Previously OrangeShipper | she/her | British | Blonde competent emotionally challenged historical/fantasy men are my jam | I enjoy: literature, history, music, board games, fantasy, faith, writing
I once watched a girl in the produce aisle pick up a bushel of bananas that were precariously perched on the edge and move them farther back and under her breath she said “there you go sweeties - that will be more comfortable” before shuffling off and… I think about her often.
I was driving on the highway and passed a dude absolutely JAMMING alone in his car, doing those little half dance moves you do when you’re stuck sitting down in a small space, bellowing unheard lyrics at the top of his lungs, and my instant reaction was to think “I love you.” And then to pray he had a good day, or whatever, because those fleeting moments of connection are so incredible.
depression for me: staying in bed, vague tweeting about the wreckage that is my emotional state, ordering lots of take out.
depression for a Dunnett protagonist: wears all black, covered head to toe in jewels, VIVIDLY expensive, travels to a foreign country, haughty and cold and severe as all hell, taking no shit and taking no prisoners. maybe an eagle.
i think being proud of where you come from is one of those things that becomes fun the more specific you get. like "proud to be english" bad rancid vibes. makes you sound like the kind of person who rants about immigrants. "proud to be from yorkshire" better vibes. i cannot deny the yorkshire cultural heritage. "proud to be from pocklington" absolutely fucking hilarious please never let anybody kill your pocklington pride.
I finally got to reading Dorothy Dunnett's Dolly/Johnson series after Christmas. I've enjoyed them, nothing like the historicals but good fun with classic Dunnett escapades and fun, complicated characters.
I'm onto the last one... This is the last Dunnett novel I've got, right? I've done Lymond, Niccolo, King Hereafter, and this is my last Dolly novel, so... that's it? No more new Dunnett novels? I feel things about this 😭
I hate (I love) Dunnett so much what do you mean she made me read the most excruciatingly & viscerally angsty love confession one could ever conceive and then I turned the page and I read this
He thought that Beelzebub probably looked like Ludovico da Bologna, but that equally the Patriarch owned that penetrating, unsentimental form of insight which permitted him, if allowed, to nick the Achilles’ tendon of the soul, and twist the remains to his purpose.
me, reading a book about the renaissance: ...perhaps...it is time to finally finish the house of niccolo series. now that i am receiving a helpful and detailed overview of the cultural, historical, social, economical background, perhaps it'll be easier to follow!
[the book is ada palmer's inventing the renaissance btw]
also me: girl, do you really think you have the time and mental energy for dorothy dunnett levels of plot and characterization and High Drama right now???
because, real talk, i did go look up a readalong of the first book in the series, Niccolo Rising, to refresh my memory, because rereading the books I've already read will only add more time and energy to this endeavor, and it reminded me of the following:
oh wow, damn, i sure missed a lot on the first read through huh!
this family tree still makes no sense to me (have since spoiled myself and sorted it out, because it was driving me insane)
NICHOLAS. oh Nicholas. Character of All Time. you really can't understand shit about a Dunnett protagonist until you reread or dive in for some real analysis, and while I got a fair bit of what was going on with Nicholas on my first read through, the readalong discussion got me seeing a lot more, and shifting the context for a lot of things. He's still a very complicated character to wrap your head around, especially in this first book where Dunnett is deliberately obfuscating about him, but things that were much more clear to me on this pseudo reread:
oh he's TRAUMATIZED traumatized. like, I knew, but I for sure missed a significant amount of the subtext that apparently later becomes text re him and Esota when he was a kid, and ouch. oof. that explains an extraordinary amount about his character and his choices, and where his head is at in the last third of that book.
also clear to me: that is a young man with a mind that will eat itself alive if not given enough to do with it. Marian seems to know, when she says she's worried he'll be dead by 20. I thought it was interesting in the readalong discussion that a few people went back and forth on whether they liked Nicholas or not, as it become more and more obvious how much scheming and planning and manipulating he was doing at any given moment.
But I was busy thinking: okay, he has an extraordinary intellect, and a frankly scary gift for reading people and situations that was only made stronger by the abuse he suffered as a child. But he's stuck as a dyemaker's apprentice, a servant, an unwanted bastard child, with precious few outlets for the intellect he has hidden from almost everyone. Marian sending him off to university ostensibly to keep an eye Felix/be his servant and incidentally piggyback on Felix's education kept Nicholas's mind occupied for a while, but I don't think it's a coincidence that he starts kicking off his real schemes at the opening of this book, when there's nothing to keep his mind occupied and little prospect of much future occupation either. This is man who is in dire need of Enrichment in his Enclosure, and if he does not get it, he will:
sink a cannon that's on its way to some very important people just to see what happens
set off an avalanche because it seemed like a good idea at the time and might prove helpful for his overall goals
throw himself into shit that has massive geopolitical implications and consequences via a courier/cipher business that he immediately uses for the purposes of spying and information dealing
expand marian's business
engineer the total financial ruin of the family that abused him, and (in)directly cause their deaths, though he admittedly did not necessarily plan that part
etc etc.
perhaps unsurprisingly, his colleagues at the end are like "uh, so, like, i guess we need to make sure nicholas doesn't become an evil mastermind!"
however! I am stuck on one line, something he says to Jordan de Riberac, his grandfather: "You won't change what's wrong with me: you don't even know what it is."
Jordan answers, "You underrate me...I could begin with your name," which implies that what Nicholas and Jordan are both referring to is his parentage, and exactly whose son he is. I.e., Nicholas knows he's Simon's son and Jordan's grandson, but that's not the official story, and both Simon and Jordan have (understandable, for all their villainy) reasons to disbelieve it.
but I really wonder if that's what Nicholas meant at all, especially in the context of the immediately preceding sentence being how Jordan can't change what's wrong with Simon, how it's too late. That makes me think Nicholas is talking about something other than parentage, especially given the brutal sharpness of Nicholas's honesty in other exchanges, when he very briefly unsheathes the blade of his intellect.
So what, exactly, does Nicholas think is wrong with him? There are a whole lot of potential answers. I doubt Nicholas is referring to the CSA he suffered as a child--he wouldn't even obliquely bring that up in front of Jordan. So I really have to think Nicholas is referring to his mind. On some level, he knows his intellect is dangerous. Or he knows, perhaps, in our modern parlance, that he's maybe not quite neurotypical.
And if he knows that, if he understands it as something being wrong with him, well. That's an interesting lens on his actions. There's a somewhat chilling moment towards the end of the book where when he's asked why he sunk the cannon--an event that is carefully engineered to look like an idiotic accident--he says, "I thought of a way to do it. That was all," and "To see what would happen."
to see what would happen.
To Nicholas's credit, he's capable of extraordinary love and loyalty and compassion as well. But like. Dunnett does not play around. She opens her 8-book series with that cannon sinking for a reason. She lets you the reader puzzle over what byzantine schemes that could have been in aid of for the whole ass book. And then, at the end, there's Nicholas saying he only did it to see what would happen.
No wonder Nicholas plays the games he does with whole entire economies and kingdoms. also, as an aside, this is a Nicholas limited by his station in life. god knows what the fuck he'd be getting up to otherwise, but it would not be any better, lol. I recall being kind of offended on Nicholas's behalf that Tobie's so set on being his "keeper", but like. y'know what. fair enough. someone should be keeping an eye on this dude if this is the kind of shit he's up to at just 18/19!
I wish we got more in Nicholas's own POV, because there's a very intriguing contrast between his apparent simple happiness early on in the book, and the terribly capable mind churning beneath all that, desperate for some kind of meaningful occupation, and equally desperate for love and companionship while being certain no one really understands him.
Excellent post! I'm mid Niccolo re-read (towards the end of Scales of Gold) and it just gets better 😁😁
My take on the "you don't even know what's wrong with me" line, under the cut for spoilers:
There's undoubtedly a lot more to it but, in my understanding, an absolutely fundamental driving factor for Nicholas is the loss of his mother when he was 7, such a small child still.
I think this highlight from Tobie's pov, after Nicholas is nearly killed by Simon at the dockside fight, says a lot:
The voice he (and only a boy) needed didn't exist 😭
He's just a boy who doesn't have his mother, and it's completely heartbreaking.
Though, that said, I think it ties in beautifully to the idea that he might consider his intellect as something "wrong" with him - he has this incredible tool at his disposal, but without the anchor, support, love, guide to it that his mother would be. And so he had to figure it out himself, and 'see what happens'.
Wauuughhhh I have such a lot of feelings about Nicholas 😭 truly a Character Of All Time
I'm about seventy pages into Niccolo Rising and so far Julius is stressed and hates everyone, Felix likes hats, and Claes has a great smile and can't walk down the street (or, indeed, go down a river in a bath) without getting into trouble.
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