I have been trying to account for my reading for the past few months. It seems as though I have read thousands upon thousands of pages, but I’ve really only dealt with a few narratives. Here I’ll discuss the three sagas that have in one case been an exhausting and addicting ride, in another been a real debbie-downer of depressive teen angst, and finally been an example of good writing that is excessively annoying because the author just makes random shit up to please himself.
First are the A Song of Ice and Fire books by George R. R. Martin. There are four books out currently and another due in a few weeks. I have read the first three: Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, and A Storm of Swords. (Though by the time I came back to edit this review, I had finished all five currently available.) I have not yet read A Feast for Crows because the title implies lots of death, and there have already been thousands of pages of gruesome and unexpected death, so much so that I’m not quite sure I have the stomach for much more. I don’t know who is left and I haven’t the energy at this point to read another thousand-page tome on medieval style death and misery.
Let’s backtrack: I went to visit a good friend who I hadn’t seen in far too long. During our ‘missing years’ she got married, bought a house and a dog, and is in the copulative stages of motherhood. I had not yet met her paramour, the licit kind, so I was apprehensive on getting together again. What if I hated him? What if he turned out to be a first-class douche? (Don’t worry, he isn’t but I didn’t know this at the time.) I despaired of the potential disasters that our dinner conservation might engender. After all, my good friend and I had had many hundreds of hours worth of delightfully funny and engaging conversations. I worried that those conversations would become the staid discourse of middle aged bores. Ha! I was wrong. Her husband and I had loads in common – mostly dorky things like genre-fiction (how I detest the term), comics, geography, etc – and I spent far too much of the dinner and evening talking with him while she sat idly by and wondered, perhaps, how it was possible to listen to such dorkish enthusiasm coming at her from two different places at once. At the end of the night, he suggested that if I liked the Lord of the Rings, which I do, then I should read a book called Game of Thrones. Now, I had no idea that if I took up his suggestion I would be in for thousands upon thousands of pages of the aforementioned medieval death and misery. I thought we were talking about one longish book that would be just right as a spring-getting-ready-for-summer-read. Well, I was horribly wrong but the books are good anyway, so I forgive my friend’s lover for getting me hooked.
Unfortunate sidenote: I read the first book – Game of Thrones – on my Kindle. I was traveling at the time and had no desire to lug around an 800 page paperback. Honestly, any paperback over 350 pages is a legitimate pain in the ass. Paperbacks aren’t made to be much longer. When they are longer, the font is inevitably too small and only leads avid readers into further myopic distress while the binding starts off too stressed and tends to give out far too soon. It was a perfect Kindle purchase with one exception: the maps were too small. I love books with maps and was pissed that the damn Westeros maps were unreadable on the Kindle. When it was time for the second book, I decided I needed a physical book to better use the maps. I bought the boxed set because it was cheap and so am I. I noticed that the actor who played Boromir in the Lord of the Rings movies was on the cover of the boxed set and book one. I came to the horrible conclusion that the books were being made into a movie. (This has become the second unfortunate sidenote, sorry.) I decided to hurry up and read them before the movie came out and my imagination was forever tarnished. Then I learned that it was being made into a TV show for HBO. I’m sure HBO will do a great job and the books are so ridiculously long that multiple episodes set over many seasons will do more justice to the books than anything else. But goddamnit, can we ever just let a good book be a good book? Do we have to go around prostituting everything for a growing populace of illiterate fools? Books are always better anyway and any self-respecting reader knows this.
Martin’s books more or less take place in Westeros, an island that seems to be about the size of South America and structured to resemble the culture and politics of medieval Europe. There are castles and kingdoms galore, all seemingly united at the start and disunited for the rest of the series. Everyone, as the title suggests, is vying to be king, and everyone and his brother has a legitimate claim. Most of the men roam about in armor killing each other as a result. Some use swords, some use axes, one even strips the skin off enemies, you get the point. The women and children do their best to survive without getting raped and/or killed. There’s lots of chicanery, death, and overall epic-ness. Martin slowly works in some of the staples of the genre too: dragons, magic, religion in various guises, religious fanaticism, and manifestations of mythic evil. But most of the action takes place among characters built largely like you and me with commensurate mental and physical abilities, except they wield swords like we wield cellphones and so it goes...And so it goes for what will likely be 7,000 pages when the story is complete. Oh and giant wolves play a large role too.
Martin does two or three things that make the series eminently readable if you have 50-60 free hours in your schedule. First, each chapter is told from an alternating character’s perspective. He focuses on 10 or so main characters in each book but slips in a few chapters from other minor characters to liven things up from time to time. This is, as far as I know, a relatively unconventional approach, especially for the sci-fi/fantasy genre. Mario Vargas Llosa, recent recipient of the Nobel prize for literature, does something similar in a book called Conversation in the Cathedral. Vargas Llosa, however, uses five narrators and works out his masterpiece in a measly 600 pages, covering a few decades of mid-20th century Peruvian history. Martin is trying to cover every single major event in the life of a continent for what will probably end up being five or six years’ time. Martin’s story is so broad that he could probably do with a few more perspectives just so reader’s can more fully understand the story he’s attempting to tell. This technique has some advantages and drawbacks. From an authorial perspective, it allows Martin to have great fun. Some of his chapters are told by innocent maidens whose virtue is threatened at every turn by major players who themselves get no chapters, others are told by aides and assistants to major characters, while a few of the main players get their own chapters. As an aspiring writer I can think of no better way to master the craft than to give multiple characters voices, emotions, and complexity. But it can be daunting when one starts out with the series. I plan, someday, to go back and read the first 300-400 pages of the first book because I spent a lot of time trying to work out the relationships of the characters without paying close enough attention to what they were actually doing and saying.
However, it does give the books a rather episodic feel. Continuity is thrown out the window. And over the course of three-seven books, the alternating chapters can grow wearisome. For example, you just read an engaging chapter about Arya Stark. She is homeless, hunted, bereft of family. Oh and she’s 11. Something interesting happens to her. And then? The chapter ends as a cliff-hanger. Unfortunately, you might not get back to her story for another hundred pages or so. In the interim, you might have to deal with a 30 page chapter on a character you care little about who is participating in part of the story line that you feel is predictable and pedantic. There were several nights where I was ready for a long reading session, but I finished an engaging chapter only to be confronted with a few characters I didn’t want to invest in for the ret of the night. I usually put the book down at that point and gave myself a breather.
Second, Martin makes most characters complex enough to be compelling rather than genre stereotypes. Tyrion Lannister, one of the masters of chicanery throughout the series, is simultaneously a devious villain, a likeable rogue, a grade-A douchebag, and a character for whom the reader has a grudging sympathy. He’s a midget, brother to one of the most renowned warriors in the land, brother to a sister who’s mentally unstable and eagerly wants his death, an uncle to a sleaze of a young king, and son to a father who abhors his grotesque proportions. Tyrion has to be one of the most interesting and well-written characters in modern fiction. He avoids the flatness that characterizes most of Tolkien’s best characters: Aragorn, Sam, and Frodo. Tolkien’s characters tend to be single-minded in their pursuits, their motivations clear from the start. One is never quite sure what Tyrion will do next because of his complex psychological profile. Will he vindictively spite his bitch sister? Will he do something outrageously dangerous to earn the love of his more perfectly proportioned brother? Will he do something noble and generous? Or is he just going to get drunk and find a whore or two to pass the time? The answer is always yes, but at the same time, no character in the story ever trusts Tyrion farther than they can throw his misshapen little body. And Tyrion is just one of a dozen or so characters equally well written with emotional depth and human frailty.
One of the unfortunate features of the sci-fi/fantasy genre is that characters rarely change in the course of the story; they may go on journeys, pass tests of basic moral fiber, become more self-aware or world-wise, or go from nobodies to somebodies, but protagonists rarely if ever become antagonists and antagonists rarely have a change of heart and become good guys. In other words, the assholes don’t suddenly become the guy you take home to meet your parents. And the good guys rarely turn out to be mischievous little fucks in the end. There was always something eminently untrustable about poor old Boromir and we knew it from the moment we met him at Rivendell. Sam, at the same time, is whole-heartedly good, hopeful, and reliable. He never loses any of those characteristics, not once, and we generally tend to love him for it. Personally, I wish he’d quit being the stereotypical working class Englishman who keeps his mouth shut most of the time, and tell Frodo to get his shit together and quit being so damn whiny. Also, it would have really thrown a wrench in things if Sam had just taken the ring from Frodo, headed back to the Shire and kicked old Ted Sandyman’s ass on his way to becoming the dark overlord of Middle Earth. Theoden is a possible exception, but I may be thinking more of the movie than the book. In any case, that type of sea-change just doesn’t happen in the genre. (One possible exception is Heinlein’s tendency to make his chaste characters become randy humpaholics throughout a book, but for him that’s still part of the journey and testing of moral character – randy humping being the end goal for humanity.) But for Martin anything is possible. The biggest assholes in the story (I’m thinking of a certain child-killing, incestuous, murderous lunatic) learn to be less douchy by getting their ass kicked by certain mannish, lesbian warriors. This is not to say that Martin ignores the genre conventions entirely. Every young character is basically in a mini-bildungsroman; the ‘good’ women are always smarter, more ethical, and more powerful than the men give them credit for; and half the damn characters are on a journey of some sort or other.
But, and this is the last point, Martin isn’t afraid to let the plot make uncomfortable but necessary twists and turns. He ends the first book by killing off the character who seems to be the focal point of the series. With that one bold stroke, Martin lets his readers know that his series isn’t like anything that’s come before. One character even gets killed while taking a dump (I don’t think any member of the Fellowship ever used the toilet on the way to destroying the One ring.)
There’s no deus ex machina either; Martin accounts for everyone and everything. While he surprises you all the damn time you can’t say you didn’t see it coming because it was there all along. The eagles aren’t coming in this one; and if they do come it’s because he wrote about for 100 pages two books ago so you know all about the existence of the eagles and what they are or aren’t doing. That’s a refreshing change.
These books are the ‘exhausting and addicting ride’ that I mentioned earlier. They’re great fun. They’re slightly more challenging than many of the books out there, and they’re part of a great story that may not end before Martin gets around to writing and publishing them all. It would be a shame if something happened to Martin before he got to finish this saga. There are a dozen characters out there that I’m truly invested in, and I’d like to know what will happen to them before I turn 40. Hopefully he doesn’t kill them all off. Fat chance!
