A Game of Thrones
I purchased a copy of George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones sometime back in college, upon recommendation from my dad, who had recently devoured the whole series. It sat there on my shelf for the previous 5 or 6 years, and a number of times I’d picked it up, read the first 20-30 pages, and put it down. Maybe I wasn’t ready for a big fantasy series, but mostly I just hadn’t given it a chance. I started it in early September and finished it in a couple weeks.
On it’s surface, the whole Song of Ice and Fire series looks like run-of-the-mill, Tolkien-rip-off high fantasy. The prologue to Book One really fortifies that impression, too. But once I’d reached chapter 10 or 11, it became clear that Martin was really putting an interesting and original twist on this worn-out genre.
Character development is what makes this series work so well, and causes it to be as addictive as it is. Each chapter is told from the point-of-view of one of the main characters, of which there are many. Until you get to the point in the story where you’re revisiting characters for a second or third time, it’s difficult to see how the plot threads are twisting together. Like other epics, the “family trees” and the geography of the world plays an integral part in your understanding of the events, and that knowledge just takes pages and pages to acquire.
The Lord of the Rings is such a fascinating book — to me — for reasons largely peripheral to the story. The geography and cultures of Middle-earth, and depth of mythology, were the elements that had me reading the deeper histories written by Tolkien. The plot of the “War of the Ring” always seemed like an excuse to showcase this wildly intricate set of languages and mythologies created by the author. With Thrones, for about the first half of the book, I didn’t get the vibe that Martin cared too much about the history of his world. His writing is definitely simpler than Tolkien’s, but Martin does hang a lot of backstory and cultural qualities on the plot over time, it’s just that those elements are not front-and-center. Martin’s concentration is on the family relationships, conspiracies, and intrigue of dozens of characters.
In the last couple weeks I’m about 3/4ths of the way through Book Two, A Clash of Kings. Much darker and more depressing than Thrones, but it’s continuing everything that I love about the series.
