A Song of Fire and Ice

When you're telling these little stories, here's a good idea: have a point.

Steve Martin, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

This post is about the novels more than the TV series.  I think the TV series is very well done; the books are a bit more problematic.

If I were ever going to write a novel -- and I doubt very much that I ever will -- I would like to try to write a fantasy, with Lord of the Rings as the gold standard one can never really hope to reach.  A Song of Fire and Ice reaches for that standard, and for a book or two it seems to give Tolkien a run for his money, but by the third book, you start to wonder what went wrong, and by the fifth book, with about twenty story lines going, most of the more appealing characters dead, and nothing resolved, it feels like an opportunity squandered due to some strange choices by the author (George R. R. Martin.)

A little background on the books:  So far there are five books in the saga, with another two promised, hopefully finishing the story.  (The author may die first; he complains at the end of book four and book five that writing each of them was a bitch [his word.]  Aww.  Maybe you should have had an ending in mind.)  As I see it, there are three main stories.  This is debatable because it is very hard to tell where it's all going, but it's my post and my blog, so three.  One, the king dies without a clear heir, and about a half dozen lords suddenly think they should be king.  Two, dragons were once used by the ruling family to defeat all of its enemies, but the dragons have all been dead for centuries, until some of the remaining dragon eggs turn out to still have some life in them.  Three, it has been summer for many years now, but winter is coming, and ancient enemies beyond the wall in the North are stirring.

The books definitely have their strengths.  Martin creates an intricate and complex world with a history and a character to each of the many places on the map.  The book only relies on magic a little; mostly it's about the people, but with a little sorcery.  The level of the writing is very adult; this is not a series for twelve-year-olds.  Rather, it is fantasy that will keep an adult very engaged.  Martin gives a wide range of characters depth and distinct personalities and important roles.  Most importantly, this is not a tale of good versus evil; the characters are all some combination of good and evil, and it is never clear which will prevail.  After five books, we have no idea how this story will end.

And so, on to the weaknesses.  I'm not sure that George R. R. Martin knows how this story will end either.  He certainly is having trouble zeroing in on a main idea.  As the books drag on, the story becomes less of a story and more of a soap opera -- the characters have stuff to do, but there is no sense that the story is progressing.  Rather, more and more you get the sense that the story is not even heading toward an ending, ever, just like Days of Our Lives.  One reason the books feel this way is that Martin has created so many prominent characters that it is hard to see how all of them can have a part in the main story or stories, whatever that is or those are.

To give you a concrete example of what I am talking about, some numbers.  Each chapter of the book is told from the point of view of a character, with most of those characters getting multiple chapters, so there are several chapters simply titled "Jon" or "Sansa", for instance.  In the first book, there are eight different points of view.  By the end of book five, we have endured 25 different viewpoints, with eight new ones added in book three alone.  We are starting to wonder by this time if all of these characters really have a key role in this saga.  And these 25 are only a sampling of the hundreds of significant characters in the books.

Another problem is the killing of key characters.  In the beginning of first book, Martin introduces a main family that seems like the protagonists of the series, along with six direwolf pups, one for each child.  By the end of book five, at least two of the wolves are dead, four of the eight family members are dead (although one I'm not 100% sure and one has been revived in zombie-like form), three have gone off away from the main action of the story and may never return, and the last has been forgotten.  When the first main character of the family is killed, it can be seen as an interesting twist.  However, when the rest die, it seems forced, like Martin decided he needed to kill those characters in order to mix things up even though it didn't fit so well in the story.  Like a soap opera, stuff just keeps happening, so we keep reading.

There were times in the 4,000 or so pages that the story dragged, but mostly the books were engaging enough to keep me interested.  It just seems like it could have been so much more.  If I ever do write that novel, I have learned three things not to do from George R. R. Martin:  Don't write a soap opera with no ending, don't kill off your main characters willy-nilly, and don't spread the story so thin that it doesn't seem to be going anywhere anymore.  Stories should have a point.