A Game of Thrones

After my brother finished Paolini's Eragon and Eldest, he was hungry for some more fantasy reading. He went to Barnes & Noble and asked an associate there if he recommended anything. The bookseller led him to George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones. I'm glad he did because my brother in turn led me to the series.

I had never heard of Martin or the Song of Ice and Fire series. My brother insisted they were good books and lent me two of them, though inconveniently not the first. I had to hit the streets and track down my own copy. Usually that's easy enough to do, especially with a book that came out more than a decade ago. But wouldn't you know, I couldn't find a copy to save my life. That was my first clue that perhaps I was about to read something great. I couldn't find the the book at Half Priced Books. My nearest Barnes & Noble only had the hardcover in stock. I finally found a paperback copy at a B&N some twenty miles away.

I finished AGoT this past weekend and am well into the sequel, A Clash of Kings. If you peruse some of the books' customer reviews at Amazon, you'll read some comparisons to Tolkien and the like. Ignore that. Martin's work bears little in common with Tolkien other than the characters share armaments and medieval technology. Other than that, the books are night and day to each other. I can best describe the series A Song of Ice and Fire as low fantasy with a historical fiction approach to plot, narrative, and character development. I've read little literary criticism of the series, but people have mentioned that the books political intrigue and warring houses is partly inspired from real history, specifically the War of the Roses and the Hundred Years' War.

Which is what makes the books so different from Tolkien and the hundreds of other fantasy settings inspired by him. True enough, Martin builds his own world. But the political in-fighting between the host of royal families fuels the narrative, not a single, epic quest. There's a hint of the fantastical. The book opens with a ranger party blundering into some viscous undead; the recon team fares badly in the encounter but I wouldn't exaclty say they "died." The book ends with a the rebirth of dragons, awe-inspiring creatures who used to support an entire ruling family but hadn't been seen for more than a hundred years.

But the fantasy element is the pinch of seasoning to the recipe that cooks up these books. The real driving force is strong character development. The individuals in the books have realistic motivations, most of them political. More importantly, they do the unexpected and they make mistakes. And they die. Martin painstakingly develops characters and then unceremoniously kills them off. It's shocking to be sure, but so rare these day in fantasy, it's the literary equivalent of traveling through a desert, throat wracked with thirst, and then stumbling upon an oasis. There's just something thrilling in the notion that any character may die at any time. Death is only a chapter away, even for a main character.

I don't know how Martin manages to weave so many character, plots, and subplots together in such a cohesive, entertaining way. But he does. As a result, he fashioned a page-turner. If you're a fan of fantasy, you've probably already read him. If you haven't, I highly recommend it. And if you're not a fantasy fan, this is probably the best vehicle for starting.

I'll end with a plea to Martin himself: please don't kill off Tyrion.