Friday, December 19, 2014

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.

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