A Song of Ice and Fire Review

Over the summer, I decided that since Game of Thrones ended so abysmally, I decided to do the thing I told myself I wouldn't do the entire eight years the show ran- I would read George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. I'm glad I didn't choose to read it until now, because it's clear the themes of Martin's work flew over David Benioff and D.B. Weiss' head like an albatross over a ship at sea. My laziness saved me a great deal of frustration from a rather piss poor adaptation both in terms of comparing it to the source material and how well it told its own story.

Overall, the books are pretty good; the wandering close 3rd-person chapters- were each chapter is told in a different point of view- is a rather brilliant idea that, more than the events and scope of the story itself, make the books so grand and cosmic in scale. Martin's prose has a rather brisk pace to it allowing him to modulate the speed of the action on the page without losing any momentum. And Martin's remixing of historical events into a fantasy setting adds the layer of political authenticity and intrigue that people have been eating up in the series for over twenty years now.

As always, I've got issues, too. You can tell Martin really wanted to put the whole idea of the chosen child hero so common in fantasy through the ringer to show just how awful the idea really is. So we have the Stark children, ranging from three to fifteen, and Daenerys, who's thirteen when the series starts with her being sold to Khal Drogo. The problems here are twofold.

The first is that- especially with Sansa, Arya, and Dany- they live in a world where they are constantly held under the threat of rape or sexual exploitation from well, everyone. Sansa has the Hound, Ser Dontos, Tyrion, and of course Littlefinger all doing the Westersoi barely legal countdown, Arya spends all of Clash of Kings and Storm of Swords held captive by various soldiers and mercenaries who never fail to mention how she'd better behave or they'll violate her in a myriad set of ways, and then of course there's Dany who gets the wonderful experience of marital rape with Drogo and then works her way down to rampant sexual harassment from Jorah Mormont and Daario Naharis after Drogo bites it.

Compounding all this is that you can't follow through on the danger you're putting your protagonist in, lest you become that fantasy series distinguished by its non-zero occurrences of child rape. 

So what to do? 

With Dany, Martin decided that she should find a way to make Drogo see her as an equal. To do this, she introduces him to the cowgirl position, and by extension, consent. Martin tries really hard to justify this with the logic that since the Dothraki are nomadic horse worshipping people, they equate riding with dominance; so it totally makes sense that when Dany rides Drogo in front of the whole khalasar the only possible outcome is that they see her as an equal, too. It’s still an obvious attempt to post hoc justify all the abuse Dany suffered because she just needed to find a way to engage in the behaviour on her own terms. 

Martin lightly did this to Sansa, too. After her marriage to Tyrion and the Red Wedding, she has a mildly sexy dream of Tyrion and the Hound, but there’s no physical consummation either in the dream or real life. So at least Martin had the decency(?) not to fully commit to “it’s totally okay this is happening because they wanted it all along, just not the way they initially got it” twice. Dany, at least, got dragons to put her in a position of power that keeps her relatively ensconced from physical attempts. Sansa, meanwhile, gets jack shit. 

On top of living under the constant threat of the sadosexual impulses from burgeoning serial killer Joffery, Sansa then gets passed around to ostensible protectors who only further victimize her. The Hound saves Sansa from being raped by the mob during the riot in King’s Landing, then forces her to kiss and sing to him during the Battle of Blackwater Bay when he deserts. Tyrion shields her as best he can while he’s acting Hand, then when during their forced marriage he uses the fact that he wants to have sex with a 13-year-old to fuel his self-hatred because the only way any woman who’s not a whore will sleep with him is if he forces her to do so. Which, it's nice that Sansa’s potential assault is used to fuel man pain. It’s great, even. Then there’s Ser Dontos who, acting as a pawn of Littlefinger, helps frame Sansa for Joffery’s assassination then delivers her directly into Littlefinger’s pedo hands. 

Arya at least gets off easy by having anyone remotely close to her die or move on from her, driving her need to become a little miss murder machine to protect herself. 

But yeah, Martin creates this constant threat of bodily violation around the female characters, but can’t really follow through with much of any of it because of how pointlessly horrific it’d be, but he can’t have all that tension or danger go to waste so he has to redirect it to side characters who end up as gristle so Martin doesn’t subject his child heroes to wave after wave of nihilistic violence.

The second problem that comes out of this is that, in the end, Martin ends up having to rely heavily on the very trope he’s trying to deconstruct and examine. Jon Snow leads the defense of the Wall and becomes Lord Commander when he’s 16 because he’s just that well trained and competent from his whole undercover wilding adventure? Sure. Robb becomes king at 15 then goes on to run circles around commanders twice or three times his age? Why not? Bran becomes trainee to a shape-shifting, sorta time traveling omniscient psychic when he’s nine? Totally. 

By making his characters so young, Martin has no real choice but for the trope that child heroes go through extraordinary circumstances become exemplary individuals who naturally become more than their fellow men, thus are they able to fulfill their grand destinies. Basically, by trying so hard to throw cold water on that particular storytelling trope, Martin in the end has to rely on our acceptance of it to roll with the idea that the whole world will be saved by a handful of teenagers without blinking an eye.

The biggest loser of all this is though is Martin’s thematic statement of purpose. To borrow a phrase from Steven Attawell, Martin is a Romantic, not a nihilist, but it’d be hard to figure that out from Martin’s work at first glance. Since Martin creates a charnel house that consumes characters as they try, and fail, repeatedly, to save or otherwise improve the lives of people around them, you get the sense that all attempts to improve are bound to fail in the face of an uncaring, ruthless, world. It’s all very hopelessly pointless.

Except.

Except the point Martin wants to make in all this is that heroism and bravery aren’t found in the result, they’re found in the attempt. In sticking your neck out against hopeless odds, against a brutal, cruel world that relentlessly just doesn’t care. Because to Martin, the point is when it comes to living, we have a choice to be a reflection of the world around us, or to set ourselves apart, to rise above for no more reason than that it’s right. Most of the time, yes, it’ll end in failure. But sometimes, sometimes you take a leap of faith and kill an ice demon elf from the dawn of time.

All this could be avoided with reading comprehension beyond surface level events, but, still, when you stack failure upon failure upon failure on top of each other, it is your fault when people think that’s the point you’re shooting for and that whatever successes do come are fleeting accidents. 

What also bugs me is how Martin has given fodder for people to blame characters for things that aren’t their fault because he hamstrings their capabilities to preserve his plotting. 

The example that stands out through the series is Catelyn Stark. When her dying father keeps muttering the word “tansy” and apologizing but the boy was just too lowborn, that he would find her a better match, Catelyn puzzles out that tansy refers to tansy tea- a real life thing used to induce abortions- that the woman he’s apologizing to is her sister Lysa, but she stumbles a bit on who the lowborn noble could be.

Why this could only happen if Martin beat Catelyn mercilessly with the stupid stick is that by this point, Catelyn knows that Littlefinger has been going around for years telling literally everyone that he claimed both her and her sister Lysa's virginity when they were children. She also knows that Littlefinger lied to her about the origin of the dagger that someone used in the attempt to kill her son and, finally, that Littlefinger was an essential part in betraying Ned to getting his head chopped off. So, here she is, sitting as one of the few characters in the entire series who knows how Littlefinger is connected to every major event so far but… nope. She never puts it together because she can’t. Because Martin isn’t ready for that goose to be cooked yet so one of the smartest, savviest characters in the series just has a brain fart in the name of plotting.

The result of this is that Catelyn gets blamed for causing the Red Wedding, specifically through her release of Jaime Lannister. To be clear, this decision is a mistake, it causes a major breach in the Northern forces which leads to the Karstarks killing the remaining Lannister prisoners, which leads to Robb needing to kill the patriarch of the Karstark clan, which leads to the desertion of the Karstark army, which, is what helps create the circumstances for the Red Wedding to be as successful as it is. 

So, does all that make what happens Catelyn's fault, in whole or in part? No. What Martin is doing here is flexing his Greek tragedy muscles- Catelyn's mistake is borne out of her love for her children. She does everything she can to save everything that's important to her in the world, and all it does is bring her closer to losing everything she thinks she has left. It's heartbreaking, because for as much as she thinks she's responsible, there are hundreds of little things she can't control that brought about the destruction of everything she held dear.

That's the core of tragedy, that whatever actions that brought the character closer, it's nothing compared to the tides of fate that pull them in like an undertow to their deaths. But, instead of feeling that, Martin makes Catelyn act really stupid so instead of the Red Wedding feeling like an inevitable, inescapable act of fate, it just feels like she brought it down on herself by a moment of weakness acting like a typical, emotional woman. It's just a shame to see Martin's execution bungle his dramatic intent. 

In the end, I’m happy I read the series. I can see why it became such a phenomenon in the fantasy literary community and why it had such staying power when it got adapted. It's an epic, sweeping story that Martin, for the most part, pulls off. I'm glad that the series is one of the few things that live up to the hype.