Parallel characters in the first two Lymond books
I’m minutes away from finishing an audiobook re-read of Queen’s Play (Dorothy Dunnett) and I had some thoughts about Phelim O’Liam Roe and the archer Robin Stewart, who like Janus are two sides of the same character. Spoilers for both The Game of Kings and Queen's Play.
Phelim O’Liam Roe and Robin Stewart parallel Will Scott and Christian Stewart in The Game of Kings – they are the good and bad sides of Lymond’s chemistry and demonstrate the problematic nature of admiration without compassion and real knowledge. Each has a different parasocial relationship with Lymond; each creates a fantasy version of him to satisfy their own emotional needs.
Phelim and Robin are each immature in focusing on their imagined powerlessness while desiring a better world, one for everyone and the other for only himself. Each endures under a sense of betrayal, the failure of their just deserts, one for people undervaluing his intellect and philosophy because of his country and the other for believing his failure to climb a ladder of success being due to his bastardy rather than his personal faults. Both turn blame outward rather than exercising their agency to change their lives. But exposure to Lymond changes each, eventually; the tragedy is that one of them changes too late.
As lessons for Lymond, they represent both his power and his failures. Both Phelim’s and Robin’s activation by exposure to Lymond’s choices reminds Lymond of his sometimes-unwanted influence. Phelim assures Lymond that both by example and through direct effort he can influence others to support his plans through their personal growth. And Robin’s response to Lymond’s ongoing priorities reminds Lymond that the hero-worship he elicits can damage others, while reinforcing the necessity of using it carefully, reluctantly. And ultimately he damages himself through using it, suffering grief and wearing the responsibility like a weighted backpack through all his future choices.
“No duties, no obligations, no responsibilities, except to himself.” Queen Mary of Guise, the Queen Mother, echoes what Lymond thinks about himself, while the books bang on and on about the question of what we owe each other. Lymond himself is a slow learner. But we love him anyway.
