extra bloodshed was useless

So the action in Dorothy Dunnett's world is not the action of her language, the imagined world is described but it is not present in the souls of the words, it is not sympathised with by its materials, the atom-word fights against its role, this fight was clawing at me, and my princess was offended by her pea.

Dunnett must have read over her books before she sent them to the publisher and the feelings that came between myself and her book must have never have struck her, instead she saw the substance of her language being the substance of her plot's action, and the same with the person who told me to read her work; they did not see a split between the language and the action, they were rapt and stayed up past their bedtime with the Lymond Chronicles. The queen gave her an OBE; there was an International Dorothy Dunnett Day in 2011 with another Day planned for this year, and people travel to the places whose names she has used in her books though probably not Timbuktu at the moment due to the fighting and the destruction of monuments.

So I feel like a person who swears they have seen a ghost when everyone else says, "There is no ghost," and I am Ruskin in The Seven Lamps of Architecture, frantic over ribands.

Seeing the differences between myself and her I want to fill this gap out with a piece of reasoning to settle myself down, and I would like to decide that she was using her language unconsciously and not consciously, and that those well-mannered words she put directly into Macbeth's thoughts, one would hope ("He was sensible enough, one would hope, to realise that extra bloodshed was useless") were noises that came to her without shyness or premeditation; it must have seemed normal to her that a person should say that phrase, any person of any class or race, and this middle class formality in the mouth of a royal thug would never have seemed strange, never mind if she had read her draft a hundred times, though even when I remember that it is a modern translation of the imagined speech of an eleventh-century Briton (with the emphasis on translation) it still seems strange to me, this niceness, under the circumstances, which are bloody, and in the mouth of a man brought up among ancient Orkney sheep and hideous rocks.

She is everywhere in the book but she seems asleep, she seems to be using phrases because they are familiar. Patrick White -- going back to Riders in the Chariot -- seems alert in everything, and arch, alive, frustrated; not only does he have an opinion everywhere but he is aware of that opinion, and pushes it hard, often with disgust; every time he writes "brick houses" he is disgusted, and bristles with disgust. He is filled with force-points. The black goat is a force-point, he charges it with Mrs Jolley's foot, with the shock of that attack, the sudden cruelty, which is an emphasis, a Decadent technique, this violence, this sadism, and then maintains the shock with tension in the conversation that comes afterwards, about the goat, the aggression in the sentences, aggression generated between the characters but not released -- the goat is a multiple symbol but tension holds it tight, it does not dissipate. White's style is the fist-style. He likes diffusion but not dissipation. He places his opinion, you are never allowed to forget what he thinks of the brick houses, and his eyes exist throughout the book, his opinion looking out at you and pressing itself home in the arch placement of words; he writes a panopticon, you are always under surveillance, and the books crush in on you. "White ... does more than get under your skin; in his best work, he flays the reader bare," wrote Nicholas Shakespeare in the Telegraph on the nineteenth of October. I'm going to throw this in: he wants to make you hysterical.

Meanwhile the countryside in a book by Freya Stark or Ernestine Hill is filled with surprise performances, vaudeville acts, announcements, somersaults, nothing is completely expected, and at any moment another person might come on and entertain you with some strange behaviour. The right response (in the language of the books) is not hatred or disgust but it should include some kind of applause, in other words a description, which is evidence of the writer's attentiveness to this thing that is even more decisively not herself as she describes it. Ernestine Hill can see the man staring at a chicken and figure out his mental state from a distance, therefore she is not that man, and when she records him speaking to her then she is doubly not him. A sign of unity in these books would be silence.

sensible enough, one would hope

Some of those opinion-words (the ones like "perfect," "good sense," etc) have been palmed off on Dunnett's characters but the language is the same once and again the same in everyone's mouth -- it is herself, badly disguised -- or she decides to involve the reader in these opinions, doing this (for example) after a tense scene that takes place between two characters during a festival, writing, "after that, the day was more the sort of festival it ought to be," without letting you know who has defined "the sort of festival it ought to be." It must be you and her together, maybe, working all this out with the collusion of a vague society of the book's anonymous inhabitants who are engaged in the festival: but it is not them, it is her, she assumes that anyone who reads the word "festival" will experience notions of frolicking happiness, the opposite of that angry just-read dialogue, and feel, at a level of thought formulated so automatically it is virtually subconscious, that this is how the day "ought to be."

(But, but, isn't that interesting, an author assuming her readers into herself and inhabiting them like a subtle Walt Whitman, see how intriguing it is, well, I say, well, clawing at my head, I don't want myself coerced into this nudge, nudge, nudge of a condemning mood against the characters, who are unnatural people, she says, because they are perverting a human day into what-it-ought-not-to-be -- that judgment is not my judgment -- maybe I was bullied as a child --)

The action in the plot is violent and surprising, one man betrays his uncle, a merchant is sabotaged, the kingdoms of the ancient British Isles can't keep their boundaries stable, but the language neuters violence with complacent words like "satisfactory" -- "The meal, served in the large room of the Vatican Palace, was satisfactory" -- it has the same opinion as the Countess in Proust's unfinished Sainte-Beuve book, a woman who does not like people who "exaggerate" (she is criticising Balzac); these people make things seem larger than the scale her mind inhabits; a meal in King Hereafter will never be an ecstatic experience, only a satisfactory one. The author gives a character a present and eviscerates his delight.

His wife of course would be delighted, and so was he: no one in Alba had such a cup. It was perhaps churlish to feel that something of a less domestic nature, a psalter perhaps, would have been more flattering from one high bishop to another.

Wry, wry, and wry again when a man during an attack sighs at his enemy because the weather is cold, "I don't know why, in the midst of all the elaborate plotting, you didn't have the common sense to keep your cloak on." Reading, I realised that Dorothy Dunnett couldn't endure the same world that she was trying to invent, rough sty where a cooked meal makes the air stink "with the smells of hot beef and grease," and you have to slosh your horse through an icy stream if you want to get to the other side; suffering in this world is necessary, but in her language no one suffers, though they may do a thing that is not "convenient."

They battle, herself and her world, they wrestle, she wins, she has won before the first page opens (you have to imagine the war from its traces), she murders violence, and here is the point where I connect her to Freya Stark (two posts ago), saying that Stark's language wants to unite sensuously with the world it is describing, and grasp it, and note a green thing with the simple adjective "green," planting it in the sentence firmly so that it suggests absolute greenness with acceptance of that greenness by the author who is issuing this undisguised description (and William Carlos Williams, when he wanted to explain a sight that was "the most important, the most integral that it had ever been my pleasure to gaze upon" gave his nouns a single word-friend each, first "red" for the wheelbarrow, then "rain" for the water, then "white" for the chickens, implacable, solid, planted, loved, respected), while Dunnett's language flies away from the world it is pretending to describe, evading the green thing's greenness by escaping into these otherwordly measurements of the gods. The character Macbeth has a hard point to make about another man, brutal, horrible; he has to soften it with a little polite bit of exasperated language before he can form his thought in the Dunnett-world: "He was sensible enough, one would hope, to realise that extra bloodshed was useless."

He is not protesting against bloodshed, he is protesting against too much extra bloodshed, which is not convenient or satisfactory, not shed with good sense, skilfully as it ought to be.

She goes to write thugs and plotters and Vikings, all pragmatists, but her language is polite, polite, it searches for the boundary line of taste, and remains carefully on the good side, manufacturing sins and informing you that they have been dodged. I protest, "But I do not think that those are sins."

the transformation imposed on reality

I found a secondhand Vintage Books reprint of Dunnett's King Hereafter with the words "stunningly realized novel" on the back: "the celebrated author of the Lymond Chronicles peels away a thousand years of legend to to uncover the historical figure of Macbeth," but after the first few pages I was reading the language rather than the story because the language was biting me while the story was not and I think it makes sense for animals to pay attention to anything that attacks them (myself a book-animal) so that they can stay away, in future, from the bushes in which that enemy hides itself, and the caves where it sleeps; my animal mind nipped back and now it will express itself in quick barks and bite a flea under the back leg where fleas hide.

I was comparing her to my memory of Henry Treece, whose books I do not have here, but he was a historical novelist too, and one whose work I read when I was a child or teenager, and I was absorbed in them, especially the end of Man With a Sword, in which Hereward believes he is talking to someone when he is in fact falling over dead. For a few words Treece lets you think that the character really is speaking, then he slides up to you with the news that he is not; his death arrives in your mind while you're still occupied by the idea of his dialogue. Reality in Henry Treece's books is made up of these acts of surrealism. I am going to call this effect magical, by which I mean that he uses sleight of hand to show you things you know are impossible; you know they're impossible even while they're happening. Hereward is not dead and alive at the same time because this is not that kind of book; your brain has to turn the idea over and conclude that he is dead or else you can't finish and will be stuck forever mentally at the second-last page.

But reality in Dunnett's book is simple and a person does not hallucinate; instead the colour of their hair is noted truthfully, and they smile or frown to show their moods; every bit of behaviour is measurable, any action can be set out along her invisible ruler, as in, for example, "she parried them, thoughtfully, in different ways. Several places along the table she could hear the Earl her husband doing the same, but more skillfully." "Different ways," being unnumbered, might be infinite; her husband is more skilfully infinite, talent is limitless but even the infinite can be judged; and the author is an utter judge, squinting and saying, "This is less skilful, this more so," but by what measurement?

And like this her language removes her from the world of the characters to an environment of particulate estimation of the vague where she can write, "The ceremony was not a success, and neither was the banquet afterwards, at which the King's mother found herself seated staring across two tables at the young King of Alba, who had the good sense to stare woodenly back."

It was this appeal to alienated assessment that agitated me, these words that measure invisible things so absolutely, a phrase such as "good sense," for example, and then the extension of that evaluating sensibility through the entire book at the level of a white-noise hum with phrases like "perfect teeth" ("Lulach's perfect teeth showed in his slow, charming smile"), or the news that a man in a ship "made no mistake about his landing," or that another man decided to "dwell rather longer than was convenient" in someone's house when he could have gone elsewhere, all these words staving off an opposite existence, sadder and sharper, where teeth are not perfect but scratched or mucky, and a man landing a ship might not be perfect either, a wooden stare might not be good sense or even bad sense but only an ambiguous thing with inestimable consequences, that the success of a ceremony might not be able to be measured in a summary, that the length of a man's stay might not be able to be described with urbane words (that the anger and shame of the host might crack through), and that no one could ever say confidently, "It was a good answer, and a correct one," as the author does at one point, and again, "It was good advice" -- denial, I say, and wring my hands: it pretends to be a world like my real world, but it is not; it is an alien that will not admit itself, staring me in the face -- (I point, it wears an innocent expression, it is a lamb ) -- uncanny animal -- bright -- prose like plastic surgery -- it doesn't know what it is --

This is one of the reasons why I don't write book reviews. Whenever I don't agree with a book I feel frantic and not methodical; I am extinguished by outrage, and I am not like Proust, who attacks Sainte-Beuve in well-paced sentences translated by Sylvia Townsend Warner. He is angry but the speed of the prose in translation is the speed of reason. "Style is so largely a record of the transformation imposed on reality by the writer's mind that Balzac's style, properly speaking, does not exist." (Calm, sharp, thoughtful man, arming himself for the next sentence, rolling up a little ball of trust in the reader's heart, yus, ya, I'll trust him --.) "Here Sainte-Beauve is completely off the scent."