rusty_halo | Appearance vs Reality in The Disorderly Knights

I am about halfway through The Disorderly Knights for the third time, and wanted to write down a lot of the thoughts that are running through my head before I forget them.

My mom's reading the same book (so cool!) and called me last night after finishing chapter five. She had more questions about the political factions, about how Thompson ended up being the one to spread the false information to the Turks, and about why Jerott hates Lymond so much. I tried to explain as best I could, and to ask questions about what she thinks without giving anything away. So far, she thinks that Lymond's going to end up with Joleta at the end of the sixth book (!!!) and that Gabriel is an admirable, saintlike character who Lymond could learn a lot from. And this is after Gabriel's Mdina escape attempt! Oh, Mom... it's going to be a shock when she finds out! I was already convinced he was evil by the time I got to that part, but I don't think she even suspects yet.

In retrospect, Gabriel's awfulness is really, really obvious once you deconstruct what he does with Oonagh. It's horrifying and offensive how he manipulates her into agreeing to sacrifice herself "for Lymond," because supposedly Lymond will have such an awesome and superior future without Oonagh dragging him down and holding him back. Gabriel strokes her pride and self-loathing simultaneously, telling her that she should have been Queen of Ireland while congratulating her on having the "moral sense" to give up on herself. And she is blinded to the horror of it by her low self-esteem; her eventual suicide is foreshadowed throughout. (And again in her suicidal impulse when Lymond is about to get caught: "Stay down. And I shall let go this little cord, and share your rest in the sea.")

Of course, there's also Lymond's insistence on viewing the Turks as fellow human beings, of recognizing both their flaws and their virtues, of comparing them to the Knights of St. John and finding both pretty damn similar. Compare this to Gabriel and Jerott's fire-breathing kill-them-all extremism. But, oh, wait, Gabriel's pious, his murderous hatred is a good thing because it's driven by religion. (That's what strikes me about my mom's failure to even suspect his evil, that because he's couching hatred in the veneer of age-old religious propaganda he still appears to be a good guy, even though his message is "We must kill those whose religion differs from ours").

That's actually the thing I'm enjoying most this time around, Gabriel as a representation of the worst excesses of religious faith, the way it's used by those in power to manipulate and by those who are weak to avoid thinking logically or taking responsibility for their actions (*cough*Jerott*cough*). Dunnett's fair about it--Jerott is blinded by his hero-worship of Gabriel and his belief in rigidly following rules, but he's also well-meaning, three-dimensional, complex, and decent in many ways. Still, he's the one arguing for torturing slaves and letting two hundred shepherd-soldiers die, because his religious leaders say so. (Remind me again why the Turks are so much worse?)

I love the contrast between the pious knights who are doing horrible things, and then the ostensibly-godless, mercenary Lymond, who is actually trying to help save the people and protect the weak. The knights follow the letter of the law while Lymond follows the spirit of it. And Gabriel succeeds at painting Lymond as the bad guy to Jerott, because Jerott's blinded by the surface and doesn't see the substance. (Ah, Jerott, why are you in three books when Will Scott only gets one and a half?)

That's the core, the recurring motif throughout this book: the difference between appearance and reality, truth and presentation, substance from words and claims. Not just in the Lymond/Gabriel dichotomy, but in the way it's mirrored with Philippa and Joleta: Lymond is to Gabriel as Philippa is to Joleta--one tarnished but with a good heart, the other bright and shining but empty inside.

And it's mirrored and paralleled throughout, this constant theme of deception and trickery that hides the truth: the opening chapter with the sheep in helmets that later gets played out again with the people of Mdina disguised as an army; Lymond's tearful prostitute disguise; Thompson's fake fishing boat which turns out to be a pirate boat with fake canons; Thompson's false message about reinforcements that leads the Turks away from Malta; Nicholas de Nicholay's feigned illness that he uses to track down Lymond in the hospital; Lymond purposely assuming a veneer of selfishness just as Gabriel assumes a veneer of piety; the French excuse for sending Lymond to Malta to fight Turks when they really want him to help depose the Spanish Grand Master; Lymond and Oonagh's Turkish disguises and subsequent escape; Buccleuch's trick to blame bastard children on the Kerrs; Joleta hiding her pregnancy and abortion; Gabriel disguising himself as Lymond to have sex with Oonagh. (Did I mention how incredibly well-written this story is? I'm in awe of how well all these threads are woven.)

A couple more bits that struck me:

Page 135, Lymond on the Knights of St. John: "'You are now what every sect potentially becomes when it loses leadership,' said Lymond calmly. 'A tool.' ... 'You either get out... or you make yourselves so strong that you can dictate your own terms.'" (135) He could practically be talking about St. Mary's here! It's very clear from a literary perspective that Dunnett is paralleling the knights with St. Mary's, and that in the story, Lymond applies what he's learned from the knights to his understanding of St. Mary's. Both end up as dangerous political tools, out of control, easily manipulated, subject to dangerous leaders and political machinations, vulnerable to infighting and to the whims of those in power. It's part of why he realizes St. Mary's is too dangerous, because even he can't control it, and it's too risky in the wrong hands. (I guess one question I do still have is how much Lymond is seriously making a go at St. Mary's versus how much he is using it as a trap for Gabriel all along.)

And then I'll just note, because I'm trying to keep count: page 196 has one of those lovely rare Lymond POV scenes, where we see how heartbroken he is over Oonagh's supposed death, how tormented he is by his own glibness and facade of irreverence, how much of a struggle it is for him to accept what Gabriel is and to make the choice to devote himself to stopping Gabriel. It's only on re-read that you feel the immense weight of that decision, knowing the terrible consequences it's going to have for Lymond and those he loves. The first time I read it, it seemed a bit much, but now? Wow, he really did have an idea of what he was getting into, and he accepted a huge burden when he chose to bear it, because he believed it was morally necessary. (And another thing that is obvious but I think important to articulate, that for Lymond "right" isn't an ideology, it's "what helps people"--in this case it's protecting the world from a dangerous, power-hungry sadist, explicitly not for personal or ideological reasons, although part of what makes it so complex and interesting is that he does also have huge personal and ideological differences with Gabriel.)

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