While I enjoyed this book enough to be thinking of looking up the sequels I found that bits of it went rather over my head, and I always felt a little lost in the plot. Partly this appears to be deliberate, and a lot of it comes out in the wash in the last few chapters, but it definitely left me feeling a bit of a disconnect from the book that is unusual with me. Nevertheless I would, with caution, recommend. Lively characters, intrigue, and a rich background all make this an appealing novel. ( )

Niccolo Rising is the first in the House of Niccolo series. In this particular book, we are introduced to young Claes, who begins the story as a servant in the dyeing establishing of the widow Charetty in Bruges.

I picked this novel up because I love historical fiction. On the whole, though, I struggled with Niccolo Rising, primarily because the author lost me when she got into the political events of the time. Frankly, I was bored, so much that I began to skip pages to get to the more interesting parts. The language is dense and difficult to follow. I had to read this book is short fits and starts because the author really packs the information in, sometimes to the detriment of the plot. But when the plot got back to Claes, it was actually quite interesting. It’s just too bad that there was so little plot there. Too, it was really difficult for me to identify or even understand the main character, since the third-person narrative doesn’t actually revolve around him most of the time. It was disappointing, considering all the good things I’d heard about this book prior to beginning it. ( )

Dorothy Dunnett’s House of Niccolo series offers us an entry into the world of the late 15 century in all its richness and physicality, with the food, the pewter cups and candian wine, the sumptuous clothes, the woodsmoke-filled freezing halls, the pissstinking dye vats, the canals and bridges and gates of the towns, the armour, the pageants, jousts, feasts and plagues, the high politics, and low scheming of bankers, burghers, bishops and high born bastards, Dukes, Kings and Princes, the wars, wounds, living, loving and dying.

Here is a partial list of historical events covered by the series:

The fall of Trebizond, last outpost of the Byzantine empire
The rise of the Ottoman Empire in the black sea
The trade rivalry between Genoa and Venice
The end of the Lusignan dynasty on Cypress
The Wars of the Roses in England,
The marriage of James II of Scotland and Margaret of Denmark
The marriage of Zoe Paleologue and Ivan the Third Grand Duke of Musocvy
The disintegration of the empire of the Golden Horde
The sack of Timbuktu by the Songhai empire
The siege of Famagusta
The fall of the duchy of Burgundy

Through all these events the hero of the series, Nicholas van der Poele, steers his remarkable career, first as a Tyl Eulenspeigel-like apprentice in Bruges, then mercenary leader, merchant, banker, pirate adventurer, inventor, maths genius, lover, diviner, political and financial advisor to Dukes and Princes, father and enigmatic friend. He is accompanied on these adventures through early modern Europe and the Levant by his band of friends and colleagues, each of whom has a particular skill: a doctor, a priest, an apothecary, a gunner and metalsmith, a notary, a business manager, a ship master and so on. The running story line is the visceral feud between Niccolo and the St Pol family, and the commercial rivalry between Nicholas’s own company and the mysterious Vatachino firm.

Dunnet is an extraordinary phenomenon. Her novelistic method is to eschew internal psychological narration (of the kind that Eliot and Tolstoy employ), and to focus on the events and actions of the characters, the external view. This creates the incredible pace of the novels, and at the same time keeps the reader alert for what is really going on underneath the surface. Her understanding and presentation of history is thick with the details of ordinary life; she completely understands the complex relationships between politics, religion, economic forces and the inertia of everyday life and how in this period all is seared with trade. She is capable of intensely beautiful descriptive prose, a kind of maidenly raciness in the love scenes, swashbuckling set-pieces of violence, subtle and elusive descriptions of negotiations at high levels. She weaves together her fictional characters and the real personages of history so well that you cannot tell the difference. Her development of character (over 4,300 pages and eight novels) is astonishing in the way she commands the reader’s loyalty, respect and love for the ‘good’ characters, and hatred for the ‘bad’ characters, without sacrificing complexity and insight into how those characters have become what they are. She is also a witty commentator on the parameters and conventions of the genre without introducing the kind of jarring anachronisms that mar many writers of historical fiction. Her metaphors are all firmly entrenched in the worldview of the characters (which, according to that most didactic of critics James Wood, is the hallmark of great writing) and there are several very funny jokes. My favourite is the list of the (uncapitalised) names of the castles owned by Prince Sigismond of the Tyrol: sigmundhelm, sigmundhof, sigmundfried sigmundfreud…

Like the great Dumas, she is capable of invoking in a sophisticated (possibly jaded) adult reader the kind of feverish, intoxicated, under-the-bedclothes-with-a-torch kind of reading last experienced in childhood.

Read the full review on The Lectern:

http://thelectern.blogspot.com/2008/0... ( )

Dorothy Dunnett's fans are few but they really, really love her novels. After reading Niccolo Rising, the first in the "House of Niccolo" series, I can understand both why she doesn't have more fans, and why those she does have are so passionate. It took me a long time to get into this novel. The cast of characters is so huge, the plot is so complex, and her writing style is so full of oblique humor that I often felt I was limping after a vast and colorful caravan that was traveling too fast for me. But once I did get hooked, I really got hooked, and the novel kept me up past my bedtime because I just couldn't bear to put it down. The level of detail Dunnett weaves into her narrative may be forbidding at first, but once readers get a good grasp of her story, it makes the characters live and breathe for us.

I've posted a longer review on my Historical Novels website at www.HistoricalNovels.info

Much slower to start than the Lymond Chronicles, I think; and unlike the end of the first Lymond book, where at least I had something of a grasp of all the various machinations by the time the book ended, I finished The House of Niccolo still thinking "Wait... but... he did that? Really? And... who?" Which is not to say that Dunnett didn't lay out her plot well, but that she did so in a manner so labyrinthine and Byzantine that I think it surpassed the Lymond Chronicles at points.

Though to be honest, with the exception of Dunnett's dense prose, and her love for angst and intricate plotting and detail, this didn't feel much like the Lymond Chronicles—I suppose this is in part because Lymond's love of word play and literary allusions was entirely absent. A Dunnett novel entirely in English! Such a novelty. The main character is certainly a very different person to Lymond, too; less entrancing, perhaps, and a little bit more of a blank in some ways, though probably more... I won't say likeable, but perhaps more the kind of person whom you could tolerate spending time with. *g* A little bit more human, not quite so epic—certainly, I can picture him being a child in a way I can never quite see Lymond being.

I have of course, in my own usual fashion, managed to acquire the third, fourth and sixth books in this series, but not the second one, so it will take me a little while to progress onwards with this series, but I do think I will be carrying on with it. ( )