n the summer of 1975, I was halfway through my doctoral thesis on "Coleridge and the Classic American Tradition" when I went into Hatchard's on Piccadilly and saw on the shelves Pawn in Frankincense and The Ringed Castle. I had started reading Dorothy Dunnett in high school, but my marriage, my removal to England, and my research had obviously conspired to put me behind with the saga. The silver lining was that I now had--oh, bliss!--two unread novels rather than just the one. I was firm with myself in the train on the way home, promising not to spend more than an hour a day with Lymond, but every resolution went by the board once I read that first sentence. Leaving Emerson behind with Bronson Alcott in the plain-living, high-thinking community at Brook Farm, I boarded the Dorothy Dunnett rollercoaster bound for Turkey and Tartary with Francis Crawford and Philippa Somerville. I rode more or less continuously, all day and well into the night, for a week, I remember, and got off a bit wobbly at the knees, but exhilarated. I then returned to my file cards and footnotes and finished my dissertation.

Although an avid reader of historical fiction since childhood, I find it difficult to describe just what makes a book click. The failures are easier to analyse and fall into three categories. The first is so weighted down with the dead hand of scholarship that the story collapses under the burden: the author knows every detail of the underwear worn by each sex at the court of the Sun King (very little, as a matter of fact), but the characters are cardboard cutouts and the plot lurches along driven by coincidences so contrived that even Thomas Hardy would have second thoughts. The second is sound on its history and with a good story, but the two are not, to use a Coleridge coinage, "coadunated." It's as if a work of fiction and a history textbook have been cut into sections and pasted together. There's a wodge of history, then a bit of fiction, another wodge of history, then a bit more story. In the last category fall many novels that succeed brilliantly as works of fiction, but not historical fiction. These may have characters in bustles or togas, but their attitudes, behaviour, and, most importantly, language, are utterly contemporary to the author's time.

Great historical fiction transcends all these pitfalls. It is a synthesis of scholarly research and narrative that captures the reader's imagination and reveals facets of life in another time. I am thinking of works like Ivanhoe; Jamaica Inn; Gone With the Wind; I, Claudius; The Scarlet Pimpernel; The Siege of Krishnapur; The French Lieutenant's Woman; Les rois maudits; Maurice Druon's splendidly grim four-parter about the Valois kings; even the charming confections of Georgette Heyer and the adventures of Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael. (I must also confess to a sneaking fondness for those stalwarts of the late '50s/early '60s, Desiree, Dear and Glorious Physician, and The Winthrop Woman, but I haven't read them for years, and they might not hold up.) These novels vary greatly in their subject matter, their scope, and the seriousness of the author's intent, but they all succeed as historical fiction. They all transcended the genre as well, and reached a wider audience.

This is the audience that Dorothy Dunnett should reach. Her research is so sound that before a recent first visit to Malta, I read the opening chapters of The Disorderly Knights again as an introduction to Suleiman's great siege of 1551. Yet the erudition, although it provides a framework for the story, is lightly worn, and the novel could be read with pleasure by someone who has no particular interest in either Malta or indeed in the sixteenth century. There are no anachronisms of attitude or language to set your teeth on edge--no one mentions an "ongoing situation," for example, or behaves in a post-pill, me-generation way totally alien to the time--but neither is any specialist knowledge necessary to the book's enjoyment. Dorothy Dunnett's characters are so vivid and so many-faceted, and her plots so strong and engrossing, that the novels can be read for the story alone.

The research, the characters, and the plot are all, of course, inseparable from the language which both expresses and informs them, and it is this which is Dorothy Dunnett's greatest strength. She writes beautifully. Whether in composing the great set pieces like the living chess game that is the climax of Pawn in Frankincense, or in advancing the plot through the characters's conversations, she uses language that sparkles and shimmers but is always kept in check by a sense of irony and a certain fastidiousness. Absolutely at home in the grand manner, she never actually goes over the top (although on occasion she does, I must admit, get very near it). The ultimate impression Dorothy Dunnett's writing leaves is one of tremendous vitality: the plot careers along, the characters nearly leap off the page, the language fizzes. It's a wonderful read.

Dorothy Dunnett's work reminds me of that of two other British writers, her contemporaries P. D. James and Ruth Rendell (particularly when she writes as Barbara Vine). Like them she operates within the rules of her genre, but like them she transcends it. Even people who are generally very sniffy about detective novels will pick up the latest P. D. James. Readers who dismiss historical fiction as all bodice- ripping and derring-do should similarly overcome their prejudices and start with The Game of Kings. It's historical fiction with a difference.


--Pat Huff

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