A Song of Ice and Fire

The trouble with today’s fantasy is that they become so long and convoluted that it makes it nigh impossible to summarize what the story is actually about.  George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire is such a fantasy series, but I’m going to try to anyway.

The first three books (A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, and A Storm of Swords) begins and ends with the drama of two noble families, the Stark’s and the Lannister’s, and mostly about the children of these families, mainly with how the Lannister’s ruin the Stark’s lives in their pursuit to rule the kingdom.

That is where most of the drama lies in all three books and yet that’s nowhere near enough.  Because one continent over, there is a girl named Daenerys, the true heir to the Westeros kingdom that the Stark’s and Lannister’s are fighting over.  In a way, Song of Ice and Fire is about watching this girl learn to become a woman and a queen worthy of taking her throne.  This is a story with little connection, if any, to the Stark’s and Lannister’s.  In fact, through the whole series, they never meet, and yet this is such a crucial part of what this series is.

But even that doesn’t cover Martin’s series.  Unrelated or rather untouched by either drama just described is the Wall.  John Snow, a bastard child in the Stark line, joins an army to guard the wall in the North, where wild men and mythical monsters are rising to destroy Westeros.  John Snow and his small and diminishing army are all that stands between the enemy from destroying the Westeros kingdom so caught up in their own intrigues.  And they must fight alone because nobody else knows or believes the very real danger that they are in.

That is hardly the whole story.  There are several crucial subplots but they all serve these three main threads in one way or another.

I want to talk about these books in some depth, so be warned, I do spoilers.  A lot of them so if that matters, don’t read the rest of this post.  If you don’t care, enjoy.

The Characters

When I first started this series, every fan that saw me with those books said, “Don’t get attached to anyone.  Martin throws characters away.”  I laughed.  Being a Lost fan, my heart is already stone and I anticipate getting my heart broken.  It’s a wonderful masochistic impulse in my reading pleasure.  And truth is, Martin is nowhere near as brutal as they claim.  Lots of people die and several of them in horrible ways, but more are hanging on than I’d hoped.  In fact, Martin is kind of a tease.  Side characters are expendable.  If you aren’t given a viewpoint at some point, your life isn’t valued.

So I want to just focus on the viewpoint characters, how they died and what I expect from the living ones.

Bran Stark: age 7 when the books start, he is crippled within the first fifty pages for discovering the Lannister’s darkest secret.  I suspect he will last through the end, merely for plot reasons.  His being the only one learning how to be a skinchanger tells me that this is going to play an important role in the final battle, either against the Winter Monsters or in unifying the Westeros Kingdom.  Not sure on that yet.

Arya Stark: age 9 at the start and easily my favorite character.  I hope she makes it to the end and it would be foolish to kill her off.  She is the most proactive character of anybody.  She’s a captive about the same amount of time as her sister but she refuses to take any of it lying down.  She is constantly escaping (granted, from one bad place to another, but she is living in an increasingly chaotic place so that’s not her fault.  The deck is stacked against her.)  If she dies before getting to see John Snow again, I’ll be pissed.  Favorite moment: when she got her sword Needle back.  That was a brilliant moment.  Oh, and she has to meet up with Nymeria and the wolfpack before the end.  That will be such a cool moment.

Sansa Stark: age 11 at the start and my least favorite of the Stark children.  Her arc is interesting enough; hers is a definite coming-of-age tale, where having her songs and castles was the most important thing to having to seeing the world for as it is strikes a chord.  Also, she does have a tendency to be at the center of all the political intrigues, mostly for ill but that’s how it goes.  My problem with her is she’s so darn passive.  She constantly just lets things happen to her.  Never once does she have an idea of her own or make plans to improve things herself.  It makes her such an effective tool for whoever has captured her at the moment (usually the Lannister family, but if you don’t think Peter Baelish is her captor despite the perks he hands her, you’re not paying attention.)  I think she’ll stay alive until we know the full extent of Littlefinger’s plans and then she can be thrown away.  I won’t shed any tears.

Jon Snow: age 15, the half-brother to the rest of the Stark children and Ned Stark’s only bastard son.  He is the one that deserves to rule Winterfell, the Stark’s home, and the one who never could.  Considering how set apart his story is from the rest, I honestly don’t believe he will be killed until the rest of Westeros finds out what’s going on up North.  At least, I hope so.  As I said, if he or Arya dies before they meet up at least once, I’ll be so angry.  That’s one of those promises I expect to be fulfilled before the end of the series.

Catelyn Stark: the mother of the Stark children and I was never more happy to see a character die.  She’s a loyal mother but I could never stand her after the abuse she heaped on Jon Snow.  I understand she was hurt that her husband cheated on her at the beginning of their marriage and Jon Snow is a constant reminder of that betrayal, but the punishment and distrust she had for him was uncalled for, especially considering how much he constantly showed his love and protection for his half-siblings.  She was simply an angry witch.  And… for all her struggles to save her family, she had a way of making things worse.  Impulsive and never repentant describes her best, from the mishandling of Tyrion to the release of Jaime, it’s no wonder to me that her oldest son stopped listening to her by the end, even when she actually made a good point.  I’d have ignored her to the same way I’d avoid the boy who cried wolf.  And jumping to the fourth book (A Feast for Crows) she’s just complicating things again as an undead with her one-track, selfish stupidity.

Eddard “Ned” Stark: Easily the most tragic death.  The scene where he’s beheaded is powerful.  It’s one of those moments that set the tone for the rest of the series: Joffrey’s insatiable cruelty, Cersei’s lack of control, Sansa’s awakening to how things are, Arya’s thirst for revenge, and the tumult that came over the kingdoms.  The wars that take place in the sequels started with this moment.  But it also raises a question of principle: his honor mattered to him more than anything.  The situation was that after the king’s death, Ned found that the heir to the throne was the king’s older brother and not the king’s son, Joffrey.  But Joffrey seized control of the castle, imprisoned Ned and called him a traitor.  If Ned admitted to treason (even though he wasn’t guilty), he was promised to be exiled instead of executed.  Ned refused at first until his daughter, Sansa, was threatened with death (unbeknownst to her, of course, because she’s not smart.)  Ned decides to admit to treason, but of course, Joffrey decides to have him beheaded anyway and Sansa is really no safer now than she was before.  In fact, she’s left in an even worse position.  Should he have still stood to his first testimony, even though he knew that road led to death while the other, he was counting on Joffrey to fulfill his promise?  He died either way, but in this case, he died with a lie on his lips.  Was it still honorable because he did it to save his daughter or was should he have continued his life of honesty and affirm that example for his children to remember him by?  Bear in mind that testimonies sealed with blood are the most powerful and last beyond time.

Samwell: Jon Snow’s friend and an admitted coward.  He’ll live long enough to prove his bravery to himself.  In fact, I think he’ll be a major force in getting Westeros to lift its head to the threat in the north.  But then, he may just get caught in the middle of their problems.  Hard to say.

Davos: King Stannis’s most loyal man, and honestly, is made out of the same stuff as Ned Stark.  He’ll serve his king no matter what the cost to himself or family and he has time and again.  Though a former smuggler, he keeps his word better than any of the born nobles.

Tyrion Lannister: a dwarf and easily one of my favorites, right up there with Arya Stark.  Serves his family despite how much they abuse him and betray them, but he’s also intelligent and proactive.  He gets captured a lot but he also gets himself out of that situation a lot and with style.  For a time, he’s the one that runs the kingdom and he did it brilliantly.  More than any other character, he want him to have a break and I know that that will never happen.  But it’s all right.  I expect him to come out on top in the end; whether he lives or dies, he will be the one to succeed with the most style.  And funny enough, despite their sides of the war, he may be the best friend that the Stark’s have.

Jaime Lannister: proof of how much of a tease Martin is.  The twin brother to Cersei Lannister and Tyrion’s older brother, he has almost died so many times and in the second book, I was totally led to expect that he had been killed.  It’s easy to hate the guy.  He is the one that cripples Bran at the start of the series and is constantly considered the least trustworthy man by the whole kingdom.  Yet, by the third book when we finally get in his head, he’s proved to be the most fascinating of the whole bunch.  He has charm, he has determination, and he was at the center of most of the past events that were hinted at for the first couple of books and it’s cool to see what really happened when he was there (this is a subject I’ll talk about later.)  But I’m also seeing a very interesting arc; he starts out as an oathbreaker and rogue, but now that he’s a major player, you can see the desires he has to keep his promises and be the kind of knight he admired in his youth, noble and good.  It will be fascinating to see how he tempers his anger and whether he will rise above his sordid past.  I want to see him become a good guy and earn the title of “hero.”

Daenerys: She is the only one I am positive will not die.  If she does, the whole series is crap.

Martin & Tolkien

Since this series, Martin has been called the American Tolkien.  I can see why that would be but Martin is trying something different than what Tolkien did, and I’ll pick on two of the major things I see: the World Disaster and the Mythology.

World Disaster: In The Lord of the Rings, Sauron has come into the world and if he gets a hold of his magic ring, it’s game over.  Every major character knows what’s on the table; they have to destroy the ring and it all goes away.  The Fellowship gets distracted from the main goal but the nobody is confused as to what the real danger is: Sauron will destroy everything if he’s not stopped.  Everything they do is to beat the Big Bad Eyeball.

A Song of Ice and Fire has just as looming a threat: winter is coming and bringing with it monsters of legend.  The dead are coming to life and ancient evil is rising to crush the rest of Westeros.  Jon Snow and Samwell are the only viewpoint characters who know anything about it.  No one else has any idea what’s going on.  Davos finally does and Tyrion had an inkling, but to their credit, Davos couldn’t read but when he learned and had the information on hand, he did something about it.  And Tyrion had no reason to trust his messenger (bad decision on the man who sent that schmuck.)  But as far as the World Disaster is concerned, it takes a back seat to everything else.  What drives Martin’s series isn’t the global threat, but the present, short-term troubles with their greeds, lusts, envies, and other such trials.  And isn’t that so true to life?  How often as a world do we ever notice and combine ourselves against a great evil?  World War II is the most recent event I can think of and that’s been seventy years.  (I wanted to say 9/11, but the world’s attention was only caught for so long and nobody’s been united on anything regarding that or whatever else since then.)

Mythology: This is the most fascinating to me.  Tolkien had a rich mythology in his epic.  He spent decades on it and parts of it shine through like gold throughout his story.  It comes out in songs, in legends, in the ancient ruins and designs they come across, ancient battlegrounds, centuries-old cities, genealogies, language, and so on.  You’ll know a little bit of everything that took place three thousand years before the events of this book and even further back in time.  But unless you go through the appendices, you’ll have no idea what happened ten years prior to the start of the book.  Maybe some details as to who lived where and who so-and-so’s parent was.  But for the most part, immediate history is overlooked compared to the great events that took place.

With Martin, it’s nearly the opposite.  There are a few cool legends dating back millennia, but they aren’t really dwelled on.  Most of them are told fairy-tale format, and Bran Stark is usually the recipient of these tales, which may be true or not.  Much of the details of their past history is fragmentary at best.  But the events that happened twenty years prior… that gets so much attention.

Which I feel is only natural.  After all, aren’t the children always more interested in what happened to their parents than they are about their ancient ancestors?  Part of that may be because we can actually talk to those people while they’re still alive and hear how it was from their mouths, while with the great-great-greats, if they actually kept a journal, there are rarely enough details about what happened.  The other part is that it’s much easier to see how the last generation’s actions affect you today rather than what those geezers did four thousand years ago.  You’re not always one hundred percent sure that these folks even existed.

And it helps that in this series, the events from twenty years or so before is fascinating.  The usurpation of the Iron Throne is an amazing backstory and really shows who these people are and why they do the things they do.  Occasionally, I’m more interested in that backstory than I am in the present events.

A Feast for Crows

I have to make a few comments on this fourth book separate from the first three.  It shows both the strength of Martin’s talent and a concern I have for the series as a whole.  I made a character list of the major viewpoints in the series… most of them do not show up in this book.  In this book, Martin casts most of them to the side in favor of what were side characters.  This book belongs to the Lannister’s as much as the last three belonged to the Stark’s; this is where Jaime shines, we finally get in Cersei’s and discover just how ineffectual she is (as well as self-destructive), and Brienne who seeks to save the Stark children and restore Jaime’s honor is quickly becoming my favorite out of all the characters.  She has the same tenaciousness of Arya and Tyrion, the nobility of Eddard Stark, and the absence of hatred so prevalent in much of the cast.  And while she also seems to have the brains of Sansa Stark, that actually makes me like her more.  She’s not smart but she is practical, she does the right thing and she never gives up.  I hope she actually does make it to the ending of the series.

I haven’t read the latest book yet, so others may already know the answer to this, but at the end of the book, it seems like Brienne was about to die and there was no way out of it.  Still, she wasn’t shown to have died, the book ended just before she croaked.  This is why Martin is a tease because this is not the first time he’s done this.  I am convinced she somehow lived through that.  But we’ll see.

The concern I have is that there is not really a unifying plot anymore.  The reason the first three work as a trilogy alone is because there were a few threads binding them together.  First was the letter suggesting that the Lannister’s had killed one of the Catelyn’s relatives; then there was the unknown assassin that tried to kill Bran after he was pushed out the window.  These were two mysteries that began in the first book and weren’t revealed until the end of the third.  These two things, although so small in comparison to the great wars and intrigues, bound all the threads together so nicely and revealed much about the deeper evil going on in the kingdom by the end.  It was brilliant at how well it worked.

There isn’t any similar such mystery in this book.  A lot of this book feels more like the aftermath of what went on before, like they’re trying to pick up the pieces.  But I’m hoping for more intrigue, some mystery that brings them all together in fascinating and haunting ways.  Not much of that has appeared yet and that makes me wonder how Martin expects to keep the value up over another three such long books.

A Couple Cautions

This series is not for children.  First is the violence; this doesn’t get mentioned a whole lot because in fantasy, I think people just expect a couple of folks to get beheaded before the “happily ever after.”  This series goes to the extreme on the cruelty, which is fair enough.  It’s a brutal society.  Still, despite my calloused heart, there were a couple scenes that shook me, one being the Dragon Prince’s death and the other a mutilation of a slave-soldier as a demonstration to Daenerys in the third book.  And the books are full of crazy, cruel things like that all throughout.

Maybe I’m wasting my breath there, though, because it’s never the violence that turns folks off of this series.  It’s the sex, of which there is plenty and not all of it offstage.

Now, I’m a prude (as I’ve been told several times this year) and I completely understand and support anybody who’ll refuse to read the books on this issue.  But I still liked them, and I’m even of the opinion that these books wouldn’t work without the sex.  I’ll have to explain this with T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, which A Song of Ice and Fire has more similarities towards than The Lord of the Rings.

Once and Future King is about the life and death of King Arthur Pendragon and his Camelot.  We all know many of the adventures that take place, from the Sword in the Stone, forming the Round Table, the quest for the Holy Grail, et cetera.  But that isn’t the heart of the drama.  There are two sexual situations presented in Once and Future King that drive the story even more than the wars do; the first is Arthur’s affair with his half-sister Morgause and the second is Lancelot and Guenevere.

It’s Arthur’s incest that brings Mordred into the world, the man responsible for leading the final war that kills Arthur.  But you can make the argument that it’s Lancelot and Guenevere’s adultery that really destroyed everything that Camelot stood for.  The tragedy would never have worked half as well without these being part of the story.

In much the same way, A Song of Ice and Fire would not be half as powerful without the sex.  It’s Jaime and Cersei’s incestuous affair that is at the heart of all the troubles in the Westeros kingdoms and their feud with the Stark’s.  Cersei was married to the king but all her children were from Jaime, unknown to the king or their children.  It was Bran Stark’s discovering their love affair that caused him to be crippled, thus the beginning of the feud.  And if Ned Stark hadn’t done the research and discovered that Cersei’s children were not the king’s, there never would have been a dispute over the throne, thus avoiding all the bloodshed that later happened.

It’s far from the only affair taking place, although it is the one that drives most of the story.  It reveals a lot about their characters, who they are as people.  Turns out, Cersei is quite the slut, and her self-destructiveness was revealed long before she gained control of the kingdom just by the company she brought to her bed.  Tyrion’s whore shows a lot about his personal pain more exquisitely than it could have in any other way.  And Daenerys’s relationship with her husband showed a lot about her growth and being able to fill the role of a queen before his death.

It’s not just the sex that’s interesting, though.  Some of the actions to avoid it are just as cool.  Sansa may be a frustrating character but I think her being able to keep her virginity through the whole series up to now shows much about her standards.  That is one fight and victory she can claim as her own, despite all the cards being stacked against her.

I’m not happy about all of it, though.  I am so annoyed with everybody on the Night’s Watch.  This is a group of people that make several oaths and one of them is celibacy.  Now, at this point in the series, most of the Night’s Watch is composed of hardened criminals some fooling around is often overlooked, but there are a few honorable souls, like Jon Snow and Samwell, that joined on honorable terms because it was the right thing to do.  I’m so irritated that neither of them have kept that oath.  Jon Snow, I can understand, because he was deep undercover and had been commanded to break his oaths by his commander for the infiltration.  He gets somewhat of a pass.  But Sam?  I just wanted one to actually take that oath seriously.  Now, though, I don’t even care.  The ice creatures can snuff all those wretches defending the wall because I think they’re all weaklings.

I have other irritations, but none worth mentioning here.

Last Remarks

That’s about it.  Longest post I’ve put up to date and I don’t expect to write any bigger.  Point is, I haven’t been so entertained by an epic fantasy series in a while, although as stated above, I won’t be recommending it to all of my friends, or I will recommend with serious cautions.  Not everybody separates content from intent, and sometimes no matter the intent of a piece, not everybody wants to deal with the content.

I’ll likely have another post when I get around to A Dance with Dragons, but I’m going to take a break for a few weeks to reenergize.  Christmas is coming and there are other things I want to focus on for now.  I do have to mention that writing these posts at least one week before I publish them is really starting to pay off big dividends.  Man, you think I would have caught onto the benefits of preparation before now.