Power is a mummer's trick: a review of George R.R. Martin's A Clash of Kings.
From Saturday, 21 April to Monday, 7 May, I read the second book in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series (the basis for HBO's Game of Thrones series), A Clash of Kings (NY: Bantam Books [an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.], 2011 [copyright 1999 by George R.R. Martin]; ISBN: 978-0-553-57990-1; 1010 pps., excluding the 16-paged excerpt from the third book in the series, A Storm of Swords).
The review that follows contains some spoilers for the first book in the series, A Game of Thrones, which really shouldn't need mentioning here; but, considering that every commercial on television these days featuring an idiotic and/or impossible-in-the-real-world stunt contains a "do not attempt" disclaimer on it, I figured I'd slap the "spoiler alert" disclaimer on here too.
The plots and counter-plots initiated in A Game of Thrones grind on and are complicated in A Clash of Kings, with more time given to an absurdly and ineptly ambitious former ward of the disgraced and deceased King of the North, Edward ("Ned") Stark, Theon Greyjoy, a princeling of the Iron Islands and House Greyjoy -- essentially pirate lords who worship the Drowned God, a deity they believe requires frequent human sacrifices -- as well as the main surviving characters from the previous book. An epic high medieval fantasy set on the continent of Westeros -- which is afflicted with preternaturally-long seasons of summer and even longer seasons of winter -- A Song of Ice and Fire (explicit reference to the series title is made here for the first time) is essentially a look at a series of patriarchal societies that place no premium on good works, peace, or fellowship, and in which game-changing technology (read: magic and alchemy) are slowly reawakening following the hatching of a trio of dragons in the possession of the last surviving heir to House Targaryen, Daenerys, who was prostituted to the lord of the Mongol-like (or Alan-like, Hun-like, Turk-like, etc.) Dothraki by her exceptionally distasteful older brother, Viserys, and the rotund merchant prince Illyrio Mopatis in A Game of Thrones, and who, in the wake of the death of her husband, Khal Drogo ("khal" is a title analogous to our world's "khan"; Daenerys's title upon marrying him is "khaleesi"), leads a small, ragtag band of Dothraki, hoping to reclaim the Iron Throne of her father, the Mad King Aerys II.
The previous King of the Seven Kingdoms, Robert I Baratheon, having been murdered in a plot engineered by his beautiful -- though cold, ambitious, and borderline sociopathic -- wife Cersei Lannister, was supplanted by his putatively eldest son (though he, like his other two children, are actually the progeny of Cersei and her twin brother and leader of the Kingsguard, Jamie Lannister, called "Kingslayer" due to his murder of Aerys II near the end of Robert's Rebellion, prior to the opening of A Game of Thrones), the grossly immature and murderous Joffrey Baratheon, who is twelve or thirteen when he ascends the throne. It was primarily Cersei who engineered the betrayal and execution of the one mostly decent main character in A Game of Thrones, Ned Stark, who was one of Robert's main allies in his overthrow of House Targaryen; it was Jamie who threw Ned's eight-year-old son Bran from the top window of the tower where he and Cersei were having sexual congress, causing Bran to become paralyzed. (Bran formerly displayed nearly superhuman climbing abilities, and loved to skitter up the walls and along the rooftops of the Stark domain, Winterfell; he inadvertently discovered Jamie and Cersei at their disport, and Cersei feared that the child would tell the Starks what he saw.) Though Joffrey sits the Iron Throne, the real ruler is effectively Cersei, aided and abetted by various followers and hangers-on (the eunuch spymaster Varys, called "the Spider"; Lord Petyr Baelish, "Littlefinger," who has a past with Ned's widow Catelyn Tully; and Cersei's father, Tywin Lannister, Lord of Casterly Rock, Warden of the West, Shield of Lannisport and current Hand of the King, a position last held -- briefly -- by Ned Stark).
Despite Cersei and Jamie's best efforts, word of the true genealogy of their offspring circulates to the various lords of Westeros, prompting two of Robert's dissatisfied brothers to raise rebellions against Joffrey (and, as it turns out, against each other). Meanwhile, the one halfway decent Lannister, Tyrion the dwarf (called the Imp; it should be noted that Martin describes him as being profoundly ugly, if not actually disfigured, which means that he got quite an upgrade in the HBO series when Peter Dinklage was cast to play him without ugsome makeup), finds himself drawn deeper into his father's and sister's machinations, and is also obligated to protect himself and his prostitute mistress from Cersei's malevolence. Then too, the plight of Ned and Catelyn's children -- fifteen-year-old Robb, now King of the North, off to battle the Lannisters; the now nine-year-old Bran, acting King of the North at Winterfell in Robb's absence; twelve-or-thirteen-year-old Sansa, betrothed to Joffrey and a captive at Red Keep, the castle of the ruler of the Seven Kingdoms, located in King's Landing; ten-or-eleven-year-old Arya, a tomboy with fencing training, on the run disguised as a boy; and the four-or-five-year-old Rickon, nearly as wild and uncontrollable as his pet dire wolf Shaggy Dog -- drives a goodly chunk of the action. And, lest we forget, there is Ned's illegitimate child, Jon Snow (so surnamed due to the tradition in the north of naming bastards "Snow"; bastards in the south are surnamed "Rivers"), pledged to the Night Watch -- a society of warriors pledged to take no wife and father no children (which is a rather different condition than being pledged to celibacy, one should point out...) and take no part in any political conflict, who patrol The Wall, which separates the northern kingdoms from the wight- and ghast-haunted lands beyond it -- who, with his oath brothers, gets to see firsthand how the Stark family words "Winter is coming" are once again coming true.
As the scheming in Martin's world ramps up, so too do the supernatural elements; A Clash of Kings contains the first on-camera full-scale battle in the series, a medieval siege by land and sea, plus magic, that should satisfy armchair generals (and admirals), as well as fans of small scale hand-to-hand combat. Martin has already established that he's unafraid of killing off appealing characters; if he hasn't yet quite shown an equal willingness to have his rotters evince good qualities (as David Wingrove did in the first few books of his compelling and addictive Chung Kuo series), well, it's early days in Westeros, relatively speaking: Daenerys is still very much a work in progress (doubtless a source of frustration to readers longing for another fantasy series with dragons prominently featured), Sansa hasn't quite stopped being a naïve victim (although she's not as maddeningly clueless as she was in the first book), Bran is seeking an alternate way in the world without the use of his legs, thanks largely to the children of Ned Stark's closest friend, the crannogman Howland Reed, the sixteen-year-old girl Meera and the thirteen-year-old precognitive boy Jojen (his gift is called here "greensight"), Arya understandably (though ominously) takes a turn towards the dark side, and Jon, upon hearing the news of his father's execution, finds his vow to the Night Watch to remain aloof from all political and familial travails overwhelmingly onerous. In the meantime, Catelyn's grief and rage cause her to do something that may bring ultimate disaster to the houses of Stark and Tully....
Character is king here, and in that sense, A Clash of Kings really earns its title -- far moreso than from the interminable jockeyings among the various jumped-up lordlings, would-be kings and queens, powers-behind-the-thrones and placeholders. Tyrion really blossoms here as the anti-hero that A Game of Thrones promised, and it's worth noting that he and his sister Cersei get all of the best lines. When Tyrion, thinking to himself, dismisses his predecessors in the post of King's Hand as "too honest to live, too noble to shit" (p. 450), one gets the sense that he is worried if the same might also be said of him one day: if his kept prostitute Shae (who seems to truly be fond of him, if not deeply love him; then again, given her youth, one would hope that she couldn't be that convincing an actress in such matters....) has rounded him and calmed him enough so that one wonders if his concern over Sansa's well-being isn't wholly Machiavellian, she may also be (inadvertently?) distracting him and (inadvertently?) softening him up for the death-blow.
Also escalating in A Clash of Kings are the apothegms and bon mots: they were mostly good at first reading, but I shudder to think of a Bartlett's Familiar Quotations type of "unofficial companion to A Song of Ice and Fire" being someday published. (I've no doubt that something of that nature already exists in "A Wiki of Ice and Fire," but I'm not going to go looking for it.)
The other thing that struck me about A Clash of Kings is how Martin patterned certain events in it on historical events in our world: to cite one example, the death of Lord Steffon Baratheon (father to Robert Baratheon and his brothers Stannis and Renly; the latter two play roles of some importance in A Clash of Kings) and his wife -- along with everybody aboard their ship the Windproud, save for the fool they'd procured, Patchface -- within sight of his castle at Storm's End (pps. 6-7) recalls the sinking of the White Ship in the English Channel near Barfleur in 1120, in which England's King Henry I lost his only son and heir, William, provoking a succession crisis that plunged England into a nearly twenty-year-long period of civil war known as the Anarchy (which conflicts Sharon Kay Penman made the subject of her not entirely successful novel When Christ and His Saints Slept, which is the first in her four book -- so far -- Plantagenet series). I also belatedly realized the similarities between Robert I Baratheon's "hunting accident" and the death of the son of William the Conqueror, William Rufus (otherwise William II), in 1100 A.D., likewise in a "hunting accident," at which his younger brother Henry (who ascended to the throne as Henry I upon his brother's death) and most of the de Clare family were present. I'm sure that there are others that I've overlooked.
Finally, fans of spy fiction will find many reasons to be happy with A Clash of Kings, given all the plotting, the propaganda and disinformation campaigns, and the worrying (chiefly by Tyrion) over how one can be sure of the accuracy of the information one obtains, and of the good faith and loyalty of one's agents.
If the pacing and whiplash-inducing plot twists of A Clash of Kings can sometimes make a reader groan or curse out of tantalized frustration, it's not a bad problem for a reader to have.
*Cross-posted to LibraryThing.
The review that follows contains some spoilers for the first book in the series, A Game of Thrones, which really shouldn't need mentioning here; but, considering that every commercial on television these days featuring an idiotic and/or impossible-in-the-real-world stunt contains a "do not attempt" disclaimer on it, I figured I'd slap the "spoiler alert" disclaimer on here too.
The plots and counter-plots initiated in A Game of Thrones grind on and are complicated in A Clash of Kings, with more time given to an absurdly and ineptly ambitious former ward of the disgraced and deceased King of the North, Edward ("Ned") Stark, Theon Greyjoy, a princeling of the Iron Islands and House Greyjoy -- essentially pirate lords who worship the Drowned God, a deity they believe requires frequent human sacrifices -- as well as the main surviving characters from the previous book. An epic high medieval fantasy set on the continent of Westeros -- which is afflicted with preternaturally-long seasons of summer and even longer seasons of winter -- A Song of Ice and Fire (explicit reference to the series title is made here for the first time) is essentially a look at a series of patriarchal societies that place no premium on good works, peace, or fellowship, and in which game-changing technology (read: magic and alchemy) are slowly reawakening following the hatching of a trio of dragons in the possession of the last surviving heir to House Targaryen, Daenerys, who was prostituted to the lord of the Mongol-like (or Alan-like, Hun-like, Turk-like, etc.) Dothraki by her exceptionally distasteful older brother, Viserys, and the rotund merchant prince Illyrio Mopatis in A Game of Thrones, and who, in the wake of the death of her husband, Khal Drogo ("khal" is a title analogous to our world's "khan"; Daenerys's title upon marrying him is "khaleesi"), leads a small, ragtag band of Dothraki, hoping to reclaim the Iron Throne of her father, the Mad King Aerys II.
The previous King of the Seven Kingdoms, Robert I Baratheon, having been murdered in a plot engineered by his beautiful -- though cold, ambitious, and borderline sociopathic -- wife Cersei Lannister, was supplanted by his putatively eldest son (though he, like his other two children, are actually the progeny of Cersei and her twin brother and leader of the Kingsguard, Jamie Lannister, called "Kingslayer" due to his murder of Aerys II near the end of Robert's Rebellion, prior to the opening of A Game of Thrones), the grossly immature and murderous Joffrey Baratheon, who is twelve or thirteen when he ascends the throne. It was primarily Cersei who engineered the betrayal and execution of the one mostly decent main character in A Game of Thrones, Ned Stark, who was one of Robert's main allies in his overthrow of House Targaryen; it was Jamie who threw Ned's eight-year-old son Bran from the top window of the tower where he and Cersei were having sexual congress, causing Bran to become paralyzed. (Bran formerly displayed nearly superhuman climbing abilities, and loved to skitter up the walls and along the rooftops of the Stark domain, Winterfell; he inadvertently discovered Jamie and Cersei at their disport, and Cersei feared that the child would tell the Starks what he saw.) Though Joffrey sits the Iron Throne, the real ruler is effectively Cersei, aided and abetted by various followers and hangers-on (the eunuch spymaster Varys, called "the Spider"; Lord Petyr Baelish, "Littlefinger," who has a past with Ned's widow Catelyn Tully; and Cersei's father, Tywin Lannister, Lord of Casterly Rock, Warden of the West, Shield of Lannisport and current Hand of the King, a position last held -- briefly -- by Ned Stark).
Despite Cersei and Jamie's best efforts, word of the true genealogy of their offspring circulates to the various lords of Westeros, prompting two of Robert's dissatisfied brothers to raise rebellions against Joffrey (and, as it turns out, against each other). Meanwhile, the one halfway decent Lannister, Tyrion the dwarf (called the Imp; it should be noted that Martin describes him as being profoundly ugly, if not actually disfigured, which means that he got quite an upgrade in the HBO series when Peter Dinklage was cast to play him without ugsome makeup), finds himself drawn deeper into his father's and sister's machinations, and is also obligated to protect himself and his prostitute mistress from Cersei's malevolence. Then too, the plight of Ned and Catelyn's children -- fifteen-year-old Robb, now King of the North, off to battle the Lannisters; the now nine-year-old Bran, acting King of the North at Winterfell in Robb's absence; twelve-or-thirteen-year-old Sansa, betrothed to Joffrey and a captive at Red Keep, the castle of the ruler of the Seven Kingdoms, located in King's Landing; ten-or-eleven-year-old Arya, a tomboy with fencing training, on the run disguised as a boy; and the four-or-five-year-old Rickon, nearly as wild and uncontrollable as his pet dire wolf Shaggy Dog -- drives a goodly chunk of the action. And, lest we forget, there is Ned's illegitimate child, Jon Snow (so surnamed due to the tradition in the north of naming bastards "Snow"; bastards in the south are surnamed "Rivers"), pledged to the Night Watch -- a society of warriors pledged to take no wife and father no children (which is a rather different condition than being pledged to celibacy, one should point out...) and take no part in any political conflict, who patrol The Wall, which separates the northern kingdoms from the wight- and ghast-haunted lands beyond it -- who, with his oath brothers, gets to see firsthand how the Stark family words "Winter is coming" are once again coming true.
As the scheming in Martin's world ramps up, so too do the supernatural elements; A Clash of Kings contains the first on-camera full-scale battle in the series, a medieval siege by land and sea, plus magic, that should satisfy armchair generals (and admirals), as well as fans of small scale hand-to-hand combat. Martin has already established that he's unafraid of killing off appealing characters; if he hasn't yet quite shown an equal willingness to have his rotters evince good qualities (as David Wingrove did in the first few books of his compelling and addictive Chung Kuo series), well, it's early days in Westeros, relatively speaking: Daenerys is still very much a work in progress (doubtless a source of frustration to readers longing for another fantasy series with dragons prominently featured), Sansa hasn't quite stopped being a naïve victim (although she's not as maddeningly clueless as she was in the first book), Bran is seeking an alternate way in the world without the use of his legs, thanks largely to the children of Ned Stark's closest friend, the crannogman Howland Reed, the sixteen-year-old girl Meera and the thirteen-year-old precognitive boy Jojen (his gift is called here "greensight"), Arya understandably (though ominously) takes a turn towards the dark side, and Jon, upon hearing the news of his father's execution, finds his vow to the Night Watch to remain aloof from all political and familial travails overwhelmingly onerous. In the meantime, Catelyn's grief and rage cause her to do something that may bring ultimate disaster to the houses of Stark and Tully....
Character is king here, and in that sense, A Clash of Kings really earns its title -- far moreso than from the interminable jockeyings among the various jumped-up lordlings, would-be kings and queens, powers-behind-the-thrones and placeholders. Tyrion really blossoms here as the anti-hero that A Game of Thrones promised, and it's worth noting that he and his sister Cersei get all of the best lines. When Tyrion, thinking to himself, dismisses his predecessors in the post of King's Hand as "too honest to live, too noble to shit" (p. 450), one gets the sense that he is worried if the same might also be said of him one day: if his kept prostitute Shae (who seems to truly be fond of him, if not deeply love him; then again, given her youth, one would hope that she couldn't be that convincing an actress in such matters....) has rounded him and calmed him enough so that one wonders if his concern over Sansa's well-being isn't wholly Machiavellian, she may also be (inadvertently?) distracting him and (inadvertently?) softening him up for the death-blow.
Also escalating in A Clash of Kings are the apothegms and bon mots: they were mostly good at first reading, but I shudder to think of a Bartlett's Familiar Quotations type of "unofficial companion to A Song of Ice and Fire" being someday published. (I've no doubt that something of that nature already exists in "A Wiki of Ice and Fire," but I'm not going to go looking for it.)
The other thing that struck me about A Clash of Kings is how Martin patterned certain events in it on historical events in our world: to cite one example, the death of Lord Steffon Baratheon (father to Robert Baratheon and his brothers Stannis and Renly; the latter two play roles of some importance in A Clash of Kings) and his wife -- along with everybody aboard their ship the Windproud, save for the fool they'd procured, Patchface -- within sight of his castle at Storm's End (pps. 6-7) recalls the sinking of the White Ship in the English Channel near Barfleur in 1120, in which England's King Henry I lost his only son and heir, William, provoking a succession crisis that plunged England into a nearly twenty-year-long period of civil war known as the Anarchy (which conflicts Sharon Kay Penman made the subject of her not entirely successful novel When Christ and His Saints Slept, which is the first in her four book -- so far -- Plantagenet series). I also belatedly realized the similarities between Robert I Baratheon's "hunting accident" and the death of the son of William the Conqueror, William Rufus (otherwise William II), in 1100 A.D., likewise in a "hunting accident," at which his younger brother Henry (who ascended to the throne as Henry I upon his brother's death) and most of the de Clare family were present. I'm sure that there are others that I've overlooked.
Finally, fans of spy fiction will find many reasons to be happy with A Clash of Kings, given all the plotting, the propaganda and disinformation campaigns, and the worrying (chiefly by Tyrion) over how one can be sure of the accuracy of the information one obtains, and of the good faith and loyalty of one's agents.
If the pacing and whiplash-inducing plot twists of A Clash of Kings can sometimes make a reader groan or curse out of tantalized frustration, it's not a bad problem for a reader to have.
*Cross-posted to LibraryThing.