Reading: King Hereafter

[white_hart]

King Hereafter is Dorothy Dunnett's standalone novel about the historical Macbeth, or at least, given the paucity of actual evidence remaining, a possible version of him. Dunnett's story takes as its central premise the idea that King Macbeth of Scotland and Earl Thorfinn the Mighty of Orkney and Caithness were one and the same person, on the basis of the fact that historical sources mention one or the other but never both. About the only points of similarity with Shakespeare's Macbeth are the fact that Thorfinn/Macbeth becomes king after killing King Duncan (though in battle, in the context of a backdrop of wars and skirmishes and power being held by right of conquest across Europe, and not by murder) and that he is deposed in turn by Duncan's son Malcolm. Apart from this, Dunnett's story is the story of a man who is cleverer and clearer-sighted than most and who tries to use his talents to unify a fragmented country and begin the process of bringing civilisation and stability to a population of isolated subsistence farmers.

It's an incredibly dense book, managing to pack events spanning forty years of meticulously researched history into just over 700 pages, while in typical Dunnettian fashion apparently throwaway lines turn out to have plot consequences hundreds of pages later. Like Nicola Griffiths in Hild, Dunnett paints a fascinating picture of the pre-Norman Conquest British Isles as a much more cosmopolitan, multicultural society than the standard view of history I remember from school, and although this is definitely a society of men the female characters, mothers and wives of kings and earls, are not without agency or even some power, despite the circumscribed lives they are compelled to live.

It wasn't an easy read, even by Dunnett's standards; as well as the denseness of the background and the plotting, and the need to keep a huge number of characters straight in my head, the conclusion is definitely a tragic one. Still, it was a terrific read and I enjoyed it as much as I've enjoyed any of her other books.

I wouldn't recommend reading the ebook, though; I started off with it but swapped to my paperback copy after about the first hundred pages as the ebook had so many errors.

Comments

[cmcmck]

I never go on with it because the basic premise that Thorfinn in Rikki was Macbeth is just plain wrong.

I know way too much about Orkney for it ever to have been a goer.

[sollers]

I never really got into it, though I did finish reading it, because I disagreed with her so much. It's not my period, but I got interested in Macbeth after a holiday spent in Lumphanan, and again when I investigated various forms of dual kingship in Europe. The one in Scotland was alternating lines, so Macbeth was the rightful heir and Duncan the usurper. Macbeth had an incredibly long reign for the time. And place, and managed something almost impossible: he went on pilgrimage to Rome, and was still king when he got back. I'm inclined to suspect that the reason Shakespeare's play has its reputation is because Macbeth's ghost is so furious at being traduced.

Suggesting that two men were the same because they never appear at once is interesting, but one might as well (or better) suggest that Aelle, King of the Saxons, was King Arthur.