Arbenethy is one of my favourite characters!

I don’t have strong feelings any way or another about Oonagh O’Dwyer. What a name. How do you pronounce that; “Una”? O’LiamRoe was also strange. I never quite knew if he was for or against whatever it was Lymond was up to at the point — in fact, I was never entirely sure what O’LiamRoe was doing in France in the first place. I never quite knew what to make of Robin Stewart either, though Lymond seems desperate to get out his hero-worshipping ways.

I like Lymond’s relationship with his young queen, though. They seem really fond of each other. Lymond, on finding the queen was not in bed when he expected her to be: “. . . is the girl a turnip?” and I found that line inanely funny. I wonder if it means anything. Also, Mary saw through the disguise. Smart girl. I was amused by that.

My copy of the book is the Vintage edition, and I think I rather like the Penguin edition of The Game of Kings better. I don’t really like the typeset Vintage uses: it’s a bit small and a tad — I guess a good word would be smudgy, the way the text seems too black sometimes — smudgy at places, and it gets really hard to read when you’re so tired and sleepy but you can’t stop reading because you’re spluttering in a sort of astonished horror at what Lymond is doing at that moment.

I was able to take a break from the series and read something else after I finished Queens’ Play. I wasn’t able to do that after the next book, though — seriously, the series is addictive!