Fantasy Update

I do completely read books, honest! And I've read a number of great ones lately (and am currently reading one I'm super excited about) but I feel that it's important to tell you about the ones that don't work out too. It keeps me honest and maybe down the line it will help me figure out the books I do really like to read.

The latest incomplete book is A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin. Yes, I know - A Game of Thrones! Didn't I just recently defend this book in a vitriolic blog post? Didn't I express my excitement and longing to read it? I did do all those things. And then I read the book.

Or, to be fair, read probably about only the first fifth of the book. I love fantasy; I really do. (I just finished reading Mercedes Lackey's The Snow Queen and a hilarious one by Diana Wynne Jones that I am going to talk about soon.) But I did not love this fantasy.

It is vaguely Tolkein-esque: there's a map and at least part of the world seems vaguely Celtic or Western European. Martin writes from the viewpoint of several different characters. The reader gets a brief snippet of an important event before the chapter ends and we move on to the next character's point of view. I didn't enjoy the rapid changes between characters. Maybe it's supposed to keep the book moving: I just felt it held it back. There's a way to change viewpoints between characters, and I felt this was not it. Sharon Kay Penman does it very well: there's one main character, a number of minor characters, and then very inconsequential characters whom we just meet at the beginning of a chapter. They're sketched out quickly, they help you understand where the story's going and tell you about events the main character could never know about without being totally historically inaccurate. Then they disappear. I found Martin's way somewhat jarring. You never really got to settle inside a character.

I did see how Martin reads like Tolkein but with less depth. His characters are more like characters than beings in a narrative myth-arc. The problem is that you never really get to settle in with a character as you are always being wrenched off into another character. I would have settled with a few less major characters. Or maybe more of an omniscient narrative as opposed to a story with multiple third-person narratives.

I read the synopsis of A Game of Thrones on Wikipedia and the book sounded great! Too bad that I couldn't get into it and that the conspiracy/plot took so long to develop. I had understood that A Game of Thrones was about a conspiracy for a kingdom and I didn't get that so much from the beginning. Maybe a little glimpse of one, but I wanted to be right in the room with the conspirators.

Further, the background was too complex. I do read a lot of history/non-fiction and I can keep track of sprawling royal families, but for some reason the vast networks of kinships in A Game of Thrones seemed to be too much. Everyone seemed to be referring to some earlier cataclysmic event that the reader was not privy to. Why not start the story there? And why have so many different houses and characters that a multi-page appendix is needed to describe who these people are and to whom they are related.

A note to the New York Times writer regarding the sex scenes that were placed in the show (from the book) in order to "entice the ladies". Well, this lady remains un-enticed. First, incest. (Gross!) And then an older greasy barbarian gets to sleep with the lovely young highborn maiden who is beautiful and the heiress to some long-lost kingdom, naturally. I'm not sure whose fantasy this is, but it isn't mine!

And, finally, for those of you who have read the book, the part with Sansa's direwolf was too much. Yes, make us love an animal right before you take it away so cruelly. (I was trying to avoid spoilers for those who have read the book, but that may have given it all away.) I'm sure that event leads to great repercussions further on, but I was not interested in sticking around to find out.

So, another one bites the dust. Maybe I'll skip over the part I really disliked and try reading it again later. But probably not. Life is short, and there are books I'd much rather read. Like One of Our Thursdays is Missing, the latest book in the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde. I'm just about to start Chapter 14 and it is fabulous!