2018/71: King Hereafter -- Dorothy Dunnett

"What else were you born for?"
"Why not happiness, like other men?" Thorfinn said.
"You have that," said his foster-father. "But if you try to trap it, it will change. Why do you resist? It is your right."
"I resist because it is no use resisting," Thorfinn said. "Do you not think that is unfair? I shall be King because I was King; and I shall die because I did die; and did I remember them, I could even tell what are the three ways it might befall me." [loc. 5055]

Dunnett's epic standalone novel, dealing with the life and death of the historical Macbeth, and theorising -- based on years of original research -- that Macbeth and Earl Thorfinn were the same person.

This isn't my favourite of her works: rereading, I'd forgotten just how much discussion of history and religion she packs in. (Much more religion than usual, because part of the story -- though not the focus -- is the tension between the pagan faith of Thorfinn-Macbeth's youth and the Christianity which promises a more practical and peaceful future.) But, rereading for some salient details about Vikings in the Isle of Man (spoiler: did not find any) I was beguiled all over again by the prophecies of Thorfinn's stepson Lulach the holy fool; by the forces that pull Thorfinn in different directions, embodied in hearty Norse foster-father Thorkel, gentle priest Sulien and stoic wife / political pawn Groa.

There is a great deal of beautiful prose here: Dunnett perhaps pays more attention to landscape and seascape, because less happens in urban contexts than in the Niccolo or Lymond series. King Hereafter, with Thorfinn's love of the sea and a host of vivid descriptions of seafaring, makes me suspect that Lady Dunnett loved to sail (see also the Johnson Johnson books. And, I suppose, Mr Crawford's galley-years?)

As in her other books, King Hereafter has a multitude of viewpoint narrators, all looking inward to Thorfinn, whose narrative voice is seldom present. He is, after all, the hero: the man who tries to create from feuding islands and little kingdoms something called 'Scotland' (well, Scotia) centuries before it's ready. There's an interesting insight into early medieval 'Scotland': it had no towns. "But the desert offers no protection to the young and the old and the sick …" [loc 9839]

A hint of homophobia (in regard to Rognvald, the golden-haired cousin who hates Thorfinn) and period-typical violence, rapine, and brutality: but these flesh out the bones of the history, rather than being used to elicit anachronistic responses from the characters, and are not included simply to shock. King Hereafter is a thoroughly immersive novel, and its final third a masterclass in the inevitable crumbling of a nascent nation, and the slow spiral downwards of its king.