Lucy Reviews A Game Of Thrones

This is Ned.  He's about to chop some dude's head off with the giant sword.

I'm a little late to the party on this one. George R.R. Martin wrote A Game of Thrones, the first volume of his Song of Ice and Fire series, in 1996. And I may never have picked it up if not for HBO and the buzz around its new series based on the book. HBO, consequently, has been putting just about every other network to shame with its offerings. Word on the street is that they picked up Thrones for a second season AND greenlit another series based on Jennifer Egan's A Visit From The Goon Squad, easily my favorite book of the last year or so. Anyway, back to A Game of Thrones.

First thing you should know about this book is that it's long. 831 pages, including an appendix. Way longer than anything the brilliant Sandra Boynton ever wrote. Man, I thought I had gotten myself into a real pickle: a giant book in a genre (fantasy) that I don't particularly care for, and it doesn't even have the courtesy to feature much, if any, rhyming. Ridiculous.

This is Daenerys.  She is about to eat that horse's heart.  Seriously.

But then I started it. And guess what? This ain't J.R.R. Tolkien or one of his legion of copycats. This book is slick. Martin plunges you into a world where summers can last for years and winters even longer. There is a vague hint of the supernatural/magical, but it all takes a backseat to the characters. And man, are there a lot of characters! It took me about 50 or 60 pages to orient myself, but from there I tore through the rest of the book.

Here's the plot in a nutshell (courtesy of Publishers Weekly):

In a world where the coming winter can last decades, kings and queens, knights and renegades struggle for control of a throne. Some fight with sword and mace, others with magic and poison. Beyond the Wall to the north, meanwhile, an army of the dead prepares to march south as the warmth of summer drains from the land. When Lord Stark of Winterfell, an honest man, comes south to act as the King's chief councilor, no amount of heroism or good intentions can keep the realm under control.

Sounds kind of lame and soap opera-y, huh? Sort of like The War Of The Roses? Yeah, I guess. If The War Of The Roses had a foul-mouthed midget, wolves, and a crap-load of violence. It's hardly an original comparison, but this is more like a medieval version of The Sopranos. And you know what the best part is? Martin can write. Chapters fly by. Characters are three-dimensional, and there are no clear heroes.

Also, don't get too attached to anyone, because Martin isn't afraid to kill a character he's spent hundreds of pages developing. This is a strategy that pays off.  No one is safe, and the reader knows it.  The end result is a built-in level of suspense missing from a lot of books.  These are fully realized characters operating in a fully realized world.  

One of the big failings of the fantasy genre is its tropes. I can write one of these suckers with my eyes closed. A common-born boy discovers he has great power and goes off on a quest with a band of unlikely heroes to combat some dark force in a far away land or destroy some stupid artifact. SPOILER ALERT: He accomplishes his mission. Not so with A Game of Thrones. Though there are echoes of this formula, Martin is too smart to let things devolve into predictability.  Heck, he discards the idea of quests pretty quickly.  Most of the novel's action takes place after characters have reached their destinations, not during the journeys themselves.  This is one of the smartest decisions Martin makes, because nothing makes me throw fits more than having to read about characters searching for edible roots or repairing the shoes.

I award A Game of Thrones 10 out of 10 stuffed bears. Amazon Prime couldn't get A Clash of Kings, volume two of A Song of Ice and Fire, to me fast enough.  Bailey and I waited and waited and waited for the mailman.  Amazon Prime likes to make you think they get things to you right away, but it took two whole days.  But at least I made friends with the mailman.  Turns out his name is Cecil, and he has three prison tattoos.  His pet snake is named Ginger, and Cecil likes to feed her baby kittens.   

Bring me my book, Cecil!