The Unicorn Hunt

Journey or destination?

Quite an amazing amount of stuff happened in cirka 900 (!) pages, without advancing the overall plot much. We went to Scotland, we went to Florence, we went to Tyrol, we went to Egypt, we went to Mount Sinai, we went to Cyprus, we went to Venice. This book is meandering. It is slow. It is incredibly self-indulgent, scattering way too many Easter eggs for the Lymond Chronicles – with Dunnett winking at the reader, saying “yes, I can afford to be as self-indulgent as I like.” I have to admit it is true. Because I still enjoyed this immensely!

In no particular order, here are some of the many, many things I liked:

✨ Nicholas reeling, unravelling, losing all the peace he learned to have in the previous books. He show more tries to wreck the relationships he built in Africa, alienating everyone. You watch him crash, yet Dunnett keeps telling us that this is all part of his secret plan: here is stage 1… stage 6. I still don’t know what these were, but maybe I will!

✨ Watching Gelis act was like watching a train wreck in slow motion, without knowing whether the train had a destination or whether there was a train in the first place. Anyway, WTF, Gelis?

✨ The jousts! There were two jousts in this book, and they were so, so well done. I realized there has been a sad lack of jousts in this series. I am glad this has been remedied.

✨ The singing game in chapter 3! It was so wonderful! I wanted to sit by the fire on that beach together with the characters. There was magical writing there, making the scene come alive. I immediately wanted 15th century music in my head, and went to find some.

✨ Katelijne (Kathi)! I love it when I have a new character to love in a series. You are awesome, Kathi. The kite scene had me in stitches!

✨ The royal family of Scotland treated me to a master class in hanging a mirror and catching an escaped parrot, all at the same time. This had me in stitches too. Dunnet is so good at both comedy and drama.

✨ Coming to Sinai and the monastery of St Catherine was beautiful.

✨ The end scenes in the midst of the Venice carnival. They were of the ”give me the next book now” kind.

And now, let’s have some quotes:

”Godscalc said, ’When did you last make confession?’
’When did you last know whether I was telling the truth?’ Nicholas said.

”Nicholas de Fleury stopped in his tracks by some fatal collision of circumstances and responding, not as normal man would, but with every unit of force he possessed, deployed without discrimination or scruple – unless he were halted.”

’If the Turks are going to be stopped, we have to do it between us.’
’That’s all right,’ Nicholas said. ’I am doing nothing on Tuesday.’ show less

I’ve always enjoyed reading how Nicholas manipulates mansplains manslaughters his way through his adventures, but I found it hard to get invested in his multiple-stage plan.
There was at least an objective in the previous books. (don’t die in book 1, get to Trebizond first in book 2, survive without the Charetty in 3 and save the bank from bankruptcy in 4) Then, at the end, it always turned out Nicholas ran at least 5 cons in the background while completing the objective.
Here, I don’t even know what the obvious goal is, let alone all his secret sidehustles? Sure, I'll follow Nicholas around, but certainly with less enthusiasm than before.

There were some things I really liked.
First, there are some one to one confrontations between show more Nicholas and Simon and Nicholas and Jordan. After 4 books, I was excited and those scenes were great.
Secondly, this series had finally managed to let its female characters be. Katelijne is allowed to just be a girl. Unlike Catherine from book 2, she gets to be a curious teenager and a child, a friend and a person.

Meanwhile, Gelis is a background presence who runs her own long cons. I quite liked her as a character in book 4, but hated her romance with Nicholas, so I was relieved during the telenovela that was the last few pages because she only let herself be seduced with ulterior motives.
I don’t think Nicholas has faced someone who bested this many times and lived to tell the tale, let alone a woman he couldn’t seduce and then leave when it suited him. He has finally met someone who can match him in conversations. The verbal sparring between them was a constant back and forth of barbs and guessing at each other’s schemes, which was very enjoyable.
Yet at the same time: my god, now there’s two of them to keep track of

And finally the guy has crossed the line of clever as the plot demands to proper Mary Sue. Nicholas is now a supernatural being who can find anything! Truly.
He has always been one of those impossibly clever tricksters, an Homo Universalis born a decade too early, but I let it slide because that was just the formula of these books: Clever little bastard on adventures.
But the supernatural gift treated as a completely serious plot point is where my suspension of disbelief ends. For a series that is so incredibly well researched and rooted in history, this feels like a cheap turn to fantasy. I think I would have accepted it if it was just another one of his well-explained skills, like the toy making or speaking 5 languages. Instead, it’s never explained how the divining and the pendulum work and what it limits are. It works sometimes, at random, and fails other times. Nicholas can find silver in a mountain but not Gelis based on her ring?

Some other remarks:
1. Umar deserved better.
2. It is wild to refer to Nicholas as De Fleury instead of Van der Poele show less

Nicholas is at his coldest and most manipulative in this volume, the charm he deploys to win over the young court of Scotland is so obviously an act of ruthlessness to the reader, but what is he up to in the wake of the double shock and trauma of grief and betrayal the blew his world apart at the end of Scales Of Gold? How can Gelis use her own child in a game of such sadistic cruelty, and why?

There's an odd sense of dislocation about this novel, or disassociation, perhaps since the geography is much, much clearer than the characters. It's very much a novel of concealment, if it's your first read-through. The motives, means and ends of the two central protagonists in their horrifying feud are kept hidden throughout, sometimes glimpsed show more and hinted at, but this is the only book, in the series, I think, that does not end with some stunning twist, revelation or reversal. That is delayed by Godscalc's death, the story diverted to other arenas, and becomes a pursuit, of lost gold and a hidden child. show less

A typically intricately plotted and dense offering from Dunnett; before I began this series, I would not have thought it possible to complicate one's life more than Lymond did, and yet Nicholas seems more than up to the task. This is the darkest of the 'Niccoló Rising' series so far—an echo of Pawn in Frankincense in the Lymond series, I think; there are certainly thematic and plot resonances, too—with Dunnett breaking Nicholas down as far as he can go before it's possible to make of him the kind of hero/protagonist we see in Lymond. There is one plot point that I intensely disliked, because it introduces an element which seems to jar with the incredibly realistic world which Dunnett has created, and is far too much of a deus ex show more machina. Everything else, however, rollicks along at a suitably fast pace, and ends on a typically Dunnettian (Dunnettish?) cliff-hanger. I'm glad I have the next book to hand. show less

If you are keeping track, it is now mid 15th century and the world, especially Europe, is standing on the doorstep of modernism. Our hero Nicholas has a new name. He is now Niccolo de Fleury. If you remember from Scales of Gold he married Gelis (the woman who had a love-hate relationship with him). She might have had a child with his archenemy, Simon de St. Pol. Gelis, instead of seeking revenge for Nicholas supposedly killing her sister, is now angry with him for having a child with her. You would think Nicholas would be used to this kind of incrimination from vengeful individuals, especially the women in his life! He believes that Gelis really had his child and like a fabled unicorn, he’s on the hunt to find this child. But, does it show more even exist?
Despite all this Nicholas tries to be all business. Instead of gold like in the last book, he is also on the hunt for silver in Tyrol. Upon hearing rumors of treasure in Alexandria Nicholas is off again on a feverish fast paced adventure. This time, he is not the fun-loving nice guy of past books. He has an edge to him that borders on asshole. He also has special powers to divine precious metals (?!). Many readers didn’t care for this new personality or the plot, as it is utterly strange and complex. Myself, I am getting tired of him being imprisoned and tortured in every book. The betrayals don’t phase him at all. show less

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2678683.html

Fifth in the series of eight novels about Dunnett's fifteenth-century hero Claes van der Poele, now rebranded Nicolas de Fleury, on a canvas that takes us from a long first section in Scotland at the court of the young James III, to Cyprus, Alexandria and the monastery of St Catherine on Mount Sinai. I must confess that I felt Dunnett was not fully in control of her material here. The core of the narrative is the feuding between Claes on the one hand and his estranged wife Gelis and his secret father Simon de St. Pol on the other. I was not convinced by Gelis's means or motivation; her end game is not at all obvious, and she seems to have almost supernatural means of keeping Claes apart from his show more son and his treasure (and at one point his liberty in a gruesome torture scene). Claes meantime has acquired his own supernatural powers of divining the location of sought objects and people by pendulum - though this only works as effectively as the plot needs it to. The attention to local historical and geographical detail is still very worthwhile and engaging, but I hope the next book (which I have ordered, naturally) is more coherent. show less

After the cliffhanger ending of Scales of Gold, the story picks up again; Gelis has disappeared, apparently pregnant with Simon's (Nicholas's arch enemy and father) child. Nicholas spends time in Scotland, nurturing plans for the future, and plans to disadvantage, taking care also to sleep with every woman Simon has had recently. A parrot provides a clue to the missing gold from the Africa trip, and the rivalry with the Vatachino, linked to the Adorne family also grows. We are introduced to Katelijne Sersanders, who attaches herself to the Adorne pildrimage to Sinai, and Nicholas also goes (via the Tyrol, where he discovers he can divine) to Egypt.
Finally, Nicholas and Gelis meet again, on top of Mount Sinai, where it is confirmed that show more she did have a child. Finally, everyone arrives back in Venice, in Carnival season, and the scene is set for Nicholas to finally meet the child; and promptly disappears into the night.
There is a sense of plots starting to come together in this book, although there are still a hell of a lot of red herrings being trailed. show less