I've just finished reading George R. R. Martin's 1996 book A Game of Thrones. You may have heard of it -- it's also quite a popular TV series. Thrones is the first book in the massive multi-book series A Song of Ice and Fire.
It's fair to say that before reading the book I already had a pretty good understanding of the story. It is not that I had watched the TV series (I've never even seen one episode), but it is hard to avoid it with the way the media has been flooding us with teasers, tidbits and gossip over the past several years.
So, what did I think of the book?
First off, Martin is a good writer -- he puts his words together nicely, in a way that makes the reading smooth and enjoyable. And that's important in an 800-page book. On the whole, I felt that the pages slipped by quickly and easily.
Nonetheless -- and I say this as someone who generally likes longer books -- by about two thirds of the way through the book I was beginning to feel a little bored. Honestly, I thought it was just a bit too much of the same and it would have been a stronger book if it was cut to around 600 pages.
For me, the sameness came about because Martin doesn't do a lot of deep character development. He does lots of characters and lots of action, but the characters are never really especially complex. As far as I could see, almost all of the plot conflict occurred because of love triangles, forbidden love, hidden love, loveless arranged marriages, affairs, secret love-children, and immature characters unable to deal with romantic rejection. But Martin is no Jane Austen, and Martin's characters are psychologically boring.
Martin has an interesting approach to his chapter structure. Each chapter is written from the point of view of one of nine (?) different characters. The chapters are titled by the name of the character being focused on at that time, and they cycle around as the story progresses.
Briefly, for those of you who don't know the story, it is sword and sorcery stuff, set in a medieval-ish imaginary world. We have kings and knights and castles, nobility and peasantry. It is all very England-centric, and even the maps at the front of the book show the main land to be a slightly squiggly mirror-reversed British Isles. The northerners live in the ice and snow. Off to the east are the hot, barbarian lands.
For this reason, I felt that there was a slight touch of casual racism. It was written a little too much from the perspective of the whitey Englishman. The darker-skinned characters tended to be portrayed as scary, exotic or barbarous. And the presentation of the folk-beliefs also had a different feel to them -- the whitey beliefs were portrayed as more normal and sensible, while the folk beliefs of the darker-skinned people were portrayed as more uncivilised.
We enter the story about 15 years after the multi-generational hereditary king and most of his family were killed during a civil war. Through flashback we progressively learn that the old king was a little too quick to chop off the heads of his nobility (and the peasantry, but they don't count for much in this story), and so the surviving nobility banded together and cut his head off. (There is a lot of head-removing in this book.)
The new king was a big-muscled popular war hero but he turns out to be a useless administrator. He drinks and hunts and gets too fat to fit into his armour. There is corruption aplenty around him. His chief advisor dies (poison, we learn) and he requests his old war-buddy to come to the capital to take over the job and run things for him.
At this point in the book we have mostly been following War Buddy, Lord Eddard (Ned) Stark, and his family, and so we know that War Buddy is supposed to be a Thoroughly Decent and Honourable Gentleman with a Loving Family. He lives out on the northern edge of the kingdom, away from the slimy politics of the capital city, ruling his land in a tough but fair and honest way (he still chops off people's heads, but he feels sad doing it and it is done even-handedly according to law and not merely on a whim).
This might sound like a lot of "sword" and not much "sorcery", but the sorcery is hinted at because the Starks live not far from a wall (huge wall, beautiful wall), which protects the kingdom from the evil hordes outside the kingdom. Something spooky and mysterious is happening over the other side of the wall. Zombies are coming!
At the beginning of the book we follow the Honourable Stark family as they heed the call to leave their simple, secure ancestral castle home and head to the inner parts of the kingdom, fully knowing that they are walking into a complex web of political intrigue, which will likely destroy their family.
So far, so Dune.
Yep, it is obvious that Martin has copied significantly from Frank Herbert's Dune series. The Stark family is the Atreides family. Lord Ned is Duke Leto. Jon is Paul. Seeing this, it becomes a fun game of spotting the many parallels (or should that be many plagiarisms?). One of the weirder parallels is that both Herbert and Martin like their redheads.
Spoiler alert! The king dies. And copying from Dune, he dies in the exact same way as the old Duke Paulus Atreides died. Then Ned, being Leto, dies too. In a similar way. And then the Game of Thrones is on, with plenty of characters putting their hands up for king-duties.
But unlike Dune, the politics in Thrones is simplistic. Herbert's political story-telling is subtle and thought-provoking; the complexity in Thrones is merely from the huge number of characters.
In the same way that Dune is a teenage boy book, following the 15-year-old Paul Atreides as he grows from normal teen into superhero (every teen boy's fantasy), so too is Thrones a teenage boy book. In Thrones, we often follow Ned's two 14-year-old sons, Robb and Jon, as they mature.
But Thrones is a teenage boy book for these more modern times. Teenage boys these days are used to Internet porn and violent video games. And so Thrones includes plenty of detailed graphic descriptions of sex and violence. And violent sex. And disturbingly inappropriate male-fantasy pedophile sex. For example, skinny little 13-year-old Dany gets forcefully married off to a huge muscular warrior-king twice her age. They don't speak the same language, and he is off with his war-buddies killing most of the time, but somehow she very soon falls in lust with him and can't get enough of his body.
So, yeah, Thrones is a dumbed down, spiced up through sexual titillation, Dune. I'm satisfied that I read it, and it was entertaining enough, but I wouldn't bother to go out of my way to read any more in the series.
UPDATE: I just did a quick Google search, and it seems that I am not the first to see the Dune-Thrones parallels!
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