I’m ashamed
to admit, right this instant, that I have watched the whole first five seasons of the
show Game of Thrones before ever
touching A Game of Thrones. Sniff.
Yes, “Shame! Shame! Shame!”
Not just because we should always read the source material first and I had the opportunity for that since the early 2000s (they were in my mum’s library, hum!), but because watching the series beforehand completely distorted my “first” impressions of A Song of Ice and Fire. You must thus take this review with a pinch of salt; it’s not a fully honest reading experience. I’m biased, fully biased.
Still, let’s get on with it.
The number of people loving ASOIAF is not what matters; it’s an easy series of books and franchise to like. It’s in the comments of those who disliked it that you’ll find the best answers to figure out the book before you read it. ASOIAF has been so much put on a pedestal (which, to an extent, it deserves), but without giving the whole piece the proper attention which we so ruthlessly give to other fantasy releases, that I’ll not invest too much time here babbling on on how great and spectacular it all is. Because, well, we all know that. You’ve got to give back to Caesar what belongs to Caesar: Martin weaves a great tale.
However…, if the story is great, the book is less so, and that’s entirely due to its story, actually. A few but strong flaws prevented my attachment to this first installment. All the ingredients were there, they just weren’t rendered along the best recipe.
Now, I must say sorry in advance for the following critique: I’ve reread it and it is fairly bent on the negative, but that is purely because I raise the points that did not work for me. There are so many detailed reviews of the book focusing on its strengths out there that I find it redundant to repeat once more how majestuous it all is. Especially since it wasn’t majestuous, nor perfect for me. That being said, I’m currently reading A Clash of Kings and needless to say I’m gonna read every single one of them. The hype has taken me too…but I’m not blindly taken, either. Apologies.
Yes, “Shame! Shame! Shame!”
Not just because we should always read the source material first and I had the opportunity for that since the early 2000s (they were in my mum’s library, hum!), but because watching the series beforehand completely distorted my “first” impressions of A Song of Ice and Fire. You must thus take this review with a pinch of salt; it’s not a fully honest reading experience. I’m biased, fully biased.
Still, let’s get on with it.
The number of people loving ASOIAF is not what matters; it’s an easy series of books and franchise to like. It’s in the comments of those who disliked it that you’ll find the best answers to figure out the book before you read it. ASOIAF has been so much put on a pedestal (which, to an extent, it deserves), but without giving the whole piece the proper attention which we so ruthlessly give to other fantasy releases, that I’ll not invest too much time here babbling on on how great and spectacular it all is. Because, well, we all know that. You’ve got to give back to Caesar what belongs to Caesar: Martin weaves a great tale.
However…, if the story is great, the book is less so, and that’s entirely due to its story, actually. A few but strong flaws prevented my attachment to this first installment. All the ingredients were there, they just weren’t rendered along the best recipe.
Now, I must say sorry in advance for the following critique: I’ve reread it and it is fairly bent on the negative, but that is purely because I raise the points that did not work for me. There are so many detailed reviews of the book focusing on its strengths out there that I find it redundant to repeat once more how majestuous it all is. Especially since it wasn’t majestuous, nor perfect for me. That being said, I’m currently reading A Clash of Kings and needless to say I’m gonna read every single one of them. The hype has taken me too…but I’m not blindly taken, either. Apologies.
Pacing: There is no denying that this is a great tale
on a great scale. Yet, perhaps, this greatness demands a sacrifice of smaller,
but finer, aspects to a good book: spending time with characters’ emotions,
with the backstory, with mythopoeia and the cultures being presented; taking
more time to set up characters that will effectively last seven books. The lack
of descriptions of places played another part in keeping you at a distance from
the plot. We storm in and out of places, from keep to keep, North to South,
East to West, and the feel of each place is barely distinguishable from the
next. The culture of each land is clear enough, the banner, folklore and style
are well developed, but the geographical representation is fairly vague, and
that’s mostly because the pacing is so fast we barely have time to contemplate
a place before we move on to the next. We get told how it all is; we don’t feel
it. There was way too much movement, for my taste, with almost every chapter
finding its character in another place. Daenerys’ chapters in particular seem
to have a big death and a move to another region of the globe in every one of
them. The only exceptions are Jon’s and Bran’s and that’s why the Night’s
Watch’s and Bran’s storylines are the best, both on page and onscreen. Both of
them follow a purpose rather than feel like puppets at the ruthless hands of
their writer. A little addition of 300 hundred pages of mere filler and getting
us used to characters would not have bothered me at all, at this point. In
short, AGOT failed to measure its pacing to our need for emotional attachment.
It hits you in the face as a suspenseful political-fantasy thriller and fails
in the same stroke to sell its characters. You
live in the thriller, but they become
trampled under the battle of the tale vs. you.
Writing: Martin writes well, but he writes little.
Adopting a style that is concise, clear and raw, Martin avoids the “fat”, as he
calls it, that is found in other novels (repetitions, descriptions, long
development of something that can be summed up in one good sentence). But also
the poetry. For a book on great evils befalling immensely fallible and grey
characters, there’s little time to shed a tear, so much your breath is being
held up till the next round of events. And there are rare moments where a
poignant, but true, adjective, gets you to the core of these events. You
understand why they’re terrible, you’re shocked all throughout, but you don’t
always feel their weight. Wit there is, and in quantity, but I can’t say I was
impressed by his writing style. It often felt as if he hadn’t put all his
efforts in as a writer, particularly in the first three-quarters of the book_ despite
having the talent for it. The last hundred or so pages are noticeably better
written than the rest of the book. Depictions are rare and short, getting
straight to the point and not lingering one minute more, just as if GRRM was
writing a script rather than a book (I mean, how many times should you close a
dialogue by ‘(s)he said?’).
At other times, Martin dives in proper self-indulgence, splashing lavish details on details of things barely needed, such as clothes and banners. We do not need our reading disturbed with every banner of every house. A little more appendices (and maps) would have allowed for a lot less heavy details weighting on the actual story. There are so many depictions of clothing and uniforms, almost every time a character appears, and in the most absurd moments, that they actually come to feel generic. In the middle of battle, grief or abuse, suddenly the character (Tyrion, Sansa) starts thinking on the dressing of his or her adversary…. Seriously? The descriptions feel automatic, staged, as if they had been added afterwards and needed to fit somewhere, the better to show the author’s knowledge of those times and add credibility to the tale. Instead, they get quickly repetitive, weigh down the emotional import of the scene and add nothing to the tale. This fits in with a more overall observation of Martin’s writing style: in this first installment, he invests almost no time in transmitting an emotion in a creative or spontaneous way. Hence, language tropes are over-present, to the point of noticing them in a book that big. He writes every chapter with the same voice, or at least the same patterns. This technique effectively allows the reader to get quickly into the tale but it’s just as easy to snap out of it once you’ve done your reading of the day. The things that will linger on in your nightmares are all those horrors characters feel like doing and twists and turns, the subplot around who Jon Snow’s mother is and how he will come to learn that, and on and on; not the writing, not the feeling of the scenes, not the emotional impact. So, don’t get me wrong, the tale is a true whirlwind and you’ll get caught in it, but I’m sad to say, it won’t be because of Martin’s writing style so much as in spite of it.
At other times, Martin dives in proper self-indulgence, splashing lavish details on details of things barely needed, such as clothes and banners. We do not need our reading disturbed with every banner of every house. A little more appendices (and maps) would have allowed for a lot less heavy details weighting on the actual story. There are so many depictions of clothing and uniforms, almost every time a character appears, and in the most absurd moments, that they actually come to feel generic. In the middle of battle, grief or abuse, suddenly the character (Tyrion, Sansa) starts thinking on the dressing of his or her adversary…. Seriously? The descriptions feel automatic, staged, as if they had been added afterwards and needed to fit somewhere, the better to show the author’s knowledge of those times and add credibility to the tale. Instead, they get quickly repetitive, weigh down the emotional import of the scene and add nothing to the tale. This fits in with a more overall observation of Martin’s writing style: in this first installment, he invests almost no time in transmitting an emotion in a creative or spontaneous way. Hence, language tropes are over-present, to the point of noticing them in a book that big. He writes every chapter with the same voice, or at least the same patterns. This technique effectively allows the reader to get quickly into the tale but it’s just as easy to snap out of it once you’ve done your reading of the day. The things that will linger on in your nightmares are all those horrors characters feel like doing and twists and turns, the subplot around who Jon Snow’s mother is and how he will come to learn that, and on and on; not the writing, not the feeling of the scenes, not the emotional impact. So, don’t get me wrong, the tale is a true whirlwind and you’ll get caught in it, but I’m sad to say, it won’t be because of Martin’s writing style so much as in spite of it.
Message: Wit wins over wisdom and that’s too bad too,
because it’s a literary book and not a TV show. It’s got to have more than
jests and quips to its dialogues. The characters say a few clever things
cleverly but rarely go further to the point of wise conclusion; I think they’d
much rather stay “cool”. So it comes that intelligence is spread across the
pages and always stops short of getting the point across. AGOT is full of good
sense that never gets tied up into a whole and ends up hanging lose, weighing
down the actual story somewhat.
Chapters’ structure and strength: The fact that it works by character
= chapter provides a great handling of structure which in a book of this scope
was a must. It was a brilliant move.
Too bad, then, that when each chapter = a scene, more or less, the whole narrative gets confined to this formula: it must be witty, have a cliffhanger, and, thus, can never go too deep. We never did get out of the formula, almost as if Martin was writing for television rather than literature and was constricted to say a maximum number of things, make a maximum number of jokes, bring out a maximum of suspense, and shock a maximum number of people, in a comparatively small number of pages. Yet, this need not be the case: he could have taken all the space and time he needed to say what he wanted to say. Instead, each chapter roughly follows a predictable “introduce the situation, get into dialogues, a little narration, more dialogues, then the afterthought on the scene which closes off the chapter”. I think no chapter, and they are small, actually contains narration only, and it’s telling than most of the book is made up of dialogues. Scene on scene on scene, chop chop chop.
Thus, you don’t feel as close to the storylines as you could for a book of that size, for they keep you on a constant “surprise, surprise” basis. Basically, AGOT shows the flaws of its qualities. Those flaws don’t prevent you from liking it extensively and getting thrilled over it, but they effectively kept me away from loving it, and that’s despite knowing how good it was going to go. If anything, it’s the fact of the TV show which played unfortunately against the book, for I kept on comparing them and the book falls slightly short of the series. I really should have read them before for, now, I’m curious to see if my opinion would have been the same. At the very least, the suspense would have worked better for me.
Too bad, then, that when each chapter = a scene, more or less, the whole narrative gets confined to this formula: it must be witty, have a cliffhanger, and, thus, can never go too deep. We never did get out of the formula, almost as if Martin was writing for television rather than literature and was constricted to say a maximum number of things, make a maximum number of jokes, bring out a maximum of suspense, and shock a maximum number of people, in a comparatively small number of pages. Yet, this need not be the case: he could have taken all the space and time he needed to say what he wanted to say. Instead, each chapter roughly follows a predictable “introduce the situation, get into dialogues, a little narration, more dialogues, then the afterthought on the scene which closes off the chapter”. I think no chapter, and they are small, actually contains narration only, and it’s telling than most of the book is made up of dialogues. Scene on scene on scene, chop chop chop.
Thus, you don’t feel as close to the storylines as you could for a book of that size, for they keep you on a constant “surprise, surprise” basis. Basically, AGOT shows the flaws of its qualities. Those flaws don’t prevent you from liking it extensively and getting thrilled over it, but they effectively kept me away from loving it, and that’s despite knowing how good it was going to go. If anything, it’s the fact of the TV show which played unfortunately against the book, for I kept on comparing them and the book falls slightly short of the series. I really should have read them before for, now, I’m curious to see if my opinion would have been the same. At the very least, the suspense would have worked better for me.
Closeness to characters: While TV can make you care for invented
characters through its actors, fiction needs the writer’s touch to render
characters tangible and "human." And the fact is that, if this is hard for a
lot of writers, Martin could have easily done it for all his characters, had he bothered a little more. As it turns out, few
of them managed to arouse me. To me, the tale did not come alive through the
characters, despite the fact that knowing the TV characters beforehand should
have eased the process of getting close to the book characters. Most of them
lacked the pages to make the reader feel
them. We root for them, we care, we feel with
them but we don’t feel them. I suspect this is due to lack of proper pacing for
emotional interaction to take place. Never undermine the importance of
emotional involvement between the reader and the book, for that’s what’s going
to determine the real strength of a fantasy book. It is fantasy, after all, so
why would you care if it wasn’t for the impact the fantastical epic has on
characters? They constitute the one thing you can always relate to.
For me, it is only in her last chapter that GRRM seems to find Dany’s voice, to give her a character. Except, obviously, when she snaps into “tyrant” mode, events seem to happen to her as if she was a puppet and not a person. And not just because she has lived her life in the shadow and fear of Viserys, but because Martin did not give her tempers, personality, likes and dislikes. I found it surprisingly difficult to get her.
As for Catelyn, some of the decisions she makes, like kidnapping Tyrion, have more to do with the needs of the plot than any credible action on her part. Her daughters are in King’s Landing, as is Eddard; she knows the Lannisters are dangerous and she does something that stupid, regardless? Bran, she leaves him alone with little Rickon in Winterfell, knowing perfectly well that if an assassin could come once, a second one can come too. Anything can happen to her boys and her castle. They're at war, for God's sake! Later on, she barely mourns Ned before telling herself she must be strong for her boys, thereby allowing Martin to move on with this, almost as if he felt a little uncomfortable with bitter human emotions that are not downright violent or elated in any sort of way. As regards her daughters, the fear, the constant worrying of a mother, we don’t feel them. Generally speaking, characters’ emotions are little described, with each character reflecting once or twice on every turn of event that befalls them, before zoup! we move on. This was a constant annoyance that stayed in the back of my mind and nagged at me while reading: for I need emotional interaction with the characters of a book; I need to love or hate them, I need to cry when logically they’d be crying and laugh as they do.
The best characters are the ones whose chapters GRRM masters the most: Jon is by far the most rounded and credible character. Bran, Tyrion, and Arya quickly follow, as do secondary characters like Osha, Luwin, Hodor, Varys. Their chapters offered wisdom, suspense, one-liners, emotional investment. Interestingly, each of the main cited above has the strongest links to fantasy fiction: Jon with the Night’s Watch, Bran with the three-eyed raven, Arya and her water dancing and her classic sword training, Tyrion with his downright, yet uneasy, denial of grumkins and snarks and his self-processed “clairvoyance” (as well as the fact that he is the only dwarf, a classic trope of fantasy). Clearly, Martin had stronger grips on his storylines there (especially with the Night’s Watch and the all symbolism of the Wall), while most of the other chapters allowed the story to shine over whatever might bring out the characters’ strengths and pro’s.
It took me a long time to figure out that this might be due to those less-good chapters’ interactions with the South and the Throne: Ned and Sansa, to cite only two, constantly interact with Joffrey, Cersei and Littlefinger… Since the Iron Throne metaphorically pushes everyone to play a nasty game of thrones, those who come out in the South and discover it for the first time, as it were, can only fail. It’s almost as if fate dictated characters’ choices rather than an author’s quill. Hence, the plot feels a little immature at times, twisting and turning the events in such a way that proper nasty characters, like Littlefinger, seem powered with all the best manipulative moves of the tale and their victims ridiculously clueless. Petyr Baelish is almost praised and, I feel, favoured by the author, when his cleverness and cunning are far from intelligence and wisdom. Spending less time telling us how much Ned is locked within a vipers’ nest and much more time showing him trying to get out, even with the same ending, would have been more credible. You can argue that would be out of character for him, but I think all the decisions that Ned takes or refuses to take reflect much more George R. R. Martin’s decision to follow the villains for seven books than they do Ned Stark any credit. Too many characters conveniently verge on the credulous and stupid (some of the decisions Sansa and Robb make are downright flabbergasting! Sansa, I can still understand, she’s eleven, but Robb…!), so that evil always seems to win and hope gets shattered way too often. And you just sit there, banging the book, screaming at all of them, fighting against the wall of stupidity raised before you, utterly submitted to characters’ fate. Obviously, the more the POV characters we’re rooting for are deemed helpless, the more surprises and suspense the narration undergoes. Yes, but also the more vexed the reader becomes as characters’ actions are constantly vexed by their foes. AGOT dances a fine line between thrilling shock and frustration and I can’t honestly decide which one won more often for me.
In return, Littlefinger and Cersei didn’t thrill me, nor even angered me; so far, they annoyed me.
That being said, my lack of interest in them is probably due in part to my pre-book knowledge of them. I know their wrongdoings and amorality, so I’m not shocked when I encounter them. I try to avoid engaging with them, if I’m honest.
In short, Martin likes so much to shock his readers that it sometimes feels as if this intent took precedence over verisimilitude, despite his much-repeated emphasis on relevancy and credibility in interviews. The wrongdoing is so brutal and mean that it borders the twists and turns of a soap opera. Less “Tein tein tein!” characters and more investment in the balanced ones and the book would have been perfect for me.
For me, it is only in her last chapter that GRRM seems to find Dany’s voice, to give her a character. Except, obviously, when she snaps into “tyrant” mode, events seem to happen to her as if she was a puppet and not a person. And not just because she has lived her life in the shadow and fear of Viserys, but because Martin did not give her tempers, personality, likes and dislikes. I found it surprisingly difficult to get her.
As for Catelyn, some of the decisions she makes, like kidnapping Tyrion, have more to do with the needs of the plot than any credible action on her part. Her daughters are in King’s Landing, as is Eddard; she knows the Lannisters are dangerous and she does something that stupid, regardless? Bran, she leaves him alone with little Rickon in Winterfell, knowing perfectly well that if an assassin could come once, a second one can come too. Anything can happen to her boys and her castle. They're at war, for God's sake! Later on, she barely mourns Ned before telling herself she must be strong for her boys, thereby allowing Martin to move on with this, almost as if he felt a little uncomfortable with bitter human emotions that are not downright violent or elated in any sort of way. As regards her daughters, the fear, the constant worrying of a mother, we don’t feel them. Generally speaking, characters’ emotions are little described, with each character reflecting once or twice on every turn of event that befalls them, before zoup! we move on. This was a constant annoyance that stayed in the back of my mind and nagged at me while reading: for I need emotional interaction with the characters of a book; I need to love or hate them, I need to cry when logically they’d be crying and laugh as they do.
The best characters are the ones whose chapters GRRM masters the most: Jon is by far the most rounded and credible character. Bran, Tyrion, and Arya quickly follow, as do secondary characters like Osha, Luwin, Hodor, Varys. Their chapters offered wisdom, suspense, one-liners, emotional investment. Interestingly, each of the main cited above has the strongest links to fantasy fiction: Jon with the Night’s Watch, Bran with the three-eyed raven, Arya and her water dancing and her classic sword training, Tyrion with his downright, yet uneasy, denial of grumkins and snarks and his self-processed “clairvoyance” (as well as the fact that he is the only dwarf, a classic trope of fantasy). Clearly, Martin had stronger grips on his storylines there (especially with the Night’s Watch and the all symbolism of the Wall), while most of the other chapters allowed the story to shine over whatever might bring out the characters’ strengths and pro’s.
It took me a long time to figure out that this might be due to those less-good chapters’ interactions with the South and the Throne: Ned and Sansa, to cite only two, constantly interact with Joffrey, Cersei and Littlefinger… Since the Iron Throne metaphorically pushes everyone to play a nasty game of thrones, those who come out in the South and discover it for the first time, as it were, can only fail. It’s almost as if fate dictated characters’ choices rather than an author’s quill. Hence, the plot feels a little immature at times, twisting and turning the events in such a way that proper nasty characters, like Littlefinger, seem powered with all the best manipulative moves of the tale and their victims ridiculously clueless. Petyr Baelish is almost praised and, I feel, favoured by the author, when his cleverness and cunning are far from intelligence and wisdom. Spending less time telling us how much Ned is locked within a vipers’ nest and much more time showing him trying to get out, even with the same ending, would have been more credible. You can argue that would be out of character for him, but I think all the decisions that Ned takes or refuses to take reflect much more George R. R. Martin’s decision to follow the villains for seven books than they do Ned Stark any credit. Too many characters conveniently verge on the credulous and stupid (some of the decisions Sansa and Robb make are downright flabbergasting! Sansa, I can still understand, she’s eleven, but Robb…!), so that evil always seems to win and hope gets shattered way too often. And you just sit there, banging the book, screaming at all of them, fighting against the wall of stupidity raised before you, utterly submitted to characters’ fate. Obviously, the more the POV characters we’re rooting for are deemed helpless, the more surprises and suspense the narration undergoes. Yes, but also the more vexed the reader becomes as characters’ actions are constantly vexed by their foes. AGOT dances a fine line between thrilling shock and frustration and I can’t honestly decide which one won more often for me.
In return, Littlefinger and Cersei didn’t thrill me, nor even angered me; so far, they annoyed me.
That being said, my lack of interest in them is probably due in part to my pre-book knowledge of them. I know their wrongdoings and amorality, so I’m not shocked when I encounter them. I try to avoid engaging with them, if I’m honest.
In short, Martin likes so much to shock his readers that it sometimes feels as if this intent took precedence over verisimilitude, despite his much-repeated emphasis on relevancy and credibility in interviews. The wrongdoing is so brutal and mean that it borders the twists and turns of a soap opera. Less “Tein tein tein!” characters and more investment in the balanced ones and the book would have been perfect for me.
The issue with Essos: Here is another criticism (sorry,
sorry!) that must start by a praise. Martin’s insistence on treating the
classic dwarf figure of fantasy in a respectful and critically conscious manner
deserves all the praise it can get. Instead of making dwarfs yet another
series of otherworldly creatures providing a foil to the human characters, he makes
the classic figure of the human in fantasy a dwarf, and a main character (if
not a hero?) at that. He actually delivers one of the rare fantasy fictions
consciously and seriously tackling dwarfs’ rights, in the same way other such
fictions have Blacks’ or women’s rights at their forefront. So, it became all
the more surprising for me when I realised that non-western-like characters
were actually handled in the same problematic way than in the TV show.
With many extravagant depictions of the peoples of Essos, and little rich elaboration, we figure out a colourful, diverse, from white to black sort of people living in that part of the world, but we never see them clearly. It’s all mixed up in my head, I don’t recall who’s got the tainted fork beards, whose faces are always tattooed; who deals in slavery among The Free Cities, who are the people of the Free Cities compared to The Summer Isles (which are not part of Essos), compared to Slaver’s Bay, compared to The Dothraki. The lack of maps of The Summer Isles and The Free Cities does not help either, for Martin does not shy away from mentioning those lands every ten pages. Well, I may be exaggerating a little, but still… At some point, you stop even bothering to try to understand where each person Dany meets or cites comes from and what their culture is like. In fact, the diffused information on Essos feels more like drops splattered across the pages after the bulk of writing had been done, an attempt at colouring further the already rich world GRRM created, than an attempt at building the context, backstory and mythopoeia of the lands in which Daenerys, a supposedly very important character, has lived all her life and will live for the next four books. She seems to know little enough of the land which she has always known and to pay little interest to it, as well; what did she do all day long before her brother married her off to Khal Drogo? It’s not very credible that through her we learn little about those countries besides her own ignorance on the matter.
This is an issue, since, aside from the reader’s confusion, it just drops all non-white, a few honeyed-white, and all mixed peoples on Essos, without appearing to make a distinction from one people to another. If that was Martin’s goal_ that Essos is a rich and mixed continent very unlike our own ethnic and geographic configurations_ well then he got it. But the consequence is that Essos has no personality, for having too many, and cannot wake up any interest. Where Westeros and its cultures are elaborately detailed, each different from the other, Essos is filled with the rest of humanity dumped there, as it were, and most of them slavers or slaves. Hum, not that removed from our own real perspective on the world beyond the West, then…
The Dothraki, in particular, posed me problems. How many times can you use the words “copper skin, almond eyes, flat nose” to describe Black-like, or Arab-like, or mixed-race people? Can’t he individualise them physically as well as mentally? And their lands are equally featureless: a green sea of grass, desert on desert, empty rock lands… I felt little interest in them emanating from the author and, thus, could arouse little of my own. You can feel that he does not fully master or does not work himself about the subtleties and context surrounding The Dothraki. In fact, they are described as such a band of savage brutes that subtleties are done away with all together. They’re a mass of people, with no personality distinguishing one from the other, save perhaps for Khal Drogo. In that respect, the TV series dealt much better with this storyline (I'm thinking of a scene with Rakharo and Jorah comparing fighting methods of East and West, for instance). As it is, the book version had a massive impact on my approach to Daenerys’ chapters: I found them poorly executed, compared, that is, to the rest of the cast. They were too fast, too predictable as well. As if the narrative distance from The Dothraki was a cue to the next round of events.
Constant mention to the rich but under-developed world of Essos is another instance of Martin’s wealth of ideas, yet lack of dealing with them in depth. He sets up a whole wheel in motion and quickly loses his grip on it. Meanwhile, the wheel keeps on reeling.
With many extravagant depictions of the peoples of Essos, and little rich elaboration, we figure out a colourful, diverse, from white to black sort of people living in that part of the world, but we never see them clearly. It’s all mixed up in my head, I don’t recall who’s got the tainted fork beards, whose faces are always tattooed; who deals in slavery among The Free Cities, who are the people of the Free Cities compared to The Summer Isles (which are not part of Essos), compared to Slaver’s Bay, compared to The Dothraki. The lack of maps of The Summer Isles and The Free Cities does not help either, for Martin does not shy away from mentioning those lands every ten pages. Well, I may be exaggerating a little, but still… At some point, you stop even bothering to try to understand where each person Dany meets or cites comes from and what their culture is like. In fact, the diffused information on Essos feels more like drops splattered across the pages after the bulk of writing had been done, an attempt at colouring further the already rich world GRRM created, than an attempt at building the context, backstory and mythopoeia of the lands in which Daenerys, a supposedly very important character, has lived all her life and will live for the next four books. She seems to know little enough of the land which she has always known and to pay little interest to it, as well; what did she do all day long before her brother married her off to Khal Drogo? It’s not very credible that through her we learn little about those countries besides her own ignorance on the matter.
This is an issue, since, aside from the reader’s confusion, it just drops all non-white, a few honeyed-white, and all mixed peoples on Essos, without appearing to make a distinction from one people to another. If that was Martin’s goal_ that Essos is a rich and mixed continent very unlike our own ethnic and geographic configurations_ well then he got it. But the consequence is that Essos has no personality, for having too many, and cannot wake up any interest. Where Westeros and its cultures are elaborately detailed, each different from the other, Essos is filled with the rest of humanity dumped there, as it were, and most of them slavers or slaves. Hum, not that removed from our own real perspective on the world beyond the West, then…
The Dothraki, in particular, posed me problems. How many times can you use the words “copper skin, almond eyes, flat nose” to describe Black-like, or Arab-like, or mixed-race people? Can’t he individualise them physically as well as mentally? And their lands are equally featureless: a green sea of grass, desert on desert, empty rock lands… I felt little interest in them emanating from the author and, thus, could arouse little of my own. You can feel that he does not fully master or does not work himself about the subtleties and context surrounding The Dothraki. In fact, they are described as such a band of savage brutes that subtleties are done away with all together. They’re a mass of people, with no personality distinguishing one from the other, save perhaps for Khal Drogo. In that respect, the TV series dealt much better with this storyline (I'm thinking of a scene with Rakharo and Jorah comparing fighting methods of East and West, for instance). As it is, the book version had a massive impact on my approach to Daenerys’ chapters: I found them poorly executed, compared, that is, to the rest of the cast. They were too fast, too predictable as well. As if the narrative distance from The Dothraki was a cue to the next round of events.
Constant mention to the rich but under-developed world of Essos is another instance of Martin’s wealth of ideas, yet lack of dealing with them in depth. He sets up a whole wheel in motion and quickly loses his grip on it. Meanwhile, the wheel keeps on reeling.
Sexposition and extreme cruelty: Now, all of the above are fairly moderate objections to a strong
book. Yet, two flaws however persist and sign, which really threaten to spoil
it all. The worse being that these two aspects are fully intended as part of
the book.
- The sadistic take on violence which effectively makes you wonder whether GRRM doesn’t take a lot more pleasure in unleashing taboos than he should. He could have shown the same amount of violence but with the purpose of showing how men were and could be in such times. As I understand it from a few interviews, this has been one of his main concerns all throughout his fantasy-fiction writing: staying consistent with historical accuracy. Well, there’s so much evil in it that A Game of Thrones can hardly be called realistic fantasy. It’s actually too far gone into devilish, monstrous, insane evil to feel plausible, and it’s always the sweetest, most defenseless and innocent of all his characters (there aren’t that many, but where there’s a lack, extras will do) who suffer at the ends of the greatest of monsters. Really? Characters never seem to have a break; most are evil even when they’re barely dissociable from each other: take The Dothraki horde, for instance. Strength is confused with power here, violence with cruelty_ just as love is quick to arise (Daenerys and Drogo) and quick to deaden (Catelyn’s easy mourning). To the point where you lose at times the pleasure in reading and must force yourself to read on. A very dangerous move on Martin’s part, but one that finally paid off since there are so many weirdoes out there who seem to love ASOIAF for all the evil it portrays rather than in spite of it.
- The sex that is so gratuitous, fast, bold, vulgar rather than sensual, that it becomes barely memorable. For a book with sex overtones, the sex fails to score like I’ve rarely seen before. It creeps up in every other chapter for no purpose at all, aside from saying “I’m a cool book, look at all the sex,” and is not attractive at all, quite the contrary. I never did get turned on. As far as sex is concerned, those who say that the Game of Thrones franchise is not for the faint-hearted had better say it is for the easy-contented.
If you
removed all the sex and cruel content, the book would be ten times better, though
you can bet it’d be ten times less spoken of. But, we’d be left with better readers’ and fans’ assessments than we
have right now. There’s just too much show off and shoving expectations asides
and shocking people for the sake of it, to the point where these three
tendencies become generic (marketing?) strategies on the part of the writer. As
soon as you expect or wish something to go one way, it goes the other, to the
extent that it does not even serve any plot purpose so much as a writing
strategy quite outside the needs of the tale.
Conclusion: That being said, it’s difficult to imagine how
Martin could have told as ambitious a tale any differently. As it is, it
remains one of the finest epic fictions
out there. Twice as less characters (and that’s only in AGOT), but those
present more invested in, and ASOIAF would have been among the very top three fantasy books there ever was. But also a less
popular and renown one, I think. A Game
of Thrones may very well be among the best fantasy books I’ve come to read,
but it is not one of my favourites.
