Dorothy Dunnett is my favourite kind of novelist: someone you know is smarter than you are. She's got all the multicoloured strands of plot in her hand; they're all going to come together and make sense in a smashing finale, even though you can't see how that's possibly going to happen. She not only says interesting things but says them in interesting ways, ways you wouldn't have thought of. All this makes reviewing (other than the "wow" variety) rather difficult, because if you find something you think is wrong, you just might not be smart enough to see what she's actually doing.

The strengths of this book are prodigious: chiefly the plot and the descriptive detail. Perhaps this is what is meant by "historical novel." Dunnett achieves heroic feats of research in order to write a page, a paragraph!, about Aleppo or Constantinople. From sights to sounds to smells to unpleasant tastes, you will know what it was like to travel the Mediterranean in the 1550's. Locations are rendered in almost obsessive complexity.

Here's where my reservations come in. I'm just not sure if, finishing the book, you'll know what it was like to be a person in the mid-1550's, or to think in the mid-1550's. These people don't behave or think a lot differently than we do. They love, they drink (all except Lymond), they are periodically confused, and they just happen to be roaming through exotic places and having people who hate them pour limitless resources into crafting elaborate schemes for 1) their immediate death, which they miraculously (not a light word here, folks, I mean miraculously) fight their way out of, or 2) their exquisite psychological pain. The description--mind-bogglingly researched and I assume brilliantly accurate. The plot--run by an author who knows where everything's headed. The characters and zeitgeist--curiously under-developed and hollow-at-the-core for a historical series of this, justified, fame. For instance, can you in good faith write an historical novel that takes place squarely in the middle of the Reformation and have but none of the characters driven by religious motives? I'm scratching my head over that one.

"Pawn in Frankincense" is my second Dunnett novel. I utterly adored "The Game of Kings" but had similar reservations. Many of the characters seemed to be the vehicles of wit and plot--here, setting and plot. The edition I read of "Pawn" boasted in its jacket notes that the book was full-blown myth. I agree. Myth and elaborate psychological characterization are mutually exclusive, however.

Read this book for the plot--the jaw-dropping climactic game of chess, the sympathetic chain of surprises throughout, the traps both sides lay for each other (and for you!). Read it for the setting, if you're interested in the 1500's in general and the geography and sociology of the Islamic East in particular. Read it for the archetypes out of which historical romances are made: the mysteriously tortured but omnipotent leading man, the woman and child in danger.

I really enjoy Dorothy Dunnett's writing. The complexity, the subtlety, the humor, and the heroism, all resting on a foundation of extensive historical research, make her novels some of the most challenging and pleasurable I've ever read. That said, I found "Pawn in Frankincense" to be one of the most difficult to finish.

It's not because it was a much darker novel than the first three, though I did miss the extra helpings of wit found in the earlier novels. What I struggled with in this book were the too-extensive descriptive passages of the Levant and its Islamic rituals and prayers. The endless lists of treasures and opulence, alone, made me numb. At times, it felt as though Dunnett simply couldn't bear to leave out any detail of her exhaustive research, regardless of whether it enhanced the narrative or not. Of all authors, she was the last who needed to do this. Given her talent, given her ability to evoke compelling images and emotions with just a few sentences, so much descriptiveness became overkill. So, for the first time, I felt that one of Dunnett's books could have used more judicious editing.

Oddly enough, what I found to be her most wearisome novel was also, in many ways, her most powerful. The dreadful choices, the rich characterizations, and the atmosphere of mystery struck me deeply. It's Dunnett's ability to engage my mind so fully that makes her one of my favorite authors...and it's this ability that makes me recommend her to anyone who will listen, even if I personally didn't think this particular book was her best.