Book Review: A Game of Thrones (Part II: The Review)

George R. R. Martin

1996

Awards: Locus

Nominations: Nebula

Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

Note: For a brief-ish synopsis of the story of A Game of Thrones, please see the post immediately prior to this one. This one contains only my analysis.

PART II: THE REVIEW

In evaluating A Game of Thrones, I must begin with my admiration.

First and foremost, this book is a masterwork of planning, organization, and focus. Every story line for every character had something to contribute to the larger picture. No one’s narrative seemed like it was unnecessary, or just there for comic relief or love interest.

Martin excels not only at the structural big picture, however, but also in the tactical details. He writes specific scenes and incidents with great clarity. Physical confrontations small and large—from mano-a-mano swordfights to huge battles between armies—are so well described you can almost picture the exact choreography in your head. This is refreshing; there is almost nothing more frustrating than a murky battle scene (I’m looking at you, John Varley).

Speaking of battles, it’s interesting to me that the reader witnesses only about half of the key battles that happen during the timeline of the book. Sometimes you actually are there during the fighting (like Cersei’s bloody coup at King’s Landing), but other times you just hear it described by characters who were there (like a battle at Riverrun in which Catelyn’s brother is captured). It is a bit like in The Hobbit when Smaug is killed and you don’t even see it, you just hear it told by someone who was there. It’s a little bit frustrating, but it still works. And I guess if you saw everything, the book would be two thousand pages long.

Much of Martin’s ground-level imagery is striking and vivid. There is almost nothing so visceral as the scene where Dany Targaryen has to eat the entire completely raw heart of a recently killed horse so that her unborn child will have good luck. And I was particularly impressed with Tyrion’s prison cell in the Tullys’ castle Aerie: the dungeon is set into an impossibly steep mountainside cliff face, with one wall of each cell open to the air. Any prisoner rolling over in his sleep carelessly enough could roll over the edge and fall to his death.

The characters are distinct and memorable.  There are, of course, a large number of them, and I did lose track of most of the innumerable “smallfolk” (handmaidens and bloodriders and knights and servants and slaves). But with a bit of concentration and/or note taking, you can keep track of a surprisingly high number of the main players. There are those who are honest, appealing, and trustworthy (Jon Snow), and there are others who are sleazy or mean or power mad (Queen Cersei), and others who are harder to pin down (Tyrion). Over the course of a book this long, even the good guys often end up making mistakes that add to their complexity.

When I say that the writing is good, however, that is not to say I didn’t have any frustrations with the book.

Most of the time the fantasy language and the medieval terms aren’t so stilted that you’re overly conscious of it. I liked the direwolves and the dragons and the grumkins. But there are a few frequently words that really started to jar after a while (starting around page 245). The ones that particularly got to me were: 

• Ahorse (as in, “He was not walking, he was still ahorse.”)

• Mummer’s farce (as in, “This trial is nothing but a mummer’s farce!”)

• Whickering (in A Game of Thrones, horses do a lot more whickering than they do neighing.)

• Manhood (referring to a male’s genitalia, as in, “When next you bare steel on Shagga son of Dolf, I will chop off your manhood and roast it in the fire.”)

Then there is the brutality. The world of A Game of Thrones is rough and not for the faint of heart. Most of the characters are (or are forced by circumstance to be) anything from harsh and unkind to violent and cruel. It can be quite hard to take—in particular, the stories of Sansa Stark and Danaerys Targaryen, who are both stuck alone in abusive situations with little outside support. And there are innumerable women raped—whether it is as prisoners of war on the battlefield or as wives or servants or slaves going along with sex with their husbands or masters because they do not have the power to refuse.

And then there is the frustration I was warned about more than anything else when I first set out to read this book: BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO PEOPLE YOU LIKE.

Horrible things did happen to the characters I liked. All of them were forced through honor, or circumstance, or both, to be alone much of the time, fighting for themselves against evil and irrational and usually overwhelmingly powerful people. I wanted some kind of vengeance, justice, vindication, refuge, solace—for crying out loud, even just a resolution of one kind or another—for them. But after 800+ pages, I got almost nothing of that. And now I might have to read another 800-page book to see if the bad guys will get their comeuppance at last? And it might not even happen then? Damn you, George R. R. Martin!

Book Review: A Game of Thrones (Part I: The Story)

George R. R. Martin

1996

Awards: Locus

Nominations: Nebula

Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

SPOILER ALERT

A Game of Thrones is the first book in George R. R. Martin’s multi-volume, as yet unfinished series A Song of Ice and Fire. It is mostly grounded in realistic medieval-type characters and locations (knights, kings, castles) but with occasional ranges into the fantastic and mythical (dragons, direwolves, magicians).

It is also enormous and complicated. The paperback version I read was 807 pages long, not including the family-tree appendices, and followed the interrelated stories of at least ten separate characters (and their entourages) simultaneously.

For this reason, I am splitting this review up into two parts. Part 1 (below) will give a relatively brief synopsis of the plot, including as much information as I think is relevant but hopefully not so much that I give away too many crucial spoilers, inasmuch as such a thing is possible. Part 2 (forthcoming) will be my actual analysis and review of the book.

Thus, herewith...

PART I: THE STORY

A Game of Thrones is set in a fictional land, an island that seems to be roughly the size and shape of Britain. The island is divided up into several fiefdoms, each ruled by a different family, or House. Each House has a proud and ancient history, two or three distinctive colors for their flag, and a unique animal emblem for the sigil on their heraldry. Sometimes the blood relatives of a House will have common characteristic hair and eye coloration to boot.

Over the past thousand years or so, the hatreds and allegiances between the various Houses have been continually shifting. Not satisfied with only their own traditional homelands, several of them have tried at one time or another to gain ultimate control over the entire country.

For many years, the Targaryens were able to do just that; the head of House Targaryen reigned as king over all of the other Houses for decades. However, about a generation before the book begins, the last Targaryen king, Aerys, was killed by the allied invading forces of the Baratheons and the Lannisters. Aerys himself was killed by Jamie (heir to the house of Lannister), and Aerys’s son, Rhaegar, was killed by Robert (heir to the house of Baratheon).

The end result was that Robert Baratheon then became king over the entire land, and he married Jamie Lannister’s sister Cersei to solidify the Baratheon-Lannister alliance. But Robert’s control over the other Houses—including even that of his own wife—is tenuous at best. And there are several (including, of course, the Targaryens) who think he is nothing but an illegitimate usurper.

By the time the book starts, only two descendants of the last King Targaryen are still alive: Daenerys, a 13-year-old girl, and her abusive older brother Viserys. Viserys promises Daenerys (or “Dany”) in marriage to Khal Drogo, the lord of a Rohan-esque horse-riding people called the Dothraki, in exchange for a huge sum of money that will let him raise an army and go reclaim the kingship he believes is rightfully his. Drogo procrastinates in fulfilling his end of the bargain, so Viserys and Dany are relegated to the fringes of the story for most of this book, but there are hints that they will be more important in later installments.

The central family that A Game of Thrones mainly follows is actually none of the three named above. No, our heroes are the men and women of the House of Stark: the trustworthy, honorable guardians of the cold northern lands. Their sense of rightness and decency starts with the head of the household, Eddard (“Ned”) Stark, and flows through his strong, smart “trueborn” sons and daughters, right on down to his strong, smart bastard son Jon Snow, who has been raised with the rest of the Stark children as if he was no different from them.

The Starks rule over the territory closest to the Wall, which is a gigantic wall of ice crossing the entire island from east to west, cutting the very northernmost tip of the island off from the rest of the land to the south. Terrifying rumors swirl about what lurks in the Haunted Forest, the land north of the Wall. Nobody knows exactly what dangers it holds, but everyone knows that it is awful, and that all that stands between it and civilization are the men of the Night Guard, men sworn to guard the Wall above all other family loyalties.

Ned Stark was a childhood friend of King Robert Baratheon. So, at the beginning of the book, when Robert’s second-in-command, or “Hand,” Jon Arryn, dies, Robert asks Ned to be his new Hand. Ned agrees and travels all the way from his northern castle, Winterfell, to the king’s southern castle at King’s Landing to be the Hand. He brings his two daughters with him, but leaves his three trueborn sons at Winterfell with his wife, Catelyn Tully.

At the same time, Ned’s bastard son Jon Snow is of an age where he is looking to make a way for himself in the world, and, seeing no real other opportunity for himself, he accepts an invitation from his uncle to go up north to become a man of the Night Guard at the Wall.

Ned’s new position as the King’s Hand should be great, theoretically—except that King Robert’s wife, Queen Cersei, is a Lannister, and the Lannisters are ruthless and power-mad and hate the Starks. Actually, the Lannisters also hate the Baratheons and the Arryns and pretty much anybody else who isn’t a Lannister. As a matter of fact, the old Hand Jon Arryn’s widowed wife, Lysa Tully, who happens to be Ned’s sister-in-law, thinks Jon was poisoned to death by the queen in an attempted power grab, and Lysa warns her sister Catelyn, who rushes south to King’s Landing to warn Ned in person to be careful.

To make matters worse, Ned quickly discovers that all of the queen’s children have actually not been fathered by the king, but by her own brother, Jamie. Meaning that they’re not truly King Robert’s heirs.

Meanwhile, back at Winterfell, a mysterious midnight assassin tries to murder one of Ned and Catelyn’s children, Bran, with a dagger that turns out to be owned by Cersei’s other brother, Tyrion Lannister. Catelyn naturally jumps to the conclusion that Tyrion hired the assassin, and that he must have had his family’s okay to do it.

                                                    

Tensions continue to mount until finally Catelyn (on her way back north to Winterfell) accidentally runs into Tyrion (on his way back south after taking a tour of the Wall) in a roadside inn. Catelyn has her men take Tyrion prisoner, brings him to her sister’s castle in the eastern mountains, and casts him into a cell to await trial for the attempted assassination of her son.

This, of course, totally enrages the Lannisters. Tyrion does eventually prove his innocence in a trial by combat, and Catelyn has to let him go. But before people can find that out, King Robert is severely wounded by a boar while hunting, and Cersei uses the opportunity to stage a bloody coup. She takes Ned hostage and puts her bratty teenaged son Joffrey (by Jamie) on the throne. Then she sends her armies—led by her brother/lover Jamie—marching up north to make war on the rest of the Starks, who she says are traitors because Ned won’t acknowledge Joffrey as king.

War ensues. Ned’s oldest son, Robb, leads the Stark forces from Winterfell down south to engage the Lannisters. Jon Snow is frustrated because he is bound by oath to the Night Watch and can’t go to his brother Robb’s aid. Tides shift back and forth during the war, during which horrible things happen to good people, and no final outcome or closure is really resolved, meaning that to get any hope of closure, or satisfaction, or justice, you have to read the next 800-page installment.

I will explore more of this phenomenon, and other aspects of the book, in the next part of this review, which will be posted on December 26.

It's Tempting

http://icanhas.cheezburger.com/

Book Review: Boneshaker

Cherie Priest

2009

Awards: Locus

Nominations: Nebula, Hugo

Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

SPOILER ALERT

I am terrified of zombies. They are far more scary to me than anything else. I can handle (and enjoy) quite a lot of vampire, werewolf, or mega-monster horror. But when a story has zombies in it, it often tends to be too much for me.

So when the cover of this book said that it was going to be a “steampunk-zombie-airship adventure of rollicking pace and sweeping proportions,” I readied myself to be really scared.

The book takes place in Seattle in 1879. Priest alters history quite a bit to fit her story, which is fine, but it does mean that you have to accept that it’s not going to be an exactly historically accurate 1879 Seattle. The Civil War is still going on, for example; the Alaskan gold rush happened many years later than it really did; and Seattle’s population is about eight times larger than it really was at the time.

The prelude for the events in the book is this: in 1863, sixteen years before the story really starts, Russia held a competition to see who could invent a machine to let them mine their Klondike gold the fastest. A brilliant and somewhat crazy Seattle inventor, Leviticus Blue, won the competition with his design for “Dr. Blue’s Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine.” The Russians pressured him to get it operational too soon, however, and on its first road test it went horribly out of control, destroying most of the financial district of downtown Seattle.

Not only did the Boneshaker’s rampage itself kill many people, but the machine also dug so deep that it opened up a subterranean vent of a hideous, heavy, toxic gas. The gas, which quickly became known as “the Blight,” poured out of the vent, killing almost everyone left in the downtown area. And then the Blight turned out to have an even lovelier side effect: it turned a large proportion of the recently dead people into “rotters,” or zombies, who of course had an insatiable appetite for living human flesh.

The survivors immediately threw up a wall around the downtown area to contain the zombies and the still-spewing Blight, and to protect the people who still eked out a meager living in the impoverished “Outskirts” neighborhoods right next to the city. 

No one knew what happened to Leviticus Blue after the accident. But his pregnant wife, Briar, escaped the city, and she raised their son, Zeke, alone in near poverty in the Outskirts for the next fifteen years.

The main story of Boneshaker is set in motion when Zeke, at fifteen years old, decides he wants to go to his parents’ old house in the walled city to try to find evidence to prove his father’s innocence. He packs a lantern, a gas mask, and Blight-seeing polarized goggles; leaves his mother a note; and sneaks into the city through a half-buried outflow pipe for what he thinks will be a quick day trip.

Whereupon, of course, there is a major earthquake, and it collapses the pipe, Zeke’s only known route of escape. His mother panics and goes in after him.

What follows is a romping chase (at a “rollicking pace,” as advertised) as Zeke tries to find the old house and Briar tries to find Zeke and both try to avoid the ravenous zombies, the ever-present Blight, and living humans who might do them harm. For, as it turns out, there are still plenty of people living in the city. They have sealed up buildings with wax and tar so the Blight can’t get in, and they pull in clean air with a system of bellows and pipes coming over the wall. They are well-masked and well-armed and they travel mostly through underground tunnels and roof-to-roof catwalks. And they’re not all nice.

There is also a small population of black marketeers who swoop in over the city in zeppelins, collect bags of the Blight gas, and turn it into a highly dangerous drug used by addicts on the outside. These illegal airships turn out to be very helpful to both Briar and Zeke more than once.

There is not much in the way of actual plot complexity in this book. What there is is a lot of breathless up-and-down rushing through basements, streets, and catwalks as mother and son try to find what they respectively came for and get out alive. They run into dangerous people and people who are kindhearted, and of course they run into zombies. And they gradually get closer and closer to a rendezvous with the mysterious, tyrannical Dr. Minnericht, an eccentric recluse who holds the citizens of walled Seattle in thrall with their dependence on his brilliant anti-zombie inventions, and who may or may not be Briar’s long-lost husband Leviticus.

I liked the premise and I liked the mid-19^th century steampunk aesthetic, which is manifested primarily in the quirky mechanical inventions and the characters’ names. Many of the characters are charismatic and appealing, like the mechanical-one-armed crossbow-toting bar-mistress Lucy O’Gunning, and the stoic, heavily armed zombie-fighting warrior Jeremiah Swakhammer. And much of the time it is a lively, page-turning ride.

But at the same time, the book has a lack of depth and direction that is frustrating. The challenges that Briar and Zeke face hardly ever seem to be as difficult to conquer as I thought they would be. There are too many times when fortuitous accidents land one of the other of them where they need to be just at the time they need to be there, and other times when they are fortuitously rescued by someone showing up out of the blue or a fortuitous piece of just the right type of equipment showing up in their hands at just the right time. And the sinister Dr. Minnericht turns out not to be pretty anticlimactic; he's not as much of a satisfying twist as I thought he was going to be.

I also have to say that the zombies were--dare I say it?--disappointingly non-frightening. Most of the trouble Briar and Zeke had was actually with living people, not the dead ones. And when they did encounter zombies, it was usually in the form of sudden, action-packed, almost silly scuffles with large crowds of them, and the battles were too frantic and over too quickly to be really frightening. Zombies are known not for their agility and fighting ability but for their mindless, unrelenting, predatory pursuit, and using a few of them in quieter, more suspenseful situations might have made them far more terrifying. There were occasionally times when I’d be scared by someone hearing a suggestive moan or a sliding shuffle down a dark tunnel, but not very often, and it usually didn't amount to anything.