by George R.R. Martin
I try to be a friend to popular fiction, I really do, but after reading several hundred pages of George R.R. Martin’s first two installments in his “A Game of Thrones” series, I’m here to tell you that the experience is like gorging on movie popcorn: obsessive, empty, and ends up making you queasy.
For those who don’t know, Martin’s mega-novels are quasi-medieval sagas that revolve around the various claims to the throne of the united kingdoms of Westeros. (Think Middle Earth rip-off in addition to the author's double middle initials R.R.) Nobody’s very likeable. The Stark family wears its honor like a stick up its backside (there's Eddard Stark, patriarch, at upper left, played by Sean Bean in the TV show, though his girth would seem to make him a better candidate for the corpulent Robert Baratheon); the Lannisters are incestuous and amoral; the Targaryens, also incestuous, are crazy; and the Baratheons just hate each other. There are other claimants, but the only real protagonist is the intelligent and practical Tyrion Lannister, who is both reviled and underrated because he is a dwarf. It’s Tyrion who keeps the reader going in the first novel, but even he couldn’t keep this reader interested by the end of the second.
The chief problem with these books is that Martin’s prose is bloated with tiresome and irrelevant descriptions and lists. There are cavalcades of kings, their colors, and sigils, the names of their castles, favorite horses, pets, and what they had for dinner. And I'm not kidding here; if there's a seven-course meal at Winterfell, then by the gods in the Weirwood, every course is going to be described in detail; we are even told at one point that a kitchen lackey washes his hands before making somebody's mulled wine. Even Thomas Mallory, that medieval windbag, would have passed over that.
During an exciting river battle in the second novel, the reader is constantly distracted from Tyrion’s very clever military strategy by endless lists of the names of ships that are summarily sunk, burned, and never seen again, over a dozen in one paragraph. Worse, the ship’s names are not even very clever. Sea Bitch is among the better ones. The names of people themselves often seem like drunken elisions of familiar names, e.g., Eddard (Edward) or Sabbassion (Sabastian).
Martin shoots for a kind of high courtly tone--which is as tiresome as the tone in those books by the other R.R.--but wouldn't be enough, in itself, to sink the series if a) the story were any good and b) it was handled with any degree of consistency or cleverness (at least Tolkien's names had interesting etymologies). But Martin fails on both counts. Words like “squished” and “butt” appear as jarringly anachronistic. Also like the other R.R.’s books, Martin’s are short on laughs, though there are horrors aplenty, most of them involving underage children who are raped, kidnapped, and/or murdered … or are themselves rapists, kidnappers, or murderers.
Perhaps the worst feature of the two novels I read was the abject predictability of character. With few exceptions, most of the characters are static archetypes--the intriguing eunuch, the vain queen, the bumbling necromancer, the nobleman's underdog bastard, the stalwart retainer, the boy seer--devoid of development unless it's to sink into yet more horrific depravity and self-indulgence. Tyrion’s character faces interesting moral dilemmas, and two or three of the female characters occasionally take a time out for self-reflection. But these moments are dispatched quickly and go nowhere. Martin seems far more interested the samites and velvets, vair and ermines, that everybody’s wearing to the next audience with the king of the Iron Throne.
Please people, winter is coming; save your time and money.
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