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disorderly knights

Looking at Description: Dorothy Dunnett

Detail From a Sculpture Outside the Redmond Public Library
Description captures so much nuance, and the structure of the sentence can prove integral to its effect, as frequently happens in Dunnett's writing.
A series that I come back to repeatedly is Dorothy Dunnett’s marvelous six-volume series The Lymond Chronicles. Dunnett has two strengths: dialogue and its accompanying actions as well as a descriptive gift that I am bitterly envious of. Right now I’m working my way through the books for a third or fourth time, and I’m midway through Book 3, The Disorderly Knights.

In this chapter Lymond and Oonagh are escaping the Turkish camp, and it’s just marvelous.

At the edge of the still, dark pool that was the sea, at the brimming edge of freedom where no boat was to be seen, she spoke the first words of the few they were to exchange. ‘I cannot swim. You know it?”

The sea is the still dark pool, the brimming edge of freedom and we know that it’s still perilous and questionable because they can’t even see the boat. It’s a passage where words are scarce and breath is conserved, and Dunnett deftly raises the stakes here with that six word exchange.

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