And here's King Hereafter

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Suddenly I knew what I wanted to say.

King Hereafter by Dorothy Dunnett

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


4.5 stars.  The longer I sit with it, the better it gets.



I started reading this book with a Dunnett group on Yahoo, but shortly got frustrated because it went so slow and there was virtually no discussion as many (including me) were first time readers and they're Nazis about spoilers.  Personally, I don't mind spoilers and sometimes even seek them out.  'Spoilers' implies that all there is to a book is the plot and what happens, and if I know that then the whole book is spoiled.  Since this is the story of the life of a king of Alba, as Scotland was called at that time, it's hardly a spoiler to know that he dies in the end.  It doesn't take the sadness away.  At least not for me.  To say that is to say that I don't want to know about the life of the people I love because I know they are going to die in the end.  What poppycock.  And after a month and a half, I got impatient and just read to the end.

For me, a lot of the enjoyment of a book is in the reading, the way it's written, the characters, the setting, the twists and turns along the way.  And this one, being a Dunnett book, has plenty of wealth in all of those story elements.

I never read or studied Shakespeare beyond what I had to in high school, so wasn't familiar with the plot of Macbeth, the Shakespearean play.  I just read a summary on Wikipedia and this story is nothing like that.  The fictional king, Thorfinn (his Viking name) who later is called Macbeth (his baptismal name) is loosely based on a real king of Scotland who ruled Scotland, then called Alba, from 1040 to 1057.  Dunnett's story is a more accurate portrayal of what we know of his life than the famous play, at least according to the Wikipedia article on him.  Wikipedia on Macbeth, King of Scotland.

No one matches Dunnett in creating characters.  Thorfinn, a tall, gangly, ugly, black haired Viking becomes a hero along the way.  Typical Dunnett style, we only see him at first through the eyes of others who may or may not know what is really going on in Thorfinn's head.  It becomes clear fairly rapidly that he is a great fighter and smart ... very smart.  He's also an independent thinker and this is totally frustrating to his foster father, Thorkel Fostri, a peripheral character who is funny, fierce, loyal and finally lovable.  One can only imagine his sorrow after Thorfinn is killed.  Thorfinn's wife, Groa, is also a memorable character and is left to finish his work at his death.  The love between them is vividly and poignantly written.

The only thing that makes me lower my rating from 5 stars is that there is a lot of time spent talking about the people, the family lines, the political machinations, and so forth.  I got lost as I could not follow who was related to who and why unless they were main characters.  And since we follow Thorfinn/Macbeth's life from around the time he was 5 until his death in his 40's, there are a LOT of people.  Fortunately I'm pretty good at picking out the significant people along the way, so was able to keep track of most of what was going on.

Well worth reading, if a significant investment in time.  I read the ebook which was 902 pages.


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