Using the perhaps obscure, to people outside of Scotland and Orkney, conceit that the Orkney Earl Thorfinn and the the Scottish King Macbeth (he of the Scottishplay) were one and the same person, Dunnett launches boldly like the Vikings of old on a magnificent epic, challenging in its depth and scope, dense with the tangled undergrowth of family and allegiance and geography and history and politics and strategies and power. The young Thorfinn has interest only in preserving his Earldom, the older Thorfinn, having secured it, becomes King of Alba in spite of himself, and only reluctantly assumes the role, but when he does he commits himself to an ambitious programme of nation-building that will encompass decades of effort, and may not, in the end, ever be enough. 

Rich with allusions and scraps of learning, heedless of obscurity, it does not resemble the famous play, though there are plenty of references scattered around in the often tart and hilarious dialogue, but does ponder, in brief pauses from the more practical business of marying widows of men you've had killed, and all the fighting and the maneuvering and the wrangling and the general husbandry, how men are remembered long after they are gone, and the thorny questions of legend, symbolism and prophecy. There are battles on land and sea, there is hardly a page without intrigue of some sort, there is romance, and there is an extraordinary pilgrimage across Europe to Rome, all driven by an extraordinary man haunted by the knowledge that he will never know whether he will succeed or not. A tragedy, of course, but it made me laugh out loud no less than three times, and the Scottishplay never managed that.

Listened again. Still epic and heartbreaking, layered with irony.