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!