Hi wayspooled, thanks for the recommendation. I've never heard of Dorothy Dunnett, and she does look like an excellent writer from your description. But I strongly feel she is definitely not Dan Brownish (Dan Brownesq?). Her advantage looks everything like the opposite of Dan Brown. The complexity, the difficulty to get into, the multitude of characters, those are factors Dan Brown desperately try to shun from. Brown's plots are all seemingly complex, but actually very simple and explicit, and very easy to follow. His characters are very few. His chapters and sentences are very short. Sure those Dan Brown characteristics are prone to criticism as we have already seen. Yet I firmly believe that complexity/simplexity should not be the criteria to judge the value of literature, to say less of thrillers. Complexity is good. Simplicity is good, too, if only you can make it beautiful.
To digress a little, my country (China) does have a tradition of glorifying simplity. In both Confucism and Taoism simplicity is revered as the ultimate taste, but that might be of another category of aesthetic or philosophical ideas. Still I can't help wonder if that has something do to with my liking for Dan Brown.......
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Originally Posted by wayspooled
Have you tried Dorothy Dunnett? I read King Hereafter, her novel about Macbeth, some years ago and found parts of it stupendously good (every scene in which Macbeth's wife Gruach appears - not sure I'm spelling that the same way Dunnett did), and other parts almost too complex to follow. This complexity seems to be a hallmark of Dunnett's style.
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