Uneasy rests the seat: A review of George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones.
From Monday, 14 November through Saturday, 26 November, I read George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones (NY: Bantam Books (a division of Random House, Inc.), 2011 [copyright 1996]; 696 pps. [excluding the 15-page excerpt from A Clash of Kings, 1999]; ISBN: 978-0-553-38679-0); this is the first book in his A Song of Ice and Fire series, which also includes A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast For Crows, and A Dance With Dragons. This is the trade paperback tie-in with the HBO series, which means that the "A" in the title is omitted, to match the series' title.
I'd long resisted plunging into George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, having been burned too many times by ballyhooed sci-fi and fantasy series in general and unimpressed by Martin's own "What if superheroes and supervillains really existed?" series, Wild Cards, in particular (although, to be fair, Martin was principally the editor of the Wild Cards series and not the main author of it); what finally swayed me to read the first book, A Game of Thrones, was the generally favorably reviewed HBO premium cable TV series based upon it (which rather inexplicably dropped the "a" in the title) and the article in the 11 April 2011 issue of The New Yorker ("Just Write It!" by Laura Miller, which introduced me to Neil Gaiman's defense of Martin from his own irate and importunate fans, "George R.R. Martin is not your bitch").
While the HBO "movie" tie-in trade paperback edition is 694 pages long (excluding a 15-paged excerpt from the second book in the series, A Clash of Kings), it bears its length well: I wasn't fully invested in the plots and counter-plots until roughly halfway through the book, but the last 200 or so pages unfolded at a nearly breathless pace, and I would've welcomed an extra couple hundred pages to this volume.
Essentially a high medieval fantasy in a time of dying magic mostly concerned with the schemes and ambitions of the high-born on the continent of Westeros, A Game of Thrones follows the fortunes of Lord Eddard ("Ned") Stark, King of the North, lord of Winterfell and former bosom companion and aide to the present ruler of the Seven Kingdoms, Robert Baratheon, called by some the Usurper, owing to to his overthrow (with the help of his teenaged brother-in-law Jaime, subsequently called Kingslayer, and Ned) of the House Targaryen, the so-called "blood of the dragon," at the Battle of Trident. The Battle of Trident casts a long shadow over this book, and is constantly referenced, with enough paucity of detail to keep the reader's interest piqued (unlike, say, how Martin's idol Tolkien might've written about it). Robert's ceremonial seat is the Iron Throne, so called because it is composed of hundreds of swords welded together by dragon fire: it's a wonderful political metaphor that graphically illustrates the lack of ease attending a position of putatively supreme authority; it reminded me, in a way, of the "hot seat" of the casique or chief (or village headman), of the Tsotsil Indian pueblo (akin to a small state) of Pebvil in B. Traven's Government, the first book of his six-book Jungle series.
Westeros is afflicted by supernaturally out-of-kilter weather that may call to mind some of the most dire predictions of the consequences of global warming: the summers can last a decade and the winters can be full-on ice ages lasting generations (indeed, the Stark motto -- a word that Martin never uses, perhaps in an attempt to more firmly ground the northern families at least in Norse-Teutonic myth by eschewing words imported from the Classical world -- is "Winter Is Coming"). There used to be dragons -- they were instrumental to the rise of the Targaryens -- but most of the fae-/Fuzzy-like races and creatures are thought to be as extinct as the dragons, or never to have been, despite the occasional disturbing reports of undead warriors called Others on the other side of the great ice Wall at the northern extremity of the Stark domains. However, keep in mind the Stark family "words".....
If I grumbled at the relative lack of a lower-stairs viewpoint, if I longed for the feminist perspective of the Free Renunciates ("Amazons") of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series, well, A Game of Thrones does depict, in all of its earthy disrepute, a society of macho shitheads who enshrine violence and eschew all thoughts of class mitigation -- not terribly dissimilar to Western Europe's own feudal history. If I personally would never want to live in the world Martin depicts, with its ever-escalating (deteriorating, actually...) iterations of the prisoner's dilemma, it does make for engrossing reading, once Martin has laid enough of his markers down. It's been awhile since I was able to sit back and enjoy a book of epic fantasy on its own merits, without making allowances for a generational shift in taste or concerning myself o'ermuch with the cumbersome apparatus of the milieu. (The appendix consists of nearly twenty pages of the major houses' sigils, mottoes, members, retainers and associated hangers-on; if the study of fictional heraldry is to your taste, I recommend the six-issue comic book adaptation of Martin's prequel to A Song of Ice and Fire, The Hedge Knight, which contains several pages of the signs of the various houses of Westeros in its concluding chapter.) I also appreciated the paucity of supernatural and mythical elements in this volume: it made them appropriately mysterious, awe-inspiring, or flat-out terrifying when they did appear, and avoided the feeling of a medieval bestiary or a Dungeons & Dragons Monsters Manual being clumsily interpolated with the narrative.
Martin is much slower to set his plots humming than either Gary Jennings (Aztec) or James Clavell (Shogun), which is why I feel as though I'm unable to chide him for not showing, in his first volume, the same level of character development that David Wingrove was able to display in the first couple of volumes of his sadly truncated Chung Kuo series (his style is at least as plain-spoken, if not flat-footed, as theirs, but to someone who's decidedly not a Tolkienite, such as myself, that's not wholly a bad thing); at minimum, I will continue with A Clash of Kings, and hope that his deliberation doesn't turn into auctorial goldbricking, as certain elements of his fandom have accused him of.
*Cross-posted from my LibraryThing account.
I'd long resisted plunging into George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, having been burned too many times by ballyhooed sci-fi and fantasy series in general and unimpressed by Martin's own "What if superheroes and supervillains really existed?" series, Wild Cards, in particular (although, to be fair, Martin was principally the editor of the Wild Cards series and not the main author of it); what finally swayed me to read the first book, A Game of Thrones, was the generally favorably reviewed HBO premium cable TV series based upon it (which rather inexplicably dropped the "a" in the title) and the article in the 11 April 2011 issue of The New Yorker ("Just Write It!" by Laura Miller, which introduced me to Neil Gaiman's defense of Martin from his own irate and importunate fans, "George R.R. Martin is not your bitch").
While the HBO "movie" tie-in trade paperback edition is 694 pages long (excluding a 15-paged excerpt from the second book in the series, A Clash of Kings), it bears its length well: I wasn't fully invested in the plots and counter-plots until roughly halfway through the book, but the last 200 or so pages unfolded at a nearly breathless pace, and I would've welcomed an extra couple hundred pages to this volume.
Essentially a high medieval fantasy in a time of dying magic mostly concerned with the schemes and ambitions of the high-born on the continent of Westeros, A Game of Thrones follows the fortunes of Lord Eddard ("Ned") Stark, King of the North, lord of Winterfell and former bosom companion and aide to the present ruler of the Seven Kingdoms, Robert Baratheon, called by some the Usurper, owing to to his overthrow (with the help of his teenaged brother-in-law Jaime, subsequently called Kingslayer, and Ned) of the House Targaryen, the so-called "blood of the dragon," at the Battle of Trident. The Battle of Trident casts a long shadow over this book, and is constantly referenced, with enough paucity of detail to keep the reader's interest piqued (unlike, say, how Martin's idol Tolkien might've written about it). Robert's ceremonial seat is the Iron Throne, so called because it is composed of hundreds of swords welded together by dragon fire: it's a wonderful political metaphor that graphically illustrates the lack of ease attending a position of putatively supreme authority; it reminded me, in a way, of the "hot seat" of the casique or chief (or village headman), of the Tsotsil Indian pueblo (akin to a small state) of Pebvil in B. Traven's Government, the first book of his six-book Jungle series.
Westeros is afflicted by supernaturally out-of-kilter weather that may call to mind some of the most dire predictions of the consequences of global warming: the summers can last a decade and the winters can be full-on ice ages lasting generations (indeed, the Stark motto -- a word that Martin never uses, perhaps in an attempt to more firmly ground the northern families at least in Norse-Teutonic myth by eschewing words imported from the Classical world -- is "Winter Is Coming"). There used to be dragons -- they were instrumental to the rise of the Targaryens -- but most of the fae-/Fuzzy-like races and creatures are thought to be as extinct as the dragons, or never to have been, despite the occasional disturbing reports of undead warriors called Others on the other side of the great ice Wall at the northern extremity of the Stark domains. However, keep in mind the Stark family "words".....
If I grumbled at the relative lack of a lower-stairs viewpoint, if I longed for the feminist perspective of the Free Renunciates ("Amazons") of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series, well, A Game of Thrones does depict, in all of its earthy disrepute, a society of macho shitheads who enshrine violence and eschew all thoughts of class mitigation -- not terribly dissimilar to Western Europe's own feudal history. If I personally would never want to live in the world Martin depicts, with its ever-escalating (deteriorating, actually...) iterations of the prisoner's dilemma, it does make for engrossing reading, once Martin has laid enough of his markers down. It's been awhile since I was able to sit back and enjoy a book of epic fantasy on its own merits, without making allowances for a generational shift in taste or concerning myself o'ermuch with the cumbersome apparatus of the milieu. (The appendix consists of nearly twenty pages of the major houses' sigils, mottoes, members, retainers and associated hangers-on; if the study of fictional heraldry is to your taste, I recommend the six-issue comic book adaptation of Martin's prequel to A Song of Ice and Fire, The Hedge Knight, which contains several pages of the signs of the various houses of Westeros in its concluding chapter.) I also appreciated the paucity of supernatural and mythical elements in this volume: it made them appropriately mysterious, awe-inspiring, or flat-out terrifying when they did appear, and avoided the feeling of a medieval bestiary or a Dungeons & Dragons Monsters Manual being clumsily interpolated with the narrative.
Martin is much slower to set his plots humming than either Gary Jennings (Aztec) or James Clavell (Shogun), which is why I feel as though I'm unable to chide him for not showing, in his first volume, the same level of character development that David Wingrove was able to display in the first couple of volumes of his sadly truncated Chung Kuo series (his style is at least as plain-spoken, if not flat-footed, as theirs, but to someone who's decidedly not a Tolkienite, such as myself, that's not wholly a bad thing); at minimum, I will continue with A Clash of Kings, and hope that his deliberation doesn't turn into auctorial goldbricking, as certain elements of his fandom have accused him of.
*Cross-posted from my LibraryThing account.