Ian Dunlop (1)

Didn’t entirely hate it… there was info to be gleaned from it, but a few things annoyed me, especially by the end.
Chapters were divided by theme/event with loose chronology; the use of dates within each chapter was too jumbled and inconsistent. Would start a paragraph “In June…” and I’d have to go back a couple pages to see what year was last mentioned.
Architecture: it was a passion of Louis XIV, so it deserves a place in the story, but it seems to me it takes a pretty masterful storyteller to describe architecture to a reader who is not an architect, and particularly when many of the chateaux being described no longer exist. Dunlop isn’t that storyteller, though this may have been the time when the eyewitness accounts were most worthwhile, because they turned talk of columns and pilasters into a living impression of the time and place.
I loved the idea of contemporary quotation. The narrative voice is very weak, however—hardly strong enough to carry the load, and the transitions were ill-defined. People enter and leave the storyline without adequate introduction and minimal reader investment. “On such-and-such date, so-and-so wrote to so-and-so,” got really old, and was too often preceded or followed by simplistic commentary. This hurt the narrative especially when covering wartime and battles. It sometimes created the impression that, well, if we don’t have a quote about it, we won’t talk about it.
At the end Dunlop quotes Voltaire, “Time, which ripens men’s judgments…” And this is exactly what seems to be lacking from the book—the clarifying retrospect that the narrator should have brought to the subject.
Dunlop would occasionally (again, too often) quote a variety of other historians in the same manner that he quoted cotemporary sources (“Chandler comments:” … “Churchill writes:”). Hated that.
Toward the end I began to feel I was carrying 3000 pages for the content of 100. It may actually deserve a star or half-star less simply for its execution.… (more)