Book Review -- A FEAST FOR CROWS, by George R.R. Martin

With all this talk about nihilism in fantasy, even Yahtzee Croshaw of Zero Punctuation had something to say about it in a recent video game review. The inexhaustible banter between various sides has actually left me a bit in the lurch, torn between a rollicking good time reading gratuitous sex and violence on a medieval scale and the demands of decent taste. Well, instead of launching forward discussing the state of fantasy fiction any further, I'm taking a break from reading Takami Koushun's teenage slaughterfest Battle Royale to belatedly put down my thoughts on George R.R. Martin's fourth novel in his A Song of Ice and Fire series, A Feast for Crows. (For my earlier reviews of the preceding volumes see A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, and A Storm of Swords).

Understanding why and how this novel was written is key to understanding the novel as a whole. Martin claims to have never really intended to write this novel, nor the upcoming A Dance with Dragons, until he realized that he couldn't simply jam everything he felt needed to be conveyed through flashbacks in the upcoming novels. So, he originally intended to write a single novel to bridge the gap between A Storm of Swords and the fifth book. However, book four ended up becoming so large that he had to split it in half, and so A Feast for Crows is only half the bridge with the upcoming A Dance with Dragons covering all of the character perspectives that weren't covered by book four.

Thus, A Feast for Crows is interesting from the standpoint of character development, but in terms of plot development, we really don't get anything until the end, and that end is more of a setup for events that will take place in book six. Given the length of time between book releases lately, it will be a wonder if Martin will ever finish this series. However, I'm hoping that the sixth novel comes out much quicker, since the bridge part of the story was something that Martin wasn't as interested in telling, but he certainly felt it needed to be told.

And that's pretty much it. The entire book is a setup for the events that will take place either during or after the winter. By the novel's end, winter has begun, and it wouldn't be surprising if things basically slowed to a complete stop. Almost all of the characters have been placed in positions where Martin can easily pick them back up years later down the timeline. A number of very satisfying conclusions have occurred for several characters. But other characters seem to be hanging by a thread and their fates are uncertain. It's not a bad read as books go, and it isn't really filler in a Jordanesque sense, where characters simply sit around plotting and those plots never come to fruition until three 1,000+-page novels have been completed. There's storyline payoff, but those payoffs are weak compared to what Martin could have done.

I don't feel like Martin is stretching his story out on purpose. Instead, I get the impression that he's not certain how to cram everything in that he wants to. We get precious little of the Ironmen storyline, or of Arya Stark's development, with the lion's share of the book going to the Lannisters (Jaime and Cersei) and Brienne. Samwell's thread and the events in Dorne get a pretty fair shake. However, its the brevity with which Martin handles Arya's, Sansa's, and the Greyjoy's storylines that make them so strong and inspiring. It's easy to get sick of the constant plotting and scheming of Cersei Lannister throughout the novel, although Martin does give us a pretty satisfying conclusion to her storyline at the end of the novel.

When compared to previous volumes, this one is definitely a bridge, and it feels like it, too. The real situation was wrapped up in A Storm of Swords. In A Feast for Crows, Martin is simply prepping us for whatever happens after A Dance with Dragons. As ever, his characterizations are believable, his grasp of character psychology thorough. There's plenty here to keep a reader going. Seeing how Samwell Tarly, Jaime Lannister, Brienne of Tarth, and Arya Stark all evolve as characters, how they face their individual challenges and quandaries. Sam continues to find inner reserves of strength and bravery, Jaime is forced to deal with the realities of his sister's ambition and ceaseless plotting and struggles with his own ethical and moral compass that is often in conflict with what other men consider honor, Brienne struggles to fulfill the many (and sometimes contradictory) oaths she's made, and Arya begins to detach herself from her past and become something new. These threads are the best parts of the novel.

Martin has, perhaps, given hints as to where, finally, he intends to take this series of his at the end. But a lot remains to be seen. A large number of characters are not to be seen in this novel, but their shadows still loom heavily across the plot's landscape--especially Daenerys Targaryen. I wouldn't suggest that this book is nihilistic as others claim. Oaths and oathbreaking dominate this book, as does plotting and conspiracy. There most heroic characters--Jaime, Brienne, and yes, Sam--struggle with oaths and honor alike. The storylines of Cersei, the Dornish, and Sansa are all hotbeds of intrigue, and Petyr proves himself to be a master politician in contrast to Cersei or the naïve, quasi-heroic intrigues of the Dornish princesses. This book is nowhere near as sluggish and filler-laden as it is reputed to be. Its only in comparison to the previous volumes that A Feast for Crows really seems to be lacking anything.

A Feast for Crows by George R.R. Martin
Style B
Substance B
Overall B

"Realism" and Nihilism in Contemporary Fantasy

Leo Grin over at Andrew Breitbart's Big Hollywood wrote an interesting piece about the decline of modern fantasy, entitled "The Bankrupt Nihilism of Our Fallen Fantasists." By-and-large, the piece is quite reactionary (as is fitting a piece for anything Breitbart-related). Pat's Fantasy Hotlist said, "To me, it all sounds like someone caught in the past, refusing to see the genre we love evolve and grow." Roland's Codex dismissed it as pathetic, saying, "I found it extremely amusing in its fanboyish indignation and intellectual constipation, and would urge you to proceed with all due haste and read it. Hilarity and merriment are to be had!" But he had some very interesting points to make.

First, Grin yearns for a return to the mythopoeic stylings of J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard. This is an odd coupling, because both authors are extreme opposites in a great many ways. Howard wrote for the pulps, and it shows. His protagonists are often scoundrels living on the wrong side of the law, mercenaries escaping from a lost battle, or ne'er-do-wells of any sort. His prose style is fast-paced, action-oriented, and particularly bloody and violent. Tolkien, on-the-other-hand, is erudite, educated, a loremaster weaving a grandiose mythic cycle about an apocalyptic struggle between Good and Evil writ large. Regardless, they do have things in common these days, since Grin seems to see their similarities more as a function of their distance from current fantasy offerings, and especially cites Joe Abercrombie's work.

Second, Grin decries the over-reliance on violence, scatology, sex, and overall shock in order to subvert the established literary tropes.

Endless scenes of torture, treachery and bloodshed drenched in scatology and profanity concluded with a resolution worthy of M. Night Shyamalan at his worst, one that did its best to hurt, disappoint, and dishearten any lover of myths and their timeless truths. Think of a Lord of the Rings where, after stringing you along for thousands of pages, all of the hobbits end up dying of cancer contracted by their proximity to the Ring, Aragorn is revealed to be a buffoonish puppet-king of no honor and false might, and Gandalf no sooner celebrates the defeat of Sauron than he executes a long-held plot to become the new Dark Lord of Middle-earth, and you have some idea of what to expect should you descend into Abercrombie’s jaded literary sewer.

(Ironically, Abercrombie actually admitted that he found this scenario rather interesting, but also admitted that your mileage may vary.) If Mr. Abercrombie's aim was "to hurt, disappoint, and dishearten any lover of myths and their timeless truths," than I applaud his success. I've not read any of Joe Abercrombie's novels, I admit, but in the course of one week, through this article, Leo Grin has managed to polarize the entire fantasy community through his reference to Abercrombie specifically.

Now, for a week, the rebuttals have come pouring in. Adam at The Wertzone said in "Missing the Point" that "the problem is that the author bemusingly names J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard as his preferred flavours of fantasy. Which makes very little sense, as few fantasy authors are more nihilistic than Tolkien and Howard." Adam's argument is iconic of the rebuttals overall, but I'd argue that it is Adam and other respondents to Grin that are "missing the point." This is a straw man argument, especially with regards to Tolkien.

Sure, Beleriand is destroyed at the end of The Silmarillion, and the ending of The Lord of the Rings sees the passing of the Elves from Middle-Earth, the dwindling of the enchantment, a shell-shocked Frodo suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome and unable to live comfortably in the Shire he struggled to save. However, what Adam and so many other critics of Leo Grin are missing is that this is not nihilistic, but should instead tug at a sort of pathos in our hearts. The Latin term "lacrimae rervm" or the Japanese term 物の哀れ (mono no aware) describe a kind of pathos, or sadness, for things mortal and temporary. This is not nihilism, it is the bittersweet nostalgia for things gone, and the idea that "you can never go home again." It's about change and how one deals with change. Indeed, when Grin's description of the hypothetical Abercrombiean Middle-Earth is rebutted with descriptions of everything that was lost as a consequence of the War of the Ring, I am tempted to rip my hair out in frustration and scream, "You're missing the point!"

Grin's right when he describes Tolkien's work as heroic. His characters are ostensibly Good. They show selflessness and self-sacrifice for a greater ideal at every turn. Their victory comes at a terrible cost, but it is a victory and more to the point, their victory is not hollow. Yes, the Elves leave Middle-Earth because the rich magic that permeated the world died with the Dark Lord, but without that loss, the victory would have been cheapened. The Elves had their chance, and Feanor's obsession with vengeance put them on a collision course with tragedy. Now it is Men's turn. Yes, it's sad, but it's sadness that has a point.

Similarly, Robert E. Howard's works are not all blood, gore, and violence. Solomon Kane is one of the most compelling of all Howard's characters and one of my personal favorites. The Puritan demon-hunter is driven by his faith in God and his unquenchable desire to right wrongs. He constantly faces horrors that would warp his mind, but he fights off (of all things) a Lovecraftian nihilism by relying on his faith and adherence to Good. Conan may be selfish and ultimately out for "number one" but he has a code of honor and, by-and-large, has little patience for tyrants and those who would slaughter innocents. He is not a morally ambiguous character--his morality is right there, up front. Yeah, he's an unscrupulous character, but that does not make him morally ambiguous. Nor does it make Howard's world nihilistic. Howard saw the barbaric characters of his stories as men walking a thin gray line between darkness and light, order and chaos, civilization and savagery, decadence and nature, and it was their will and their wits that brought them triumph, even against darknesses that were dredged up from the blackest pits of Lovecraftian nightmare. Yes, civilization would eventually be washed in the blood of Turanian, then Pictish, then Cimmerian invasion, and then cataclysm, but Howard didn't like civilization much anyway, and saw strength, honor, and will in the barbarian kingdoms of European yore. That is not nihilism.

I think that this over-adherence to nihilism on the part of so many commentators and bloggers is a desperate attempt to divert the main thrust of Grin's argument. It isn't so much nihilism, per se, but a matter of taste. Some say de gvstibvs non est dispvtandvm, but I'm not so sure.

The other side thinks that their stuff is, at long last, turning the genre into something more original, thoughtful, and ultimately palatable to intelligent, mature audiences. They and their fans are welcome to that opinion. For my part — and I think Tolkien and Howard would have heartily agreed — I think they’ve done little more than become cheap purveyors of civilizational graffiti.

Abercrombie himself responded to Grin's comment:

We’re on sides, now? No one told me about sides. What are the sides? Of what? And on which side am I? I love Tolkien, after all. I’d like to be on his side. Grew up with The Hobbit. Read Lord of the Rings every year. I’m a great admirer of his. Without Tolkien there’d be no fantasy as we know it, and certainly no First Law. When it comes to an epic tale with moral clarity set in a supremely realised fantasy world, he pretty much knocked it out of the park.

Abercrombie sets up another straw man here, and proceeds with it. Leo Grin is right--there are sides. Just because Abercrombie admires Tolkien doesn't mean he's not participating in a movement of literary degradation. If Leo Grin is to be believed, Joe Abercrombie's work utilizes "cynicism, profanity, scatology, dark humor, and nihilism" to put the tropes of the fantasy genre "back together into a Frankenstein's monster designed to shock, outrage, offend, and dishearten." His book, The Heroes has been cited as an utterly ironic piece in which the main characters are most certainly not, and partake in the slaughter of innocent civilians (including women and children), rape, and murder. So, in order to avoid just another umpteenth retelling of The Lord of the Rings, modern fantasy requires foul language, scatology, immoral anti-heroes, graphic sex, sickening and upsetting violence, and rape. In other words, it needs to realistically depict the graphic realities of medieval life, warfare, and death because Tolkien didn't do that (although Howard approached it).

As I go through earlier 20th century works of fantasy fiction, I find them chock-full of sex and violence. It's just not graphic. I have to ask why George R.R. Martin finds it necessary to describe, in detail, one character's sexual experience in A Feast of Crows, where Poul Anderson simply ended a chapter of Three Hearts and Three Lions as Holger carries an elf princess off to bed. What was the rationale behind it? Sex is a part of life and shouldn't be avoided in literature, but I don't need a pornographic description of what happens. Similarly, Robert E. Howard's warriors would wade through buckets of blood, but it was always described with a certain panache that is most definitely lacking in a lot of contemporary fantasy. They seemed less like men and more like forces of nature in combat, and the violence of the scene was woven into the tale like thread. This is different from reading about some young maiden trying to hold her intestines inside herself after a mercenary decided to gut her. I'm trying read an adventure tale, not watching a Rob Zombie flick.

Nevertheless, de gvstibvs non est dispvtandvm. There is no disputing taste. Your mileage may vary. However, I have to ask, is the reason so much graphic and cold-bloodedly disturbing sex and violence being included because the authors can't actually write well otherwise? Everybody's known since Shakespeare that sex and violence on gratuitous levels will sell, but that real art is something that isn't readily accessible, and difficult to produce. Shakespeare purposely made Titus Andronicus an over-the-top schlocky gore-fest, either to capitalize on the crude "sex and violence sell" reality or to subvert it and show how hollow and mind-numbingly unartistic buckets of blood truly are. It's just another kind of spectacle, and anyone who actively enjoys reading about innocents being slaughtered in a novel needs to read about the much more recent (and true) Rape of Nanking and see if they still enjoy that sort of stuff. As an historian, I've read my fair share of civilians getting massacred and really don't need to spend dozens of pages dwelling on it in a fantasy novel.

Brian Murphy compares the over-the-top tasteless (in my opinion) graphic horror of Richard Morgan's The Cold Commands with Tolkien's description of how Shelob captures, tortures, and finally drains her victims. Describing Tolkien's passage he had this to say:

That to me is a great piece of writing. It tells you plenty about the cruelty and maliciousness of Sauron and his relationship with the giant she-spider (which he half-hates and half-fears, but tolerates as a valuable guardian into Mordor).

As for the gory details, it allows my mind to fill in the rest. Tolkien goes on to explain that Shelob cares not for wealth or power, but spends all her time brooding on her next feast. "For all living things were her food, and her vomit darkness," he writes. That's about as nasty and explicit as Tolkien gets.

When compared to Richard Morgan's excerpt, Brian went on to say this:

As for that passage, man, it’s brutal. It’s effective, and horrifying, and well-done. But it’s not why I read fantasy. It jerked me back into reality with its clinical descriptions of flensing and tearing blood vessels. Perhaps Morgan intended this scene as a condemnation of torture. It vaguely reminded me of the real-life practice of waterboarding, albeit turned up to 11. I don’t know. I read it and it just felt — too much.

Brian Murphy pretty much sums it up. We're dragged out of a story and thrown into the real world where people are tortured in Gitmo and religious fanatics blow themselves up. Fantasy is many things, but it is most certainly a brand of escapist literature as much as anything else, and to rob the genre of its escapist facet ultimately cheapens it. In the excerpt of Morgan's book that Murphy quotes, we're presented with a torturous execution that is intensely described, with little omitted. We're drawn a picture of agony, blood, viscera, and being eaten alive. It has an impact, but lacks the elegance of the Tolkien passage that Murphy quoted before it. There was no real vibrancy or flair to the description. Just a cold, calculated explanation of how these characters were dying. What ever happened to Hemingway's Iceberg Principle, where what's not said carries more weight than what is said?

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy nihilism in my literature, and graphic sex and violence--to a degree, and so long as there is a point to it all. I adore the works of James Ellroy because he grabs the hardboiled noir that Chandler and Hammett birthed and runs with it to it's logical conclusion. Noir is inherently nihilistic, but it's supposed to be. Ellroy's stuff is grim, gritty, shocking, upsetting, but that's because it is supposed to be. He's epitomized the genre. Reading a tragic and pessimistic novel like The Big Nowhere is an incredibly cathartic experience. It can be depressing, but my overall experience was actually cleansing. Fantasy wasn't designed to be nihilistically cathartic but instead nostalgic, perhaps a postmodern re-enchantment of an otherwise mundane world.

It's hard to feel nostalgic about a bunch of raiders lining women and children up in front of a fortress and burying axes into their heads until the garrison capitulates. That's not cathartic, either. It's simply disturbing and upsetting.

R. Scott Bakker has this to say to Leo Grin:

you might say that Grin thinks this is fantasy’s vocation, to endlessly eulogize, and that writing that strays into the baroque or revisionary are not only morally and imaginatively bankrupt, they are symptomatic of some great disease of the soul that is presently claiming the world and humanity.

Sound familiar? It should if you read fantasy. This particular salad of attitudes and concepts – moral certainty writ on a cosmic scale – is precisely what you find in almost all premodern works of fantastic fiction, everything from Upanishads to the Holy Bible. Consider the hyperbole. Consider the way he structures his oppositions in the above quote: on the one side you have the sacred, the treasured and the cruciform, while on the other side you have, well, shit and piss.

I'm tempted to break out Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane, a landmark study in how "religious man" establishes the sacred by delegating it as "special" and "not profane"--that is, not mundane, mortal, or carnal. Indeed, fantasy often tapped into that throughout its growth and development in the early 20th century. The problem with Grin, apparently, is he sees fantasy itself as a sacred touchstone of our culture, and sees it's deconstruction and infusion with the profane to be blasphemous, a mark of Western civilization's self-loathing and willful self-destruction, and inherently political.

Soiling the building blocks and well-known tropes of our treasured modern myths is no different than other artists taking a crucifix and dipping it in urine, covering it in ants, or smearing it with feces. In the end, it’s just another small, pathetic chapter in the decades-long slide of Western civilization into suicidal self-loathing. It’s a well-worn road: bored middle-class creatives (almost all of them college-educated liberals) living lives devoid of any greater purpose inevitably reach out for anything deemed sacred by the conservatives populating any artistic field.

Well, Grin, if it is a sacred touchstone, then in this postmodern world where religion has become evil, the sacred has literally become a profane force in the eyes of many, then one must expect this sort of reaction.

The deconstructing and subverting of genre tropes is not always a bad thing. One of my favorite fantasy series is Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, a trilogy which preserves the rich sense of re-enchantment that Michal at One Last Sketch talks about, while simultaneously subverting a number of fantasy's tropes. Loads of characters die, medieval warfare is bloody and horrific, the realities of medieval life are not ideal in the least. And yet that makes the actions of the protagonist all the more heroic. No, Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn does not simply churn out the same old tropes, but subverts almost all of them subtly, delicately. Overall, author Tad Williams wrote a fantasy series aimed at adults that doesn't require the graphic sex, violence, or scatology of other authors in order to get its points across.

Now, I have yet to read Joe Abercrombie's work. I'm not a big fan of historical fantasy, mostly because I am a historian and I can't help but nit-pick what's wrong half of the time, and from what I've gathered, that's primarily Abercrombie's oeuvre. Not to say that Abercrombie does a bad job or has inconsistencies--I just prefer not to read historical fantasy. I'm not bashing Abercrombie. But considering how his name has fueled a lot of this divide, I cannot help but ask why? What about his work, specifically, did Grin (and others) find so damn objectionable?

I am , however, insisting that Grin's argument not be dismissed out-of-hand, like Joe Abercrombie, R. Scott Bakker, the Wertzone, et. al. have. Once you scrape away the political hyperbole from Grin's argument, you can't help but realize that everybody missed the point and ended up shooting the messenger.

Theo at the blog for Black Gate actually made one of the best defenses for Grin's argument I've seen. In his piece, "The Decline and Fall of the Fantasy Novel," Theo argues that Grin is correct, the tragic heroism and mythic tenor of both Tolkien and Howard have given way to an ironic, barren landscape bereft of anything sacred or meaningful. There's nothing worth defending, and that's depressing and disheartening. For me, what I find depressing is the unnecessary gratuity of sex and violence making such literature more "adult" or more "literary." I find it quite depressing, and can't help but compare it to the gritty Dark Age of comic books during the early 1990s, when "adult" and "mature" wound up really being quite immature, adolescent at best, and unnecessarily graphic. Shock was not followed by awe, but by disinterest. (For more on this, see Michal's post on "Adult" Fantasy at One Last Sketch.)

I do not want to read a Tolkien knock-off. I've had enough of Terry Brooks' Shannara. I read fantasy to visit places that I wish were real and enjoy stories of heroism, adventure, and of individuals overcoming immense obstacles. I love books with strange monsters and magic. Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn is a magnificent subversion of fantasy that tragically flies under everyone's radar as "just another fairy tale," when it should actually be a model for postmodern deconstructive fantasy. Indeed, Williams' work inspired George R.R. Martin to start A Song of Ice and Fire in the first place!

There's plenty of heroism in Martin's books, too. Although he was, unfortunately, lumped into this, I see Martin's books as trying to bridge a gap between the real and the fantastic. Yeah, Martin's got a lot of gratuitous violence, but to his credit, he's not a fan of it himself. He's writing the story he wants, or perhaps needs, to tell. One of the reasons that A Storm of Swords took so long to come out was because he had such a difficult time writing the Red Wedding scene. Events such as that do not make his work nihilistic, and indeed the career of Daenerys Targaryen, if anything, is full of heroism--her character grows to develop a strong sense of justice and good. The use of perspectives makes the various characters much more real and human, and therefore understandable--their own inward struggles can make them heroes or villains in ways that a simple straightforward narrative could not. I honestly do not find Martin's work to be nihilistic in any way. Pessimistic, yes, but nihilistic, no.

There's a long list of great books to which I can point that subvert fantasy tropes and do so tastefully, without resorting to the sort of stuff that Leo Grin decries. I just finished reading Glen Cook's The Black Company, a novel about a mercenary company that works for the bad guys. The book is fraught with pessimism and darkness, but I'd not go so far as to say it was nihilistic. Similarly, I'm rereading Jack Vance's The Dying Earth, and it deals with nihilism while still maintaining a sense of fantastic wonder--the very nihilism itself of Vance's stories is part of the overall enchantment and sense of awe, which is achieved without gratuitously graphic sex, violence, or scatology. In Lord Foul's Bane, Thomas Covenant rapes a woman, but Stephen R. Donaldson doesn't give us a thick paragraph description of all her cries and his thrusts, nor are we ever treated to a phrase like "engorged member." Indeed, the guilt of this deed is something that torments Covenant's conscience for the rest of the series--something that seems to stand in direct opposition to the current "nihilistic" and "morally bereft" trends to which Grin objects.

This is where I respond to Matthew David Surridge's rebuttal to Theo's article (the one that defend's Leo Grin). When Surridge evokes a number of early-to-mid 20th century examples of rape, murder, moral ambiguity, etc., I have to shake my head and reiterate, "you're missing the point!" It's all about the presentation, otherwise, why would Grin have made such a fuss about language, scatology, and graphic description of sex and violence? Yeah, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser were cut-throat thieves, ne'er-do-wells, and sex-crazed. However, there were levels to which even they wouldn't sink. The same is true for Conan. When Surridge cites Conan's pursuit of the ice-princess in "The Frost-Giant's Daughter" as having "rape" as his intent, Surridge is being hyperbolic--Conan's intent is revenge because she tried to have him killed for sport and amusement. Again, it's about the description and the presentation of events, and someone seems to be missing the point.

Grin's point, I think, in reality, goes back to what Michal at One Last Sketch said about fantasy being "adult."

However, my problem with these “new takes” on the genre is that they don’t, actually, do anything new. Strip away the swears and the sex and you’re left with works not much different from their predecessors. Yes, there may be moral ambiguity, but Lord Dunsany, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith also wrote amoral worlds. Sara Douglass has much less depth than Morgan; ignore the strange creature sex and the novels don’t much reflect the lofty themes she urges writers to pursue. We are told to strive for realism in our fantasy, yet I don’t see much inherently realistic in the word “fuck.”

The only thing that makes these books adult is that we, adults, try to bar children from reading them. We often fail. Writing sex doesn’t make your book mature unless you do something with it. I used to sneak my mother’s romance novels when I was ten to skip to the dirty bits: it’s not, in itself, a particularly adult thing to write about, or even talk about. Head into any schoolyard and you’ll hear language that would make even, I warrant, Ms. Douglass blush.

It does, however, give a false sense of legitimacy to a work. Because we don’t want children reading them, we can automatically label such books “adult.” No longer need we piddle around in a sanitized Middle Earth where no orc would dare say “shit” even if he really wants to; we can be depraved as we like.

And there you have it. Strip away all of the sex and violence and I have to ask, do these works really mean anything? If Joe Abercrombie's books were bowdlerized, would their stories lose their impact? If so, why? I know R. Scott Bakker's work would suffer, not because his work is bereft of substance but because he is dealing with deeply psychological and philosophical subjects, attacking our assumptions through a gigantic thought-experiment of a fantasy series, and doing something that the genre honestly really hasn't done before. But can the same be said of Morgan, Douglass, and Abercrombie? Are they trying to be relevant by having their characters swear, smear feces on their swords before battle, and rape twelve-year-old girls while on chevauchée? Does this actually make them adult, sophisticated, literary? Do you need this stuff in order to be more realistic? What purpose does the inclusion of scatology, foul language, graphic violence, sex, and torture actually serve in the novel? Is this really going to prevent a writer from merely mimicking Tolkien?

Or perhaps somebody is just throwing the baby out with the bathwater?

Book Review -- A STORM OF SWORDS by George R.R. Martin

Backdropped against the torrential rains and falling leaves of a year-long autumn, the War of the Five Kings grinds to a halt and most of the plot threads are, if not resolved, then placed in a sort of stasis for the coming winter. George R. R. Martin closes the first part of his cycle with shocking brutality, bitter revelations, and broken promises--and its a stupendous and tragic vision of a war-torn medieval kingdom.

Martin follows his usual pattern in this novel. Whereas A Game of Thrones (review) detailed the events that lead up to (and caused) the War of the Five Kings, and A Clash of Kings (review) described the first half of the war, A Storm of Swords describes the final stages of the war after its turning-point at the Battle of the Blackwater. As in previous novels, each viewpoint character is given a specific story arc, and Martin draws them through a sequence of events which irrevocably change who and what they are by the end of the novel. Each story arc is a formative experience to his characters, and by the end of the novel, they have learned and grown as characters. Perhaps in A Storm of Swords we can see the most transition from Martin's perspective characters.

The book follows the viewpoints of Jon Snow, Daenerys Targaryen, Catelyn Stark, Arya Stark, Bran Stark, Sansa Stark, Tyrion Lannister, Jaime Lannister, Davos Seaworth, and Samwell Tarly--a total of ten characters, as compared to eight in A Game of Thrones and nine in A Storm of Swords. What is especially exciting is we are given the perspective of Jaime Lannister, the Kingslayer, which goes an incredibly long way in illuminating his personality, motivation, and especially the reasoning behind the famous betrayal that earned him his moniker. A Storm of Swords is a lengthy 1,177 pages in length, but the plethora of points-of-view means that many of the main characters only get a few chapters (such as Davos and Samwell) while others get a great many (Jon, Arya, Tyrion, Sansa, and Jaime having the most chapters dedicated to them). Again, the action in the book is mainly divided between the main thrust of the war in the Riverlands, Daenerys' activities across the sea, and the wildling invasion against the Wall. Through it all, Martin slowly begins to reveal something sinister at work in the darkness of the cold northern wastes, ominously forshadowed by the onset of autumn and the promise of winter. Against this, a mysterious foreign deity, the Lord of Light, has begun to make its presence felt in Westeros.

Not all things are as they seem.

Martin has proven himself to be a master storyteller. I've written before that A Song of Ice and Fire is a primarily character-driven tale. Martin establishes situations around his characters that force them to change and grow as people--or die. This doesn't always mean they grow in good ways. By the end of the book, Arya Stark and Tyrion Lannister may have embarked upon paths that will make them extremely brutal and callous individuals, for example.

Again, Martin's prose is quite plain and unassuming. It's not turgid, clinical, or florid. My only critique is that he has made a habit of spending too much time in flashbacks, ripping us from the current situation and into the past in a lengthy side-story. Although flashbacks are a useful technique, he uses them too often to recount long and lengthy sequences of events that had already taken place off-stage (or, perhaps, off-page), and it would be much simpler to just include those events as they happened as briefer, earlier chapters.

Many have said that A Clash of Kings was the high-point of the series. While I can understand what they mean, I don't necessarily agree. A Storm of Swords is a difficult book, but it is also much more complex. Its themes don't jump out at the reader quite so easily.

Weddings play a huge role in this novel, as does the backdrop of autumn. Throughout the novel, rains cause rivers to swell and become powerful barriers against the passage of armies. The marriages and childbirths that are featured throughout this book--each an event that is supposed to be joyous--is shrouded in pain and misery. A Storm of Swords is about pain and loss. It is about things falling apart. It is about lies and betrayal at the hands of those one had trusted most.

Autumn is symbolic of decay, death, and entropy. It is the season in which the warmth and life of summer begins to fade and harvests are collected. A Storm of Swords is a chronicle of the grim harvests that many reap as a result of their actions. Weddings, which usually take place in springtime, are held throughout this novel and their aspects are clouded with the decay and death that is foreshadowed by the approaching winter and the changing of the leaves. Life and death are in juxtaposition throughout this novel as well. The war of opposites, between the cold and the ice of the Others and the warmth and the light of R'hillor, the Lord of Light, is ironically marked with the use of sacrifice and undeath as a tool. Is Berric Dondarrion much different from the wights that the Others deploy throughout the novel? Childbirth, weddings, and funerals all are a mash of emotions and themes that aren't easy to untangle, and Martin challenges both the readers and his characters with events that spiral out of control, and by the end of the book, everything that the Starks and Lannisters have built seems to have fallen irreparably apart.

I can't be more specific without giving away too much of the story. Suffice it to say, Martin suffuses the pages of his novel with these themes. Betrayal and accusations of betrayal (as well as innocence) are ubiquitous. Vengeance is served, justice is dealt and abused, and many, many people die horrible deaths.

Nonetheless, this book is rife with spectacularly powerful scenes. The emotional weight they carry is stupendous. One of the highest points in the book for me was the duel between Gregor Clegane and Prince Oberyn Martell. Arya Stark earns the grudging respect of Sandor Clegane, but at the cost of her innocence and a piece of her humanity in an incredible scene in the taproom of an inn near the book's conclusion. The Night's Watch defend the Wall in a sequence of battles that can only exhilarate the reader, especially after the trauma of the other story-arcs. Robb Stark, the Young Wolf, the boy king who never lost a battle in the field and even took Jaime Lannister captive, makes a disastrous decision that has unspeakable consequences, all due to his youth and innocence. The horror and heartbreak of the Red Wedding and the fact that the reader knows that it is coming was one of the final and most difficult parts of the novel Martin had written.

In my opinion, through all the pain and suffering, betrayal and vengeance, Martin has actually topped his effort in A Clash of Kings, though I know many people will disagree with me. This book is more complex than its predecessors. Its themes are nowhere near as simple as A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings. Actions have consequences in this series, and Martin's characters are human and have human foibles. The author is unapologetic with the grittiness and realism of his world. This is not Tolkien's Middle-Earth, where all men are noble and good. Even the good guys make bad choices sometimes. Choices in A Song of Ice and Fire have always had repercussions, and, as Daenerys Targargyen learns throughout the book, responsibility for one's decisions must be taken, especially when the fate of thousands (maybe millions) of lives are placed in one's hands.

A Storm of Swords is the best novel yet in A Song of Ice and Fire. I'm currently awaiting the arrival of A Feast for Crows in the mail, and then I imagine I'll be eagerly anticipating A Dance with Dragons alongside the rest of Martin's fanbase.

A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin
Style B+
Substance A+
Overall A

Book Review -- A CLASH OF KINGS by George R. R. Martin

I've felt highly compelled to return to George R.R. Martin's Westeros immediately upon finishing the last book (check my review here). So, without a single moment of pause, I grabbed A Clash of Kings and started digging through it. It was when I was about halfway through it that I realized that I was totally wrong about Martin's multiple-viewpoint approach, among other things.

First, Martin's world-building is second only to Steven Erikson and R. Scott Bakker. And The Alexandrian is right, the world of A Song of Ice and Fire is comparable to an onion, and in this book, a number of layers are peeled back.

Martin's writing style becomes quite clear when compared to the first book. The opening book chronicled the events leading up to the outbreak of dynastic civil war in Westeros, a continent formerly unified approximately three centuries previous by the Targaryen dynasty, dragon-taming refugees from ruined Valyria. Through eight perspectives, it laid the groundwork of actions different characters took that brought the entire continent to war. It also tracked the progress of Daenerys Targaryen and her brother as they sought to rebuild their lost fortunes as exiles. I gave the ending of A Game of Thrones little thought, until I realized how perfectly it set up the opening moves in A Clash of Kings.

Martin's style is essentially to create a situation through which each character must progress--their own plot thread, basically--which resolves at he end of the book. However, this resolution often leaves the character on the precipice of another challenge that will likely develop in the course of the following book. In this manner, Martin is really writing several books in one, tying them together in a single setting, occurring roughly simultaneously. The result is that, while at first blush A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings appear very loosely plotted, they are actually extremely tight.

I was also wrong about my comments on character-driven events. In retrospect, I was really reaching for criticisms of A Game of Thrones. Martin's books aren't just character-driven, but the events of the story drive the characters, forcing them to make decisions. A great example (and I won't spoil it for you) is the choice Sandor Clegane makes at the end of A Clash of Kings. It comes as extremely surprising, but it makes perfect sense once you consider the circumstances. Martin is also paying incredibly close attention to his characters, and most authors may forget the psychologies of their characters when they put them into certain situations. Clegane's behavior (his refusal to lead the sortie) and his ultimate decision both make perfect sense when you consider his character's psychology--but it is something we can easily forget, and hence, can come as an unexpected twist. This showcases Martin's incredible strength as a writer, and largely banishes a lot of my doubts that I had at the end of A Game of Thrones.

Martin's world is coherent, and most-importantly, lived-in. His eye for detail really comes to fruition in this book. We get the dirty little inner workings of castles and towns, and we get to see the effects of a medieval chevauchée on the countryside. It is difficult to not compare Martin's work to Tolkien, but one must remember that Tolkien wrote mythologies, not histories (although his myths were coherently presented making them seem historical). Minas Tirith was a city of myth, much like Troy, or the Seven-Gated Thebes of Sophocles, but Martin writes much more down-to-earth and gritty.

Much like A Game of Thrones, the reader shouldn't expect the sort of flowery language and epic tone that Tolkien elicits. Martin, much like his contemporaries, Erikson and Bakker, are writing in a much different time than Tolkien, and it shows. His writing is straightforward, not baroque, delivered in a very matter-of-fact manner. He doesn't waste page space. His descriptions have an air of terse accuracy to them, eschewing a Dickensian turgidity of prose in favor of brevity and action. Martin writes about people doing things, and even when they are sitting around and talking, their conversations aren't meaningless, but drive the book forward.

A Clash of Kings is a massive volume. The US paperback is 1000+ pages long (almost 200 pages longer than A Game of Thrones), but before one would compare it to Robert Jordan, I'd advise that a more accurate comparison would be to Steven Erikson. STUFF HAPPENS in this book. Battles are fought, people are betrayed, entire towns and castles are massacred, people you thought were dead are really alive, religious movements are born, and Martin shoots Chekov's gun repeatedly. There were several points during this book where I almost went into convulsions when I realized that Martin was pulling the trigger on Chekov's gun--he does it and you don't necessarily see it coming, but when you realize the clues were all there, you slap the heel of your palm to your head and find yourself screaming, "THIS IS F---ING AWESOME!" at the top of your lungs.

The characters really come into their own in this volume. I have to say, my favorites are Tyrion Lannister and Arya Stark by far, but I find that I can connect with all of the characters on some level. Some critics of A Game of Thrones complained that a few of the perspectives were from personae that they actively disliked and wanted to skip. At first, during A Game of Thrones, I found myself feeling similar only for Sansa Stark, but the events at the end of the first novel and her experiences throughout A Clash of Kings have softened my opinion of her a bit and I've been able to connect with her much more easily.

Martin's development of his characters is also just as fantastic as his ability to create his world. His characters do not remain static, but transform realistically. For example, Sansa Stark's entire world has been brutally upset and she copes through a mixture of hope and strict adherence to her training as an aristocratic lady. In contrast, her sister Arya develops a keen resourcefulness, cunning, and ability to seize advantage out of every opportunity, despite her youth and inexperience. Martin deepens the internal conflicts of the characters as well, climaxing with Jon Snow's brutal dilemma at the end of the novel. Theon Greyjoy's perspective is introduced, replacing Ned Stark, and giving us insight into his own issues of inadequacy and his desperate need for approval and respect.

To summarize, briefly, A Clash of Kings is not only a worthy successor to A Game of Thrones, it's better. And it actually puts A Game of Thrones into better perspective, so that the reader can appreciate this series for the absolute genius that it is. Martin's got a firm handle on a very complex story that is probably far more literary than I had previously given it credit for being. It is not the deep exploration of psychology or philosophy that R. Scott Bakker's Prince of Nothing is, nor the allegorical homage to early modern romance that Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn is, nor is it an epic myth cycle like Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. If anything, it is Martin's answer to Tolkien and all it's pastiches (David Eddings, Terry Brooks, and yes, even Robert Jordan), and answer grounded in reality, pessimism, and politics.

A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin
Style B+
Substance A
Overall A-

Book Review -- A GAME OF THRONES by George R. R. Martin

George R.R. Martin read Tad Williams' epic trilogy, Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn (some of my notes and comments can be found here) and realized that fantasy was not simply for children, and that an author could do far more than just a pastiche of Tolkien (much like Terry Brooks has been accused). Williams had proven that a writer could draw from a great many sources, such as traditional romance of knights errant, Tolkienesque high fantasy, pulpy and gritty fantasy by such authors as Lieber, Howard, Moorcock, Zelazny, and Anderson, and transcend all of those influences by creating something deep and meaningful while simultaneously avoiding imitation.

George R.R. Martin was inspired by this to begin work on a massive series that was very loosely inspired by the War of the Roses. Thus was born A Song of Ice and Fire. His first novel, A Game of Thrones (released August of 1996, my senior year of high school), runs 860+ pages of intrigue, deception, plotting, and character development. The Alexandrian's review of the first few books states:

This is a brilliant series. Brilliant and painful and beautiful and stunning. Literally stunning. There are points in reading it when I found my mouth hanging agape, in sheer shock.

After reading the first volume, I have to agree.

The book is very strong in its characterization, so much so that the entire plot is very character driven. However, we are rapidly treated to a variety of plot-twists and sudden surprises. When you read this series, you will find many of your expectations to be overturned. Martin's story reflects real life in the manner that the best-laid plans do not always come together as we expect them to, and unforeseen elements will completely derail them. The characters themselves are far from stagnant. They change and grow as they experience things.

And there are a lot of characters. But none of them are identical or interchangeable. Much like R. Scott Bakker's Prince of Nothing series, they are all deeply fleshed out and multi-faceted, with entire psychologies so well-defined that their characters make sense. One drawback to this is that many fans develop deep and abiding hatreds for some of the characters, and therefore have difficulty identifying with them (a great example is the loathing many readers have for Sansa Stark). However, I believe that they are limiting themselves by simply reading about characters that they would like. Martin hasn't set about creating entirely sympathetic characters, but instead has built believable personalities and psychologies for each one, making them real and occasionally alienating. Martin's book is fantasy, but it isn't all that escapist (more on this later).

I think there is a great difference between writers like Martin and Bakker when compared to Tolkien, and that difference is the contemporary writers produce books that are propelled by their characters. Tolkien's characters almost seem as if they are along for the ride. For example, the Fellowship is essentially railroaded into the Mines of Moria, Frodo "accidentally" slips on the Ring at the inn in Bree, and the Ring's temptation of Boromir is the author driving a character to take an action that would result in a party-split that otherwise may not have occurred. It's more of an event-driven plot, and the characters are not as free to act as the ones in Bakker's and Martin's books. That being said, the psychology of the characters themselves determines their behavior in the contemporary tales, and while Martin's psychology isn't anywhere near as heavy as Bakker's, it's there and it certainly plays a role.

We may not agree with the behavior, decisions, and opinions of all of the characters Martin presents to us, but we can certainly understand and perhaps even sympathize. And we can even see how actions can cause events that spiral out of control and force confrontations.

This isn't to say that all of the plot is purely character driven (for example, Lady Catelyn Stark and Lord Tyrion Lannister just happen to visit the same inn on the same rainy day), but their behavior is perfectly in character and the choices both of them make on that particular occasion put not only themselves, but the entire continent of Westeros on a course toward war. Once these events begin, we can see that the different players, such as Lord Tywin Lannister, Robb Stark, and others, have too much to lose by not taking action. It is very interesting, especially after reading Geoffrey Blainey's The Causes of War about a year-and-a-half ago, what assumptions and plans different factions make when going into a war, and how these differ from the reality that emerges. We literally see some of these characters do risk-reward assessments for their proposed actions. In a way, this is a fascinating study in how wars can begin from small causes which ignite underlying tensions.

Martin's book is smart, but some might say that it is unfocused. One major complaint is that it jumps around too much. In A Game of Thrones, the story is told through eight separate points of view, with three major plot threads in development (one of which is divided into numerous subplots). Although these may very well unite at some point in the series, being jerked between three major story-arcs can be quite jarring for some readers. It's a symptom of what I call the "soap-opera impact" on fantasy-fiction, in which numerous plot threads have to be playing out simultaneously, and the author must constantly jump from one to another in order to keep the reader's attention. Martin's use of eight separate perspectives involves ample use of cliffhangers between chapters, but to his credit, he doesn't always leave us hanging. He often uses the transition to different character viewpoints to give us a variety of perspectives on events. This comes off as a strength, albeit a tricky one to maintain.

A possible weakness later in the series may come from our familiarity with the characters. Our exposure to more and more players throughout the series may serve to strain Martin's ability to surprise us further. I read that at one point, we get to see the inner workings in the mind of even the Kingslayer, Jaime Lannister, one of the most interesting characters in the series, as a chapter is told from his point of view. The problem with this is, while it can make the characters themselves more fascinating, it also could dispel some of the mystery surrounding their drives and goals, thus making them more predictable. Martin could end up painting himself into corners, forcing himself to make his characters act in ways contrary to their established natures in order to provide more surprises. Simply adding new characters to continue generating plot twists could get old.

In brief, though, I think Martin takes many of the potential weaknesses of his style and turns them into strengths. Instead of leaving the reader dangling after numerous plot threads over long periods of time, Martin is busy developing them. There's no sense of resolution yet, but the three main plot threads are held up by subthreads that tend to move and resolve rapidly enough to keep the reader interested, and the different character viewpoints provide one with a variety of perspectives, which keeps the book fresh and entertaining.

The weakness of this, however, is the lack of any one single protagonist with whom the reader can specifically identify. And this will honestly come down to individual preference. Some readers cannot get past the constant shifts in character, especially to certain characters they dislike. Indeed, a good literary critic might have to ask if this is preventing Martin's work from actually succeeding as something more than just fantasy. Tad Williams' work transcends fantasy, but I really can't say the same about Martin's work. It reads like a historical fiction novel, actually, and not much like a fantasy at all, and while this may be a strength, it doesn't propel the work into the sort of literary magnitude and depth that Tad Williams' books had.

That being said, though, Martin's not writing an escapist sort of story. The tale is bloody, brutal, and full of lots of unpleasantness. He's unapologetic about war. There that he sugar-coats and glosses over. He takes on a lot of challenging and unpleasant facets of medieval society. Sex and sexual violence are a part of warfare. The frequency and brutality with which rape occurs can be disturbing, but Martin is jamming it in our face in order to challenge our whitewashed conceptions of medieval warfare being chivalric (see "Chapter 3: Chivalry and the Chevauchée in John A. Lynn's Battle: A History of Combat and Culture). However, Martin doesn't employ the poetic finesse of a Tolkien that could perhaps propel this book beyond being exemplary genre and something more.

Then again, it's simply the opening volume, and Martin could further cultivate and develop a lot of these more challenging aspects of his tale further.

Is there symbolism in the book? Absolutely. The first chapter has the Starks finding the wolf-cubs, and I would most certainly suggest that the cubs' symbolize the Starks themselves, as well as their fates. This is especially poignant regarding Eddard Stark. (NOTE: This is, honestly, hardly a spoiler, because Martin foreshadows it so hard that if you are surprised then you need your head examined). What Lady's fate says about Sansa Stark is anybody's guess at this point, but I have my interpretations/theories. Arya, Rickon, and Robb all very much embody the actions and fates of their wolves by the conclusion of the book. Only Bran seems to stand out, but that is because I believe his condition is not as debilitating as it seems, since his wolf is fine.

There's some other symbolism in the book, but none of it seems to really jump out at me as embodying some higher sort of meaning. Perhaps I have to go back and reread the series again once I'm finished, but I haven't detected the sort of deeper philosophical and spiritual meaning that Tad Williams underpins Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, for example. Does that make Martin's books at all bad? Absolutely not! Indeed, Williams' Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn is incredibly unique in it's ability to transcend genre. Martin's work is exemplary, and blows every other fantasy writer out of the water, with the exceptions of R. Scott Bakker, Steven Erikson, early Raymond E. Feist, and J.R.R. Tolkien himself. But you cannot really compare Martin to these works, because, although they all count as fantasy, that is like saying apples, oranges, and grapes are all fruit. There's a limit to how much similarity there is for comparison, before things just begin to break down.

Martin's purpose in writing A Game of Thrones is to tell an intensely political story, rife with labyrinthine politics and byzantine treachery, flawed and intensely human heroes (the best kind), and no clear antagonist. It's tragic, really, if you think about it, but then again, all wars are, after all. And Martin succeeds in his aim. There were times where I had to reread a passage out of sheer disbelief, for the things that occur in it. Martin lacks the over-flowery prose of some fantasy authors, and delivers his medieval setting with all the nasty, dirty details. The sheer variety of his characters and their fully-fleshed personalities is only surpassed by Bakker.

With writers like Erikson, Bakker, and Martin, I think fantasy has a great deal of potential. The only flaw in the book is a lack of a clear protagonist. But it is a necessary sacrifice for Martin to be able to tell the sort of story that he wants to tell. The variety of perspectives throughout the novel gives it a uniqueness that helps to keep the story moving and keeps us from getting bogged down in one character's shoes. Martin needs the varied points-of-view in order to tell exactly what kind of story he wants. Without them, his book would be much weaker, even if it were more solidly and conventionally constructed. Martin's risk becomes the reader's reward.

A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin
Style B
Substance A
Overall B+