Reading: Race of Scorpions
Nov. 11th, 2016 08:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartI'm still reading Dorothy Dunnett when I want comfort reading; not that her books are entirely comforting in themselves, given her penchant for throwing her heroes into one dire situation after another and piling misfortune on misfortune, but they're books I can lose myself in, and that's what I wanted this week. In the third book of the House of Niccolo series, Nicholas ends up in Cyprus, where both claimants to the disputed throne want him and his army to fight for them. There are battles and twists and romance; some plot threads from the earlier books are resolved, while others emerge.
I do feel as though I'm starting to get a bit of a handle on Nicholas's character, which I struggled with in the first couple of books. Even though long sections of the narrative are written from his point of view, unlike Lymond, where we only get a handful of scenes from Francis's point of view throughout the series, and those tend to be solitary action rather than introspection, I've found him harder to understand; perhaps because the amount of point-of-view time he gets is deceptive, and there's a lot of crucial stuff we don't see. With Lymond, the overarching mystery always seemed to be what had happened in the past to make him the way he was, but with Nicholas, I think it's more about what kind of a person he really is.
I do feel as though I'm starting to get a bit of a handle on Nicholas's character, which I struggled with in the first couple of books. Even though long sections of the narrative are written from his point of view, unlike Lymond, where we only get a handful of scenes from Francis's point of view throughout the series, and those tend to be solitary action rather than introspection, I've found him harder to understand; perhaps because the amount of point-of-view time he gets is deceptive, and there's a lot of crucial stuff we don't see. With Lymond, the overarching mystery always seemed to be what had happened in the past to make him the way he was, but with Nicholas, I think it's more about what kind of a person he really is.
