Long ago it was the cool to read George R.R. Martin’s series “A Song of Ice and Fire”. Later, but still a while back it became a big thing when HBO adapted it to a TV show called “Game of Thrones”.

All this time I missed out on it, books and TV show alike, because I don’t usually delve into unfinished series, and I don’t like being part of the herd that does “the popular thing”.

But it isn’t popular any more, is it? The TV show eclipsed the books, overtook them, then crashed and burned. The fans have dispersed, the hype has dimmed and turned into a distant memory. The TV-producers botched it.

Late to the party

I already played in an RPG campaign set within Aegon’s conquest; a unique experience, to ride with an army together with comrades who all know how this is *supposed* to turn out, while I alone put one foot before the other going in with nothing but a goal: Unite the Seven Kingdoms. After that, I did read “The Hedge Knight”, which is set in the same world, only at a different point in time.

A Song of Ice and Fire

Now I finally went ahead and read it: The Song of Ice and Fire. And even though I am probably the last person on earth to go in, I will try to avoid too egregious spoilers.

Everyone knows the beginning: A Lord in the North, a family man, lives a good life with a good family. Honest to a fault, with just one blemish on his white west: a bastard son – but this man, Lord Stark, makes good on that misstep by raising the boy almost like a legitimate one, to his wife’s chagrin. So there we have the core of a classic story: an absolutely likable hero with a nice family, with a world of trouble awaiting them.

Who could not relate to that? A good, honest guy, not infallible, but trying to do his best. And we see that the Fates like our good northern family: On an excursion they discover a litter of direwolf pups, orphaned, and just as many as the Starks have kids. What a great omen! Or is it?

Well, as in every story, the happy life in the snow is about to end, because the King comes to visit. The King is an old friend of our family man, but he comes with a pretty shitty job offer: “Become my right hand man, because the guy who did the job until now died mysteriously.”
How attractive, right?

It has to be said, Ned Stark is not the sharpest tool in the shed, but even he sees that this is going to be a bad deal. However, friendship is magic. And when the King plays the friend card, he damage the trust between them, but succeeds in forcing Mr. Honour to do his bidding and take the job.

Bad Mistake

Things go awry right then and there. The family suffers, his bright young son falls off a tower, a fairytale-dreamer daughter gets betrothed to a spoiled piece of shit prince, and everyone goes off in a different direction.

Ned Stark takes a couple of wrong turns, makes some really bad decisions, and down go he, his family, and the whole big realm: from a prosperous heavyweight in the global political landscape to a bloody and burning civil war plagued by escalating violence, runaway debt, rapidly multiplying gangs of brigands, and a mounting wave of famine about to come down on the suffering commoners like a ton of bricks.

It really does not take long to drive this particular car into a ditch, and we meet a cast of dozens of protagonists on various sides in the ensuing “War of the Five Kings” and its aftermath.

But even this war is overshadowed at every turn by the dark past, wars and uprisings that came before: the King himself grabbed the crown in a coup, aided by Eddard Stark and Tywin Lannister, two heavyweights among the factions. Yet now in the new war the Starks and Lannisters find themselves on different sides, fighting and bleeding each other, while all the other factions that they have slighted back when they were friends are now coming out of the woodwork sharpening their knives, ready to get satisfaction.

Worldbuilding and Characters

GRRM, or Georg R. R. Martin, has earned every praise for this opus: he does a splendid job at world building and character portrayals. His world is living and breathing, and it looks back on a long and complex history. There are old natives and invasions in the past, a war of unification that is long gone but not forgotten. There are religious factions and ruins of fallen Empires of old.

This Westeros, despite its over-the-top Uber-Hadrian’s-Wall, Dragons and Magic, is believable: The wealth of detail, especially the wealth of seemingly random and unimportant detail, is astounding. Because yes, life is complex, and full of random details, and so it stands to reason that a fantasy world, too, should have all those small details underneath the broad strokes. Not only kings and princes, but also farmers and mummers and little taverns with unknown nobodies, until suddenly one detail or some nobody becomes important.

The characters fighting for money, power, revenge or justice in this land are rich tapestries of histories, duties and emotions. They make mistakes and earn triumphs, they do their best or their worst, and foremost: they feel like real people.

Martin really has a strong gift to bring a setting to life, and to let us get to know these people. He does not go out of his way to let us know all their hopes, dreams, and regrets, but we feel them: they have them, and they colour their actions.

Character Development

Closely tied to that is GRRM’s capacity of taking the reader on a journey with these characters: a journey of change. One could expect that such a vast cast of people is hard to keep track of, so a natural expectation would be that they remain relatively static to personify one trait or another. Stark: Honour, Lannister: Shrewdness, Cersei: Asshole, Arya: Cool Cat (hidden hint).

But that is not the case: These characters in all their diverse multitude evolve. Some change very strongly – in one case an arrogant piece of seemingly un-salvageable shit becomes quite a likeable person worth rooting for after an important loss; many others “grow up” in one way or another; two slowly slip into madness, one faster, one slower… and it is portrayed quite beautifully by staying in their POV, so it is palpable, if unaddressed, in one case, and quite subtly done in the other.

I shudder to think of the database GRRM must have to work with, because without automated help it can’t be humanely possible to keep that many parts of the puzzle organised.

One stunning element of this is that looking back to the beginning, much of the later development sees already developed roots back in the beginning. Keeping these people and their timelines and interactions straight and believable must take a massive amount of invisible background work.

Brutality

Over the course of the TV show the story has collected a reputation for brutality, and of random character deaths.

Yes, it is quite brutal, but not to an unexpected degree. Yes, characters die, but I cannot agree that these deaths come entirely unexpected: they tend to die when they go into danger, or when they do something foolish, and they tend to get foreshadowed quite a bit. Many of those who meet with trouble go there with full knowledge that they are taking a risk.

Of course there is one character in the story who is so abjectly evil that I’d expect even the devil would hesitate to take him. Still it bears notice that his excesses are not discribed in minute detail. The worst tends to happen off-screen, so the Lion’s (heh, heh, yes, that’s a hint too) share of the actual detail of cruelty that gets bolted (another one) on GRRM is not actually on the pages, but in the minds of those who are complaining.

Quotability

It is no accident that certain terms and phrases have made it into the public verbiage: Winter Is Coming… The North Remembers… A Lannister Pays His Debts… You Know Nothing, Jon Snow…

And more worthy quotes:

“A ruler who hides behind paid executioners soon forgets what death is”

“A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge”

“To lead men you must know them” / “A good lord must know his men”

“When your enemies defy you, you must serve them steel and fire. When they go to their knees, however, you must help them back to their feet. Elsewise no man will ever bend the knee to you.”

“Summer friends will melt away like summer snows, but winter friends are friends forever”

Unfinished Business

• A Game of Thrones
• A Clash of Kings
• A Storm of Swords
• A Feast for Crows
• A Dance with Dragons

….

The tale is very much unfinished. At the point where book 5 cuts out and the reader is left hanging like a short-term acquaintance of Lady Stoneheart’s the state of play is quite obviously two books from completion at the very least.

The abrupt end leaves scores of plot lines dangling in the open, so it is no surprise that fans are pestering good old GRRM to keep writing the way they do.

Will he?

I used to think that he had no idea how to finish that mess himself, so he just stopped and hoped everyone would forget or that the TV show would do the job for him.

But I think that no longer:

He is not a pantser who writes as the fancy takes him; the degree of complexity of the world and the web of interconnections, the foreshadowings and repeated themes, all of that underscores that he has a plan, otherwise he’d never have gotten this far. Plus, at the point where the books end the story is already in various key points very different from what I get told happens in the series.

Clearly based on the same general idea, the TV show and the books are yet two different tales, and will would end quite differently if he’d manage to write the missing books.

I won’t place any bets though: we will see when we see.

Recommendation

Unfinished as it is, though, I can only recommend the read. It is inspired and inspiring, an outstanding work worth the attention.

It is not perfection: there are some turns of phrases that pop up with rising frequency and get oddly put in the mouth of different people, and at some points it is doubtful if we are following the train of thought of the character or the author, when a thought or two stand out as a break, or at least twist, of character in some small manner.

And yet, it is an epic tale that few have the strength to pull off.

Do read it.