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
Great post. You’re not the first to recommend these books, and I don’t exactly have time for several thousands of pages not already unread on my shelf, but…this may have tipped it for me.
Glad to see you’re enjoying the series so far. The HBO announcement has sent back for a second hit of them, although in audio book form since my reading time at home is limited.
I had thought that translating the series would be a tough nut to crack. But while I’m revisiting the first book, I’m also catching up on The Wire at night and there really is a strong similarity in how a long form storyline is broken down and paced in a show like that and how Martin has structured his series. He moves between plot lines, character perspectives, locals and, most importantly, how politics and past history inform so much of the story – both directly and indirectly. I know Martin has a television background, so maybe that contributes to how seemingly “television-ready” the series feels to me now.
Should be a good fit. And I can’t wait to see some of Martin’s more over-the-top imagery on the screen…wake the dragon, indeed.
I don’t know about you lot, but that final scene in the first book had the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end. In fact everything in Daenrys’s arc towards the end was humungously gripping.
Glad you’re enjoying the books, Sean.
Zom: Oh, that scene gave me goosebumps – literally – when I read it. If there’s a TV God, they will end the first season with that exact moment.
Between that and the end of the third book…yeah.
Sean: The way I remember that Tyrion/Thorne encounter, Tyrion does laugh the whole thing off because the guy is such an asshole, except at the last minute he does send some reinforcements to the Wall. He does it in a way that looks like it’s all a big joke on Thorne – because all the courtiers are listening, and he can’t afford to look credulous – but privately he admits he’s doing it just in case the asshole is right. So he’s pretty damn competent considering that as you say, he doesn’t have any more of a clue than most of the characters about the big scary subplot. (And it gets scarier. That hand is nothing.)
But yeah, the kind of thing you’re talking about is something Martin does really well, where both the smart people and the morons are reacting as if they’re in some other novel that’s just about their own shit, not seeing how it plays out elsewhere till way too late. Tyrion does something else that you may not have gotten to yet, where he’s just cleaning house at the court and giving some more assholes their just deserts– you’re cheering him on till you realize that he’s just inadvertently put one of those guys in the perfect position to do even more damage. Pretty much everything about Tyrion’s career has a half dozen layers of irony anyway, since he’s using all that competence and social insight to prop up the regime of a bunch of stupid sociopaths whom he hates, just because they’re his family and because he has something to prove. He’s a fucking beautiful character.
I just read the first book of the series (bypassed the spoilers on book 2). I was wondering about Dani’s inclusion in this book when there was so much going on elsewhere. But the final pages had so much going on, it blew me away.
I also enjoyed how Martin wrote the villains. They weren’t necessarily mustache twirling evil mongers found in other fantasy books. Characters like Visyres, Cersei or Jamie felt what they were doing was right, whether through entitlement or fear of their position. It was a refreshing take.
After the first book, I needed to pad out my reading with some lighter fair before leaping into book 2.
Sam: I hope you like them!
Sean and Zom: Thanks for the encouragement! Sam, that’s a good point about The Wire. And I’m sure you’re right, it’s his background writing for television that does the trick.
You know, I saw that final scene coming from miles away, so it didn’t knock me out. I was more impressed by a supporting element of that scene involving a character she’d previously rescued. (Trying to avoid spoilers, but I’m sure you remember what I mean.)
Eli: Yeah, I know that he ends up doing what he can, but I just wanted to talk about that particular scene. And even still, I’ve got a feeling that instead of sending the usual quota of ne’er-do-wells, he should have sent a whole army.
I’m glad you brought up Tyrion’s relationship with his family, which is compelling stuff. He knows they’re monsters, but by the same token, in the real world it’s a devastating thing to walk away from your whole family the way he would have to do if he were to wash his hands of them. They’re still his family, and he still loves them. And of course they also are the only things keeping him from being a beggar or a fool or whatever hideous fate would await someone in his condition in that world. Tyrion Lannister: It’s Complicated.
Garrett: It’s not even just that it’s a shades-of-gray world–that’s not a high hurdle to clear if you go beyond the world of genre fiction–but that their motivations are so true to life and clearly delineated. The bad guys love their families, or at the very least don’t want to fuck them over; the good guys have irrational resentments of various other good guys, know darn well it’s irrational, and still are too petty to get past it; etc etc etc. Cersei loves her kids, Tyrion worries about his brother and sister; Catelyn treats Jon like dirt, Eddard’s too much of a hardass; etc. It’s delightful.
Hey, I saw it coming too – the second the eggs were introduced – but it still delivered goosebumps.
I also really love the way the Stannis/Renly rivalry is set up in A Clash of Kings. There are some things to like about both of them, and you can totally understand how someone who was already in one or the other camp would be totally loyal to them, and you still want to slap them both silly. And the fact that they more or less understand each other makes it even worse, because they can’t see the other people whose lives they’re screwing with, they just see their annoying brother. I’ve seen the same dynamic in jobs, activist groups, church committees, etc.
And it’s not just a personality thing, it’s personality responding to a particular social setup – everyone’s inherited all these feudal rules that are supposed to be the natural order of things, but that order’s already been blown to shit within their generation, so now it’s just a choice of which piece to cling to. Again, familiar.
Hmm, I had another comment which you either deleted for being too spoilery, or else it just evaporated but probably rightly so, because it was a little spoilery despite being very vague. Sorry.
Eli–I’m sorry, but after reading the first few words of your comment I deleted it. I don’t want to have any idea what’s coming.
Yeah, sorry, I just thought you’d like to know that the dragon’s three heads are Nikki, Paolo, and Walt…