(Originally posted 30 April 2014 at trenchkamen.livejournal.com.) Note: This is well before the Game of Thrones TV show on HBO concluded, so my optimism for the show is still evident. I still maintain the episodes based on the novels were excellent. Oddly, it is eleven years on and the last book published has been book 5, still.)
The ornery part of me resisted reading this series because it seemed like mediocre pulp, and after a lifetime as a fantasy reader I was quite full on pseudo-Medieval Eurocentric high fantasy. But the show was starting on HBO and I hate watching things before I’ve read the book (if the book came first).
ASOIAF is high fantasy pulp–but it relishes what it is and does it well. You will find no more, and no less, then political intrigue, war, fealty, chivalry, etc. And it’s not overly self-aware or genre-aware in the sense that it has to lampoon itself from the outset. Lately media has felt a need to poke at the clichés within itself in a way that is often handled clumsily and seems more like lampshading than satire. In that sense I don’t know if ASOIAF is pre-post-modern or post-post-modern, and damn that sounded so much less pretentious in my head, but it made sense when I was laying in bed. You don’t get the sense that the creator is rubbing the back of his head and laughing nervously, waiting for somebody to call him cliché, because in this generation, the worst thing an artist can be is cliché without being aware of it.
The point is this is a confident series–it never apologizes for what it is. And despite (or perhaps because of) my own insecure and cynical tendencies, I respect that.
Oddly enough, I call it high fantasy, but the ‘fantastic’ elements (magic, dragons, etc) are used sparingly and, for the first part of the saga, are background if anything. Most of the characters have no access to this power and regard it rationally–myth until proven otherwise. Truly, the driving force in these stories is human action.
The narrative feels abrupt and disjointed, and I mean that in a good way. I am pleasantly surprised when a book still manages to surprise me. You truly get the feeling that the author is making this up as he goes along–and, again, I mean that in the best possible way. It rambles and its momentum is halted awkwardly, but that is what happens in Real Life. In some places, the momentum is building and surging toward an inevitable, and cathartic, confrontation or crisis point, but it crashes on the whim of one man with a knife or a crossbow. So many of the deaths are inglorious. Narrative threads are abandoned and plots crash and burn, and in this sense, it works so well. The sense of emptiness is, indeed, very real. Martin is willing to be cruel to his characters in the truest sense–not that they die gloriously, but that they die pointlessly, out of all proportion with their greatness and ambitions. Few authors are able to do this. And few authors can arrest their own momentum, like that. It’s deeply uncomfortable.This means that when things do pull off, when people do survive, it is all the more shocking and exhilarating.
Westeros sucks. It’s violent, dirty, brutal, misogynist, feudal, patriarchial, deeply cruel. Common folk just trying to live their lives are wiped out, raped, (graphically) tortured, etc, in the wake of highborn fighting for power. Slavery is an open and entrenched institution in other parts of the world. There has been considerable argument over whether or not the author’s rendering of a deeply misogynist world reflects his own misogyny, or an unflinching reality, and that is a whole other essay (that others have tackled, on both sides). My university Japanese literature professor would have been appalled to hear people speculate on the author’s intentions, as he is a firm subscriber to the theory that the Author is Dead, but whether or not you subscribe to that theory, evaluation of authorial biases is a pervasive form of criticism lately.
A Feast for Crows is, by far, the weakest book in the series. And that’s sad because I really like crows. Seriously, though, I understand Martin’s reasoning for dividing books 4 and 5 the way he did, to keep the narratives of each character bundled together coherently, and while the characters were bundled geographically the book 4 cohort had a more boring go of it than the first-half-of-book 5-cohort. That’s not to say book 4 was boring, but the most boring in the series. It’s a relative evaluation. It is also the most rambly. I wonder if Martin’s editors were more sparing with the red ink in his later books, given his success; they are not as tight as A Game of Thrones (book 1), which crackled along briskly, and which I did not put down given the chance. In the second half of book 5, the storylines merge again and the pace picks up.
A lot has already been said about the various problematic aspects of the series, by people far more familiar with the series than I, so I won’t bother to detail it here. If you have several hours you want to evaporate, read the comment section on any commentary on white saviors or feminism in ASOIAF. The TV show’s visual emphasis on Daenerys’s bleach-white hair and porcelain skin, as contrasts with the dark skin of the peoples of the Free Cities, did not help this. While one can argue it was purely an aesthetic decision (I doubt it was, in the subconscious of the directors), it was an unfortunate one. But Martin does address that she wasn’t able to march through these cities and declare slavery ‘over’ (like declaring racism over, I guess), and then leave them to prosper. When her occupying army leaves, infighting immediately follows and the cities are headed by a parcel of new bosses, same as the old bosses. Former slaves take revenge on the families of former slave owners, misdirecting revenge so the people most effected were not the ones doing wrong in the first place. I think one of Daenerys’s decisions (if you know, you know) was deeply unjust, as it was punishing a largely innocent cohort to get back at their loved ones for, what was, admittedly, abhorrent cruelty to slaves. But that’s really neither here nor there, as it is a personal disagreement between the Mother of Dragons and myself, and hasn’t much to do with reviewing the integrity of the book.
Overall, I would say, the stories present a high-quality version of precisely what is advertised on the tin. It’s epic political drama. If you don’t like this genre, it isn’t going to change your mind. It doesn’t subvert tropes; it glorifies them, polishes them up to the best versions of themselves. If you have an incest/rape/violence trigger or squick, tread not into Westeros. These things exist and they aren’t spoken of euphemistically. Much like Stephen King novels, these books aren’t digested slowly; you read them briskly and keep being tugged along. There isn’t much here for meditation or contemplation. Which is fine; Martin is good at that style. These are pot-boilers in the best tradition, pulp fiction that couldn’t be called lit-ra-ture and wouldn’t want to be. They’re just good books.