2020/035: Dolly and the Nanny Bird -- Dorothy Dunnett

You couldn't say of the anthropologists that they were stoned out of their skulls: but neither were they in the way of dealing with what you might call emergencies. The Booker-Readmans had, at public or finishing school, never even met a Boy Scout. But you would expect, alone in the howling wastelands of Canada, in a deserted railway carriage with the temperature at twenty five under, that the men for the job would be Eskimos. [p.22]

Dorothy Dunnett is one of my favourite novelists: her thrillers, while much lighter and less epic than her better-known historical sagas, are written with typical verve, humour and drama.

Dolly and the Nanny Bird -- later republished as Split Code -- was first published in 1976, and is very much of its time. (Tag for period-typical sexism, racism et cetera.) The premise of each novel in the 'Dolly' series is that an independent and capable young woman becomes involved in the swashbuckling spy adventures of Johnson Johnson, the thinking woman's James Bond: an enigmatic aristocrat who paints portraits (as Dunnett did herself), and turns up, with his yacht Dolly, to solve or spark secret-service crises, spouting witty and impenetrable asides.

In this novel, the independent young woman is Joanna Emerson, a trained nanny whose father is a colleague of Johnson's and whose previous employer died under mysterious circumstances. She's manoeuvred into accepting a job as nanny to the Booker-Readmans, who may be involved in perfidious business, and whose offspring Benedict becomes a target for kidnappers.

One thing I love about these novels, and about Dunnett as a writer, is the characterisation. We never really get to know Johnson, but the narrators of the novels are complex, likeable and interesting. Case in point: Joanna, in this book, gave me some idea of how it might feel to form strong bonds with babies and small children. (This is otherwise wholly outside my experience.)

I'd read this novel before, several times, but not in the last twenty years or so: I remembered some details (such as the melancholy last line), but the plot was pretty much opaque to me.

Immense gratitude to Caroline, who gave me the hardcover of this and my next read (Dolly and the Bird of Paradise) last Easter. I don't read many hardcovers these days, because they're unwieldy when one is rushing from place to place: but I spotted these on the shelf just when I craved an easy, pleasant read and was locked in place by the pandemic.