King Hereafter and Queen Once Again

I read Dorothy Dunnett's King Hereafter over several weeks, but I don't think I would say that I read it slowly.  It's a long book with tiny font, with foreign words and subtle plot development, with larger-than-life characters and evocative landscapes.  It's the sort of book you can't read too slowly because it takes some time to get into the rhythm of it, to remember everyone's names and their histories and their relationships to the other characters.  So I would read it in bursts - 40 or 50 pages in a night being a "burst" - and then go to bed, exhausted but enthralled.

So much happened in King Hereafter that I am not even going to attempt to do a plot summary.  Instead, here's the blurb from the back of the book:

In King Hereafter, Dorothy Dunnett's stage is the wild, half-pagan country of eleventh-century Scotland.  Her hero is an ungainly young earl with a lowering brow and a taste for intrigue.  He calls himself Thorfinn but his Christian name is Macbeth.

Dunnett depicts Macbeth's transformation from an angry boy who refuses to accept his meager share of the Orkney Islands to a suavely accomplished warrior who seizes an empire with the help of a wife as shrewd and valiant as himself.  She creates characters who are at once wholly creatures of another time yet always recognizable--and she does so with such realism and immediacy that she once more elevates historical fiction into high art.

In this novel, Thorfinn is a giant - he is taller than everyone around him, with a deep and gravelly voice.  He's ugly, hardly ever smiles, and he rarely takes anyone else's advice.  He's brilliant, like so many of Dunnett's other male characters are.

He's also married to one of the most beautiful women ever, Groa, who has the great honor of being the newest entry (and the first new entry in years) to my Heroines Who Don't Annoy Me list.  Groa is wonderful.  She supports Thorfinn in everything, but she is also one of the few people who talks back to him.  She's witty and well able to understand political intrigue, and she was, for me, the focal point of this whole story.

[NOTE:  The rest of this review assumes that you know how this story (the story of Macbeth) ends.  I wouldn't say they are spoilers as it's heavily implied through the whole story, and well - most people know the ending, but just wanted to give a heads up.]

[TSS] Interlude: Cahokia Mounds

One of my all-time favorite books is Charles Mann's 1491.  It describes what America was like before contact with Europe, and it's fascinating.  In the book, Mann describes an ancient American city called Cahokia, which surprisingly enough is in my home state of Illinois.  I have never been there, but I want to go (even though, depressingly, it is probably the only World Heritage Site that has a four-lane highway and billboards going through it), and I thought it would be a great place to highlight for this week's Sunday Salon interlude.

Cahokia is situated close to St. Louis, outside Collinsville, IL, and is considered to be one of the greatest civilizations North America has ever produced.  It's a National Historic landmark and one of only 21 World Heritage sites located in the United States.  It is home to the largest prehistoric earthen construction in the US and Canada.  The largest mound in the park is about ten stories tall.  It's believed that there were originally 120 mounds in existence in this city, and currently about 80 remain.  They are shaped differently, some conical, some flat, some with ridges, and are thought to have served different purposes.

Musings: Lady of the English

Lady of the English is Elizabeth Chadwick's most recent novel.  Set in the first half of the 12th century, it revolves around two royal women:  Empress Matilda and Queen Adeliza.  Matilda is called back to England after her husband, the German emperor, passes away without heirs.  She returns to meet her father, Henry I, for the first time in many years and is introduced to her step-mother, Adeliza, who is just about the same age as Matlida herself.  The two become fast friends, even though they are so different.  Matilda is rigid and firm and does not suffer fools, whereas Adeliza is kind and ethereal and devoted to her charity works.

Henry makes Matilda his heir, set to be Queen of England, but then sends her off to marriage in Anjou with a man half her age whom she strongly dislikes.  And he continues to make no promises or stand true to his word, playing factions against one another to consolidate his power.  It works well for him, but when he passes away, he leaves England with no strong contender for the crown and it is taken by Stephen, his nephew who had previously promised fealty to Matilda.  This sets off a long, bitter war between Stephen and Matilda, with all of England to suffer between them.

Musings: Lionheart

Lionheart is Sharon Kay Penman's new novel about Richard I's time on crusade in the Holy Land.  It is, like all her novels, epic in scope, with an impressive amount of detail and a lot of research.  I have not read the two books that come before it in this series- Time and Chance and Devil's Brood- though I read the first in the series on this fascinating Angevin family, When Christ and His Saints Slept.  This book picks up right around Richard's coronation, after which he promptly left (on a somewhat meandering journey) to the Holy Land to pit his own military prowess against that of Salah-al-din in hopes of regaining Jerusalem for Christians.

The Angevins are one of the most interesting families in western history- they have a sordid history of deceit and distrust and ill will, and while I can't imagine that it was at all fun to be living under their rule, it is a lot of fun to read about them.  I should have read this series in the proper order, but I confess that I found When Christ and His Saints Slept to be very long, repetitive and lacking spark, so I wasn't very motivated to read its sequels.  But Richard the Lionheart is one of those giants of history, still very well known today.  And I loved SKP's book about another Richard, Richard III, in The Sunne in Splendour (in fact, it was the first book I ever blogged about!), and I was confident she would do justice to this one.

Musings: Outlaw

Angus Donald's Outlaw is his first novel in a new series about Robin Hood.  I realized when reading this book that I don't actually know much about Robin Hood at all.  I remember some characters' names from the BBC series, but that's pretty much it.  I also had this vague and completely baseless notion that Robin Hood and his Merry Men were similar to King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, but that is (unsurprisingly) quite false.  But both Robin Hood and King Arthur are men steeped in legend- all sorts of stories abound about them and their deeds even as people have trouble proving that either of them actually existed.

In Angus Donald's mind, Robin Hood is the head of what seems to be a medieval Mafia.  He offers villagers protection from the sheriff and dangerous criminals. In return for a fee.  That's how Alan Dale ended up with Robin's men.  He stole from a pie vendor and his mother asked Robin Hood to protect her son.  Robin agreed and Alan never looked back.  The story is told in a pretty typical flashback- the now old and lonely Alan Dale is relating his younger exploits on paper for the world to see.

Review: For the King's Favor

I was very excited about Elizabeth Chadwick's For the King's Favor because I had been briefly introduced to the two main characters in previous books (most recently The Scarlet Lion) and was excited to learn more about them. 
For the King's Favor is about Ida de Tosney and Roger Bigod.  Ida was mistress to King Henry II while a teenager and bore him a son, William, before marrying Roger.  Roger spends much of the book trying to win back and then protect his land holdings, all of which had been in jeopardy since his father rebelled against Henry.  The two meet at court, marry, and then embark on a life together during a tumultuous period of English history.