Game of Kings

Rating:
Summary: Few first novels are superb, but Dunnett did it
Review: I began reading the Lymond Chronicles when I was 18, and read as much of the series of six books as I possessed at least once a year (sometimes twice!) until The Ringed Castle was published when I was in my mid thirties. Difficult, challenging, wonderful writing, plotting like unto the Gordian Knot, and a protagonist that brooks no comparison. The challenge for me with Game of Kings (with its wondrous first chapter!) is that there is a predecessor book "understood" before it which the reader must write in her/his own mind, as well as the overarching "book" of his parents' love story. This is reading for grown-ups, and smart ones at that! Dunnett is the best historical writer I know, with the funniest, most tragic, most graphic eye and ear there is. Read it, and the others; give it to the people you cherish. Game of Kings will introduce you to characters that will mystify you, awe you, and challenge you to out-think them.

Rating:
Summary: The best historical novels ever written in this century
Review: I first read the Crawford of Lymond series in the 1970's. I started The Game of Kings and abandoned it after 100 pages; I picked it up a year later and began again, and, once I hit my stride, could not stop until I had read all six. Many writers want you to believe their protagonist is of surpassing intelligence, but one rarely believes it, because the author doesn't have the intellectual firepower to bring it off. Dunnett does. The series is a joy for many reasons: the historical accuracy, the complex characters and plot, and, not least, the extraordinary way she brings it all together in the last pages of the last volume. As I look at the comments of others, I get tired of hearing Americans whine about others using foreign languages when they write; it is our shortcoming that so few of us have even a passing familiarity with other languages. We would be the better for a little stretching of our own intellects through a more thorough acquaintance with other languages, history, and culture.

What is it about the Scots that make them such good romantic figures, in a way that others, the English, the French, the Italians, etc., never achieve? All that wild Highland blood (even in the most civilized, like Lymond) or something else? No matter; you can't do any better than this series.

Rating:
Summary: Amazing Characterizations
Review: My first experience with Dunnett was the House of Niccolo series, which was an utter delight. But I must say that after reading this first book in the Lymond Chronicles that I have even more respect for Dunnett's writing ability than I thought possible. I humbly bow in adoration. It's incredible to think that the very first novel Dunnett ever wrote could be such a crowning achievement. I hope the rest of the novels in this series keep pace.

Dunnett's strengths are perhaps more pronounced in The Game of Kings than in anything I have ever read. While the Niccolo series was masterfully strategic and unpredictable, the Lymond Chronicles-so far-have the added flair of unyielding personality on all levels. Every aspect of her narrative oozes with motive and mystery that gives the narrative itself living breath and an almost omniscient presence that one would typically associate with godhood. Her frequent quotes from Greek legends and other literary treats add to this flavor.

Dunnett, above any other author I have yet read, has the keen ability to let her characters behave in a way that is so utterly true to who they are that even the untimely deaths of characters who could have persisted throughout the series are right and true: it simply couldn't have been any other way. So often I find that authors will eliminate characters for the purpose of sparking emotion in the reader, but Dunnett reveals deeper motivations for her choices that fashion her world in the sense that it was the best course of action in relation to a deeper good that simply pervades the fiber of being.

Throughout this book the reader is led (playfully) one way and then another always wondering what motivates these characters to endure and while Dunnett stays mercifully away from moral diatribes, her characters, in the end, reveal themselves to be true, and deeply rooted in (or uprooted from) a universal good. While her characters in The Game of Kings have the same kind of depth and determination on par with authors such as Dostoevsky and Rand, Dunnett's Lymond (most of all her characters) never succumbs to the wretched bitterness of being misunderstood or further, victimized by a world that is unfavorable to his very being. Instead, he simply displays the beautiful duality of strength and frailty with a sweet sort of resignation to the fact of what he is.