A review by caroparr
The Disorderly Knights by Dorothy Dunnett
4.0
Reading this during a trip to Malta and Gozo was wonderfully satisfying. Even knowing who the bad guy was, I was still astonished at Dunnett's plotting and character development that misleads the reader so successfully.
I think I read only the first section of this when I was in Malta. Rereading the whole book this time, I was much more aware of GRM's perfidy and remembered Joleta's true backstory. Poor Lymond always has to convince Richard that he's not a bad guy! The end may be melodramatic, but it's as powerful as ever, particularly the last few sentences. Whew!!
Originally read at the beach in 2002
From a breathless sky, the sun beat on the soft yellow rock; the long spit on which the knights had reared their tall, elegant houses, face to face in a network of alleys that climbed the steep ridge on either side from the water's edge, where the Maltese lived still, in cabin and hut... Between the palaces of the knights and those that served them; the convents, the elegant homes belonging to officers of the Church and the town; between the bakehouse and the shops of the craftsmen, the arsenals and magazines, the warehouses, the homes of merchants and courtesans, Italian, Spanish, Greek; past the painted shrines and courtyards scraped from pockets of earth with their bright waxy green carob trees, a fig, a finger of vine, a blue and orange pot of dry, dying flowers and a tethered goat bleating in a swept yard, padded the heirs of this rock, this precious knot in the trade of the world. Umber-skinned, grey-eyed, barefoot and robed as Arabs with the soft, slurring dialect that Dido and Hannibal spoke, they slipped past the painted facades to their Birgu of fishermen's huts and blank, Arab-walled houses or to sleep, curled in the shade, with the curs in a porch.
I think I read only the first section of this when I was in Malta. Rereading the whole book this time, I was much more aware of GRM's perfidy and remembered Joleta's true backstory. Poor Lymond always has to convince Richard that he's not a bad guy! The end may be melodramatic, but it's as powerful as ever, particularly the last few sentences. Whew!!
Originally read at the beach in 2002