Book 64: Checkmate by Dorothy Dunnett

Before I started reading this book, my friend who's responsible for me reading this entire series told me that Checkmate reads like Part 4 of The Game of Kings, i.e., the final free fall on a massive roller coaster of emotions. I thought I was prepared for this experience; I was not.

Checkmate was an absolute marvel of tropes and plotting and payoff; there were so many revelations and confrontations and plot twists and acts of noble self-sacrifice and decisions that would have been unforgivably cruel and awful if they hadn't been chosen out of the deepest love. I (and a couple of other friends) have attempted to explain the plots of the first three books in the series to a good friend who will never actually read them, but when I attempt to imagine doing that for Checkmate my brain breaks a little. There's so much that happens, but even more than that, I am still overwhelmed by my feelings about this book, and I finished reading it almost two weeks ago. The delay in writing this post is mostly due to having gone on vacation almost immediately after finishing it, but it was also caused by a near inability to express how I feel about this book.

Part of that is because so many of the events of the book could be absolutely wretched and unforgivable if handled by a lesser writer. Dunnett never shied away from writing about terrible, emotionally gutting things earlier in this series, of course, but in Checkmate she really went all out, and committed to both the tropes of high romance and also the logical and devastating endpoints of plot threads she had put in place three or four or sometimes five books prior. And yet there's so much power and beauty and understanding and love in how she captured everything that all I was left with was a sense of wonder that it was possible to tell a story like this the way she did. She managed to write a novel that makes the characters and also the reader work for every victory, and forces the reader to truly feel every single setback and tragedy, while also giving both the characters and the reader enough time and space for those moments to land. Everything happens at a breakneck pace, and yet nothing happens before it's the right moment. It feels like a weird thing to say, but I spent so much of this series genuinely angry at her brilliance, at her craft and her talent and above all else the joy with which she told this story. She wrote the book she wanted to be able to read, and that comes across in every word of the story.

It isn't just that she told a difficult story well, though. It's that the writing in this book, and in particular its depiction of many different kinds of love, is so heartwrenchingly beautiful it would often make it hard for me to breathe. In general, I don't read books first and foremost for the beauty or poetry of language; I often prefer the simple facts stated plainly. But with Dunnett, it's impossible to separate the two. It's her use of language and her mastery of so many different kinds of storytelling techniques that enabled her to tell such a difficult story and make it all seem inevitable. This is a book that seems headed for disaster and like there's no escape route possible (or at least visible to the reader), until at the very last second when we all discover it was on a road we hadn't known existed in the first place.

I have never been so grateful and relieved to finish a book and so utterly bereft by the realization that I'll never read it for the first time again. It was everything I had hoped it would be, and more.

Grade: A