Martin, George R.R.: A Clash of Kings
A Clash of Kings (1999)
Written by: George R.R. Martin
Genre: Epic Fantasy
Pages: 969 (Mass Market Paperback)
Series: Book Two (ongoing)
I read A Game of Thrones back in March 2007. I loved it. In fact, I loved it so much that I promptly went to the store and bought the rest of the series. And then I sat on it, because at that time, I was working on my SF novel/thesis, and Martin's epic fantasy prose was way too influential on my own writing, and I couldn't afford to keep reading him. Then, after I graduated, other titles kept catching my eye, and then there was the fact that frankly, the length just intimated me, even though I'd read A Game of Thrones in eight days.
But now, three years to the month later, I finally read A Clash of Kings due to mine and digitalclone's March challenge. You can thank, in part, all of the hype around the HBO adaptation for getting me excited to return to the series. :)
The premise: ganked from BN.com: As a prophecy of doom cuts across the sky-a comet the color of blood and flame-six factions struggle for control of a divided land. Eddard's son Robb has declared himself King in the North. In the south, Joffrey, the heir apparent, rules in name only, victim of the scheming courtiers who teem over King's Landing. Robert's two brothers each seek their own dominion, while a disfavored house turns once more to conquest. And a continent away, an exiled queen, the Mother of Dragons, risks everything to lead her precious brood across a hard hot desert to win back the crown that is rightfully hers.
A Clash of Kings transports us into a magnificent, forgotten land of revelry and revenge, wizardry and warfare. It is a tale in which maidens cavort with madmen, brother plots against brother, and the dead rise to walk in the night. Here a princess masquerades as an orphan boy; a knight of the mind prepares a poison for a treacherous sorceress; and wild men descend from the Mountains of the Moon to ravage the countryside.
Against a backdrop of incest and fratricide, alchemy and murder, the price of glory may be measured in blood. And the spoils of victory may just go to the men and women possessed of the coldest steel...and the coldest hearts. For when rulers clash, all of the land feels the tremors.
Review style: This one's actually tough to review, and I suspect that until the series ends, the reviews are just going to get tougher. I'm still trying to keep spoilers out of my reviews, so here, I'm going to talk about how serials work, compare this series to the television show Lost (yeah, I'm going there), and discuss the reasons why this installment didn't grab me like A Game of Thrones did. No spoilers. Promise. :) ALTHOUGH!! If you haven't read A Game of Thrones, don't read this review, because you will be spoiled for some surprises in A Game of Thrones.
So it took me thirteen days to read this, and on some of those days, I didn't read at all. However, sometimes I just didn't want read. It's a hard thing to put my finger on, but that's the point of this review, to figure out why I felt this way, but I just really didn't get sucked into this book like I did A Game of Thrones. This time, the length was just daunting, and because I'm now familiar with Martin's writing style, I just wasn't as engaged. Although, while the writing in and of itself is very good in many respects, I noticed things this time around that I either didn't notice before, or I did but they didn't bother me as much, or they weren't there.
What bothered me? I do remember Martin having a habit of opening a chapter in the middle of a scene, and then the narrative/POV character would flash back to how he/she got to that point before getting to the task at hand. Now, I don't know if it happened more often in A Clash of Kings or if it just annoyed me more, but oh, it annoyed me. It happened far too often, and I never really could understand the reasoning for it. It'd be one thing if there wasn't an actual flashback, but rather a quick info-dump explaining how the characters got from A to B, but no, it's an actual flashback, and which means, in my mind, if it's important enough for a flashback, why aren't we reading it in real time?
Probably because that would make for a very short chapter, and Martin's chapters are anything but short. Not that they're excessively long either, but they aren't short, and some of these scenes would make for very short chapters. Of course, I also wonder if part of it relates to how he writes the series. For the record, I don't know how he writes the series, but I wondered this time around if, perhaps, he doesn't write out an entire character's arc, then move on to the next, and then the next, and so on and so forth until he achieves what he wants for a tome, and then braids the differing chapters together? Or does he write linearly and in order, therefore jumping from POV to POV as he goes? Any insight to this would be lovely. :)
But back to the reasons I wasn't engaged by the prose: you've got the flashbacks. But then there's the descriptions. Look, I'm all for detail, even though I get bored by excess, as I want to get on with the story. However, the detail is what makes the world, it's what separates a high fantasy from fluff fantasy, and I bet if you were to remove every portion of detail from this book, you'd have half its length. ;)
Okay, maybe not, but there was enough detail that I got impatient, especially regarding meals. OMG--do I really need to know about every meal the characters partake and every course that's served? Don't get me wrong, I see the reasons for showing it: for the poor, it illustrates how hungry they are, for the rich, it illustrates how fortunate/gluttonous they are, especially when the poor around them are being ripped off for a measly bit of bread, you know? So there's social commentary to be found in the descriptions of the meals, but oh, I got so tired of the little details (yet, I know many readers of the series eat this stuff up, pun intended. My tiredness is not meant to insult their taste (ha ha) so much as to illustrate what my taste isn't). Also, I could really care less about all the banners and colors and what belongs to which house. I probably should care more, but I don't. I get that the direwolves are the Starks, the lion belongs to Lannister, and the crowned stag the Baratheons, but beyond that? Yeah, I don't care. Sorry, but it's not my thing, and when I get passages of it, I start getting antsy.
But beyond technicalities, there's something to be said for momentum and the direction of a series, let alone of a single title. A Game of Thrones was compelling because we were discovering a world and its characters, and those characters were setting up surprises that still sit with me. A Clash of Kings gave me nothing new. Ninety percent of the book was the bickering factions of kings and the preparation of battle (battles, yawn), and it dawned on me where this series is going:
We're going to resolve the kingship of Westeros in regards to Stannis, Joffrey, Robb, and Balon (didn't he declare himself King of the islands?), and then Daenerys is going to swoop in with her dragons, and somewhere in the middle of all of this, the wildlings are going to invade. Or, the kingship is still going to be competing with itself when Daenerys strikes and the wildlings are going to attack in the middle of it all.
The point? It seems the driving endgame for this series, based on this book, is who's going to be in charge of Westeros and what it will mean for the survivors, and I suddenly realized that, well, I don't care.
Don't get me wrong: I'd rather see certain parties win over others, and I certainly am rooting for the Starks to survive this whole mess, but generally speaking, I'm not caring. I'm not sure what exactly is at stake and why these characters that I'm growing so attached to are being put through hell just because several someones want the crown. Fans of this series may tell me that's the point: after all, A Song of Ice and Fire is something of a historical fantasy, in that short of the magic and dragons (which aren't peppering every single page), this book reads like medieval history of sorts, you know? But I've lost my taste, if I ever had it, for political fantasy, and while I have every intention of finishing this series (provided the author does, indeed, finish it himself), I hope the series blooms beyond who ends up King (or Queen). I mean, yeah, the land and its people are in danger until this is resolved, but I'm not so fond of the land or its people so much as I'm fond of a handful of characters, and if I had my way, I'd handpick them out of the novel, scurry them to safety, and let the rest of the characters play war.
It could very well be that this simply wasn't the right time for me to read this book. But really, what did I learn that was new? What progressed the series in this book?
Here's where I compare it to the television show Lost: when it first premiered, fans were enraptured, questions were asked, and fans waiting eagerly, episode to episode, for answers. But as the series progressed, we got more questions than answers, and fans started dropping, thinking that the show's writers had no idea where it was going, and they didn't want filler. It wasn't until the end of the third season that the show's creators announced an end date for the series, and the story itself got sharper, more focused. From that point on, while the show still raised questions, fans had the reassurance that 1) the show would end so the writers had to have SOME idea where they were going and 2) what they were getting, no matter how unimportant it seemed, most likely wasn't filler.
Lost had a direction, and a very focused one, and every episode seemed to take a tangible step toward the big finale, even though/if the fans had no idea what that ending would look like (and still don't!).
How does this compare to Martin?
Aside from the fact that there are fans out there who seriously doubt he'll ever finish the series (I'm not that cynical, not yet), there's the fact that we have hundreds upon hundreds of pages of material, and the direction it's all pointing to feels, to me, rather weak. After all, the actual story portion of this book numbered 969 pages, and honestly, I really didn't learn anything new. Oh, the magic surrounding the Starks and their wolves is interesting, but did I get anymore hints about the mystery of Jon Snow? Daenerys barely took a step closer to her goal of reclaiming her throne, and while one king was eliminated (and what happened to his brother, surely he's still living?), everything is still as it was, no one was overthrown. Sansa got part of what she wanted, and Arya made an escape, but oh, how long it took to get there!
Sure, it's world-building. I saw more magic in this volume than I did in the previous one, and that thrilled me. I'm fascinated by the new monotheistic religion that's taking over. And I'm getting more and more attached to certain characters (Jon, Arya, Tyrion, Daenerys) and more invested in their fates.
Like Lost, A Song of Ice and Fire has a HUGE cast of IMPORTANT characters, but you're going to care for some, and not for others, and those POV episodes are going to try your patience.
Of course, this is just my analysis after reading the second book in what's so far a four book series and counting. Books three and four might totally sharpen the direction of the series, or give me more to stew on so that I don't mind there's not a direction in sight (or, if the direction I think is in sight stays that way, I won't mind it). But I do feel that serials, be it television or books, should have SOME sense of direction. In the case of A Clash of Kings, I don't feel we got enough to justify that INSANE page count, but that's me. Others, I'm sure, where probably thrilled to bits with the parts that I got frustrated with. :)
My Rating
Worth the Cash: In the end, I feel like this book was nothing more than set-up, which would explain how tiring it made me. I'm not saying it was bad, but it wasn't as nearly as engaging as A Game of Thrones and trust me, stuff happened in A Game of Thrones. Not so much here. I feel like that for all the length, we just took a few baby-steps in terms of overall story, and that's frustrating, even though my favorite characters managed to delight and scare me at the same time. I've been assured that A Storm of Swords is much better, but, oh how the length scares me. :) Still, for all of my problems, I enjoyed this book far more than, say, Joe Abercrombie's The Blade Itself, which had plenty of action (no offense to fans of both, it just wasn't my thing), but failed to engage me on an emotional level. The trouble with Martin, though, is that there's no such thing as a quick read. Every book is meaty, and it's almost too much in a single volume (seriously, if I were his editor, I'd be talking to him seriously about splitting these volumes into more manageable lengths), which means I need plenty of recovery time before tackling the next book in the series. Of course, that means I'll have to refresh myself using the handy-dandy Wikipedia for plot summaries, but in the end, I just can't throw myself into this world without coming up for air and lots of it.
When you comment, PLEASE DO NOT SPOIL ANYTHING BEYOND A CLASH OF KINGS, or you will make me very sad and grumpy.
Cover Commentary: okay, so I know people find these generic covers boring. Mostly solid, single colored background with a symbol in the middle to represent the book and big letters for the author's name and title. But you know what? I prefer this look far more than the original cover, and that's because traditional fantasy art just really doesn't do anything for me. In fact, I kind of hate it, no matter how well rendered. I'd much rather have symbols or landscapes than people on my fantasy covers, but that's just me.
Next up: Horns by Joe Hill