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published 1996; hardback 1996, Spectra
George R.R. Martin's novel, A Game of Thrones while ambitious, complex, and promising, suffers from the same pressing internal conflict as its author's name: impressive at first glance, and sick with terminal bloat by the second. It's a pity, because it is well-written; Martin has good eyes and ears; his dialogue and description couldn't be better. Unnecessary background information is confined to the appendices and the reader is flung headlong into unstoppable action. The plot itself gives us quite a ride.
Unfortunately, we've met all these people once before. Honest. How many people can name a famous incestuous throne-usurping genocidal couple in a famous work of fantasy literature? I can, without even straining. And of course there's the bastard son who's so much more like his sire than any of the trueborn brats, and et cetera all the way down to the noble barbarian who seems rough and tough but turns out to be the thirteen-year-old girl's wet dream. Ahem. A story this immensely detailed can be forgiven many errors, but flaws in characterization inevitably become fatal. It's a pity because Martin has clearly made an effort to lift his characters up out of the cardboard; for example Catelyn Lady Stark is the paragon of mothers and perhaps close to the wifely ideal, yet she is allowed to hate her husband's bastard with vehement passion though he is a blameless youth. Hints are given that Catelyn has used her position to favor her own family; though she is loyal, she is a schemer equal to (actually far superior to) the evil Cersei.
Other characters, like Cersei herself, fall woefully short: how many women with enough guile to go to bed with a twin brother in the middle of a visit to somebody else's fortress would be so undone by a husband's murmuring the name of a (safely dead) beloved? Cersei's actions and words make less sense than those of a vaudeville villain, and seem to serve much of the same purpose. She's the nasty, incestuous, lusty, power-struck woman who's been scheming to fill a power structure with her (admittedly competent) relatives. Therefore she is evil. End of story. (Gods below, how I wish Martin had made her the heroine.)
Now let's go back to history for a moment. Can you name one power-struck, incredibly vain woman who, also accused and possibly guilty of incest, watched as the kingdom suffered at the hands of an ailing neglectful king? I can name two who became warrior queens and rulers in their own right; both were vilified and castigated by the Church of their own time. Were they guilty? Who cares. They were successful. They were good guardians of the land. And neither one managed to commit the sin of becoming a bore.
That's right: Martin's villains are boring. His heroes are standard but not too bad, but his villains are deadly dull, mindlessly bad, and self-obsessed to the point of idiocy. Oh, sure, there's that bad plague of ghouls or whatever up north, but that's just nameless faceless dread which will probably take another thousand pages to fully develop. Perhaps it will abate when the (yawn) Rightful Leader Ascends the Throne.
The pity of it is that this could have been a very good book if it had been written more tightly to keep all the small subplots from escaping. The flaws of characterization are best camouflaged by a swiftly-moving plot, not by swift jumping from story segment to story segment in the middle of brisk action. It's distracting. It forces the reader to say WHO? Oh, yes, that stupid sycophant brother. What's he saying? Oh, yeah. More of the same. Ah, let's just flip on to see who gets to deflower that babbling princess. It's not like television, where a three-second cut is essential to holding audience interest. The story of Daenerys Stormborn was sickly riveting. Eddard's troubles were horrible and insurmountable. Jon's success up at the Wall was heartening. Stripped into small chunks and pieced together, the individual stories lost much of their initial impact. The characters aren't sufficient to mortar the stories together, and that's where the rot sets in. And though A Game of Thrones is a pleasant read, it wasn't particularly memorable. I expected better content from an author who demonstrates such command of style.
Review by Becky Parkhurst
Reviewed November 14, 1996
ISBN 0-553-10354-7
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