Over the past week and a half or so I’ve been reading George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, prompted equally by HBO’s greenlighting of a series based on the books and by all the enthusiastic comments about them here on the blog. I’m done with A Game of Thrones (the first volume, which lends its name to the HBO series) and about a third of the way into book two, A Clash of Kings. There’s a little scene in the latter I just loved, and it gives me a chance to talk about a bunch of things I’m really enjoying about the series. SPOILER WARNING duly issued, though I don’t give away a whole lot of potentially enjoyment-lessening stuff, I don’t think.
Anyway, way down South in the capital city of King’s Landing, the book’s anti-hero, an aristocratic little person named Tyrion Lannister who is currently helping to run the kingdom, has his hands full. In addition to helping gird his war-torn kingdom against several major pretenders to the throne and their armies, he’s also navigating the treacherous, occasionally murderous politics of the high-ranking officials within the city itself. He’s got a secret girlfriend, he’s trying to solve a murder mystery for which he himself was once framed, his love-hate relationship with his sister the Queen could go permanently sour at any point, the peasants are revolting (rimshot!), and so on and so forth. For these reasons, and because the messenger in question is a right dickhead, he blows off an emissary from the Wall that guards the farthest border of the kingdom hundreds of miles to the North, and decides to see the severed hand the man has brought along with him (for reasons Tyrion doesn’t even bother to learn) another day. Maybe.
What we know and Tyrion doesn’t is that the last time we saw the severed hand, it was still moving of its own accord. And shortly before that, it was attached to a dead man, who’d risen in the middle of the night to slaughter those he once called his brothers in the Night’s Watch along the Wall.
What makes this such an evocative, powerful little moment? Quite a few things. For starters, the fantasy element in these nominally fantasy books has been minimal. In A Game of Thrones, it’s present in the prologue, then doesn’t reappear until the final few chapters. But that prologue is our first glimpse of the Others (!), a supernatural menace lurking in the wilderness beyond the Wall that turn their victims into undead soldiers for their cause, and so on and so forth. Kind of a Tombs of the Blind Dead deal, if you will. Since this is the very first chapter in a proposed seven-book series, we can assume (and indeed, only 1 1/3 books into the series, that’s all I myself can do) that this will be the crux of the whole affair. But when tipped off to this potentially apocalyptic development, Tyrion Lannister shrugs it off without even realizing the import of what he’s heard. I love the idea of the world’s most important piece of information being lost in the shuffle. It’s like the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, only if the Ark was secretly multiplying and readying the destruction of civilization there in that warehouse.
So that’s the main thing I dig about it so much. But it also speaks to some of the books’ unique strengths. For example, so much of what happens in them hinges on the personal relationships between the characters, and the way old grudges or old friendships cloud judgement and lead to poor decisions. In this case, the Night’s Watch sent as messenger Ser Alliser Thorne, a man Tyrion had come to dislike during his own visit to the Wall months ago. Tyrion has no problem letting the asshole cool his jets for a few days — the more insulted he gets by the delay, the better, in fact. This despite the fact that Tyrion has been shown to be not just one of the shrewdest characters in the book, but also, despite the crimes of his loathsome family, one of the fairest and most interested in administering justice and preserving the kingdom and its people. What’s more, during his visit to the Wall he took a genuine interest in the fate of the Night’s Watch and promised he’d do what he could to persuade his family to support their mission. But even so, he still can’t help but give the brush-off to a dude who picked on him — and who could blame him?
Another strength: Martin doesn’t hesitate to show that even when a decision is made wisely and justly, with good intentions, and even with good results, that doesn’t mean it can’t still be a disaster in some unforeseen fashion. In this case, it really was a good thing for the head of the Night’s Watch, the Old Bear, to send Ser Alliser away. The guy was a sadistic tool, and in his position as a sort of drill sergeant for new recruits he was much better at bullying his chargers and setting up potentially fatal conflicts between them than he was at actually training them to fight. By sending Thorne on his way, the Old Bear instantly improved the quality of the training the Watch’s desperately needed recruits would receive and punished a creep for his abusive ways. It just happened to backfire in that he didn’t realize Tyrion would be the man to receive the message.
On a structural level, it’s also just a hoot to see one of the book’s many separate storylines poke its head into another. The goings-on at the Wall tied tightly to the main storyline early in book one, with Jon Snow, a member of main character Eddard Stark’s extended family, going to the Wall to join the Watch and Tyrion coming along to pay it a visit. But since then it’s been off on its own almost entirely, with the intrigue and infighting over the kingship and its attendant positions taking precedence. Heck, elsewhere there’s a storyline taking place far outside the kingdom that has yet to tie directly into the main storyline at all, unless you count the decision to dispatch an assassin in the latter bearing fruit in the former, which I don’t since there’s no character overlap. In fact, I read that that storyline won awards on its own as a separate novella — and you really could excise those chapters and have a standalone book if you wanted to. I admire the patience involved, and Martin’s ability to invest his many separate strands with more or less equal pull.
Finally, how creepy is the image of a severed, rotting hand flexing and clutching all on its own as a desperate messenger travels hundreds of miles to a besieged city in a vain attempt to warn its inhabitants that soon such hands could be around their collective throat?
In short, these books are engrossing as all get-out. I’m glad I’m reading them and would recommend you do the same.
Tags: A Song of Ice and Fire, fantasy, Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin
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