Television viewers recently got a lesson in the style of George R.R. Martin when, late in HBO’s adaptation of “A Game of Thrones,” the first volume in Martin’s five-books-and-growing “A Song of Ice and Fire” series, a character got his head chopped off. As it does in the book, the scene happened without much warning, and less ceremony. Just an unexpected command, a falling sword, and just like that, one of the show’s main leads — a character whom viewers had spent the better part of the season learning to love, or at least like — was no more.
If the startled gasp from Martin’s newfound TV audience was audible, the exasperated sigh of readers who are by now all too familiar with Martin’s fondness for killing off his own creations was just as loud, if not louder. Martin, who is the most successful fantasy novelist working today, has been hailed as the author of a new kind of genre fiction, in which the medium’s traditional comforts — supernatural powers and otherworldly creatures, clearly delineated forces of good and evil, romance and heroism — have been subverted or modernized.
The land of Westeros — as the main continent in “A Song of Ice and Fire” is called — is one that both magic and morals have abandoned (though the magic is perhaps creeping back in). Heroes charge bravely ahead, only to find the knives of their former friends lodged in their backs. Noble kings rise to power at exhilarating speed and then fall just as fast. No sooner do characters capture our loyalty or affection than they are cut down. The bad frequently go unpunished, and the good are often murdered, maimed or raped for their sentimentality.
It is a dark vision that has found an enormous audience. The fifth installment of Martin’s saga, “A Dance With Dragons,” came out on Tuesday, and sold nearly 300,000 copies on its first day in bookstores. Since January, Martin’s publisher has shipped more than four million copies of the series’ first four books. After airing only one episode, HBO renewed “Game of Thrones” for a second season.
In the court of popular opinion, Martin has surged ahead not just of his contemporary Robert Jordan — whose still-unfinished “Wheel of Time” series sold more than 40 million books before the author’s death in 2007 — but of the father of modern fantasy himself, J. R. R. Tolkien. “With the arrival of ‘A Dance With Dragons,’” a reviewer wrote recently, “it’s high time we drove a stake through the heart of J. R. R. Tolkien and ‘The Lord of the Rings.’”
If only. The knock on Tolkien and his descendants, like Jordan, is that their fantasies are too black-and-white, their characters too one-dimensional. Martin’s characters are supposedly made of more modern, realistic and complex stuff — nether good nor evil but merely human, and sometimes barely that. In this, Martin’s most emblematic and fully realized character is Tyrion Lannister, the twisted and hideous dwarf who is a scion of the most crafty and cynical dynasty on Westeros. Unloved by his predatory family and his many enemies alike, Tyrion is coarse, funny and clever, and largely without a conscience. For a short man, his body count is startlingly high.
Tyrion is a masterful character, as is Arya Stark, the plucky youngest daughter of a once-noble family fallen into despair and ruin, and Daenerys Targaryen, sister to a dispossessed and murdered prince and daughter to a mad and usurped king. And 1996’s “A Game of Thrones,” the first book of Martin’s series and the volume in which we first meet all three, is a tightly plotted novel, intricate and unexpected, a thrilling departure from the standard and frequently staid fantasy conventions.
But that is more than you can say about the rest of Martin’s series, which has unfolded in ever more halting salvos over the last 15 years, bogging down in tertiary characters and increasingly insignificant and byzantine plot twists, palace intrigues and political struggles. Nor does it help that Martin is so quick to snip his most appealing and robust characters from his own weavings, building them up over thousands of pages only to snuff them out in a paragraph or two.
Martin is often praised for transcending the strictures of epic fantasy, but there are many conventions of the genre the author is all too happy to leave alone. He is a better writer than many of his peers, but he is still prone to the same repetitions and flat phrases that afflict novelists when their Microsoft Word documents grow long and unruly. Too many scenes repeat without variation or meaningful exposition: Citizens petition their monarchs; priests argue for the primacy of their gods; warriors who are known to be superior disembowel those who are less so. The self-indicting idiom “useless as nipples on a breastplate” is a bad joke made worse by Martin’s fondness for it.
“A Song of Ice and Fire,” once meant to be a trilogy, is now set to stretch over seven volumes, each of which runs to nearly a thousand pages. Over the course of the books, which mostly focus on a protracted and bloody succession struggle over the crown in Westeros, Martin shifts among dozens of different characters’ perspectives, leaving some storylines dormant for years.
Long fantasy series are peculiar things, exercises in delayed satisfaction and an almost sexual kind of withholding — secrets, prophecies and twists are introduced, teased at length, and then finally revealed, granting readers long-awaited and treasured relief. And though authors like Tolkien are often criticized for substituting myth and archetype for fully realized humans, the length of the medium offers an opportunity almost unprecedented in fiction — to get to know characters deeply, over timescales and word counts that simply don’t exist in more conventional literary novels. The engine of books like Martin’s will always be their plot. But it is the men and women fantasy authors create that will determine whether readers will slog to the end.
Some of Martin’s characters are wonderfully real and complex. But many, if not most of them, are not. Ned Stark, the morally upright center of “Game of Thrones,” was depicted in the television adaptation as a charismatic and loyal man undone by his own unbending honesty. But in the book, he’s merely a dupe — a man too dull to see the fate hanging before him, and too proud to get out of the way once he finally does. Stark’s principal antagonist, Tyrion’s sister Cersei, is pure unbridled malevolence, no more or less believable than Tolkien’s evil wizard Saruman or Jordan’s assembled cast of undying Forsaken. And Stark’s daughter, Sansa, is a simpering idiot, leavened by an innate kindness but no real complicating intelligence.
Over the course of the series, as the political intrigue over who will claim the throne in Westeros has spread across newly emboldened factions and neighboring continents, Martin’s cast has swelled. “A Dance With Dragons” at least returns to the point of view of some of the books’ most beloved characters, including Tyrion, Arya, Daenerys and Ned Stark’s (alleged) bastard-turned-guardian of Westeros’ chilly north, Jon Snow. But we are also submitted to long stretches alongside many minor or heretofore-unknown operatives, such as the mild and unmemorable prince Quentyn Martell and the vacantly implacable sailor Victarion Greyjoy.
In practice, this means reading through chapter after chapter from the point of view of people we couldn’t care less about, just to get a glimpse of those we do. And in Martin’s world, we now know, that glimpse may well be brief, and consist of an axe descending to separate a beloved head from its body.
This unsentimental realism is what makes “Song of Ice and Fire” such a natural fit for HBO, where “The Wire” and “The Sopranos” made a dramatic principle out of the fact that anyone could die at any moment. But there are only so many times a writer can hit the reset button before a reader realizes that he or she doesn’t, in fact, care who will be king of an imaginary kingdom. And human weakness and venality are only recognizable as such when there are humans we care about involved. In Martin’s universe, there are precious few of those to begin with, and their numbers have a nasty way of getting smaller all the time.
If the startled gasp from Martin’s newfound TV audience was audible, the exasperated sigh of readers who are by now all too familiar with Martin’s fondness for killing off his own creations was just as loud, if not louder. Martin, who is the most successful fantasy novelist working today, has been hailed as the author of a new kind of genre fiction, in which the medium’s traditional comforts — supernatural powers and otherworldly creatures, clearly delineated forces of good and evil, romance and heroism — have been subverted or modernized.
The land of Westeros — as the main continent in “A Song of Ice and Fire” is called — is one that both magic and morals have abandoned (though the magic is perhaps creeping back in). Heroes charge bravely ahead, only to find the knives of their former friends lodged in their backs. Noble kings rise to power at exhilarating speed and then fall just as fast. No sooner do characters capture our loyalty or affection than they are cut down. The bad frequently go unpunished, and the good are often murdered, maimed or raped for their sentimentality.
It is a dark vision that has found an enormous audience. The fifth installment of Martin’s saga, “A Dance With Dragons,” came out on Tuesday, and sold nearly 300,000 copies on its first day in bookstores. Since January, Martin’s publisher has shipped more than four million copies of the series’ first four books. After airing only one episode, HBO renewed “Game of Thrones” for a second season.
In the court of popular opinion, Martin has surged ahead not just of his contemporary Robert Jordan — whose still-unfinished “Wheel of Time” series sold more than 40 million books before the author’s death in 2007 — but of the father of modern fantasy himself, J. R. R. Tolkien. “With the arrival of ‘A Dance With Dragons,’” a reviewer wrote recently, “it’s high time we drove a stake through the heart of J. R. R. Tolkien and ‘The Lord of the Rings.’”
If only. The knock on Tolkien and his descendants, like Jordan, is that their fantasies are too black-and-white, their characters too one-dimensional. Martin’s characters are supposedly made of more modern, realistic and complex stuff — nether good nor evil but merely human, and sometimes barely that. In this, Martin’s most emblematic and fully realized character is Tyrion Lannister, the twisted and hideous dwarf who is a scion of the most crafty and cynical dynasty on Westeros. Unloved by his predatory family and his many enemies alike, Tyrion is coarse, funny and clever, and largely without a conscience. For a short man, his body count is startlingly high.
Tyrion is a masterful character, as is Arya Stark, the plucky youngest daughter of a once-noble family fallen into despair and ruin, and Daenerys Targaryen, sister to a dispossessed and murdered prince and daughter to a mad and usurped king. And 1996’s “A Game of Thrones,” the first book of Martin’s series and the volume in which we first meet all three, is a tightly plotted novel, intricate and unexpected, a thrilling departure from the standard and frequently staid fantasy conventions.
But that is more than you can say about the rest of Martin’s series, which has unfolded in ever more halting salvos over the last 15 years, bogging down in tertiary characters and increasingly insignificant and byzantine plot twists, palace intrigues and political struggles. Nor does it help that Martin is so quick to snip his most appealing and robust characters from his own weavings, building them up over thousands of pages only to snuff them out in a paragraph or two.
Martin is often praised for transcending the strictures of epic fantasy, but there are many conventions of the genre the author is all too happy to leave alone. He is a better writer than many of his peers, but he is still prone to the same repetitions and flat phrases that afflict novelists when their Microsoft Word documents grow long and unruly. Too many scenes repeat without variation or meaningful exposition: Citizens petition their monarchs; priests argue for the primacy of their gods; warriors who are known to be superior disembowel those who are less so. The self-indicting idiom “useless as nipples on a breastplate” is a bad joke made worse by Martin’s fondness for it.
“A Song of Ice and Fire,” once meant to be a trilogy, is now set to stretch over seven volumes, each of which runs to nearly a thousand pages. Over the course of the books, which mostly focus on a protracted and bloody succession struggle over the crown in Westeros, Martin shifts among dozens of different characters’ perspectives, leaving some storylines dormant for years.
Long fantasy series are peculiar things, exercises in delayed satisfaction and an almost sexual kind of withholding — secrets, prophecies and twists are introduced, teased at length, and then finally revealed, granting readers long-awaited and treasured relief. And though authors like Tolkien are often criticized for substituting myth and archetype for fully realized humans, the length of the medium offers an opportunity almost unprecedented in fiction — to get to know characters deeply, over timescales and word counts that simply don’t exist in more conventional literary novels. The engine of books like Martin’s will always be their plot. But it is the men and women fantasy authors create that will determine whether readers will slog to the end.
Some of Martin’s characters are wonderfully real and complex. But many, if not most of them, are not. Ned Stark, the morally upright center of “Game of Thrones,” was depicted in the television adaptation as a charismatic and loyal man undone by his own unbending honesty. But in the book, he’s merely a dupe — a man too dull to see the fate hanging before him, and too proud to get out of the way once he finally does. Stark’s principal antagonist, Tyrion’s sister Cersei, is pure unbridled malevolence, no more or less believable than Tolkien’s evil wizard Saruman or Jordan’s assembled cast of undying Forsaken. And Stark’s daughter, Sansa, is a simpering idiot, leavened by an innate kindness but no real complicating intelligence.
Over the course of the series, as the political intrigue over who will claim the throne in Westeros has spread across newly emboldened factions and neighboring continents, Martin’s cast has swelled. “A Dance With Dragons” at least returns to the point of view of some of the books’ most beloved characters, including Tyrion, Arya, Daenerys and Ned Stark’s (alleged) bastard-turned-guardian of Westeros’ chilly north, Jon Snow. But we are also submitted to long stretches alongside many minor or heretofore-unknown operatives, such as the mild and unmemorable prince Quentyn Martell and the vacantly implacable sailor Victarion Greyjoy.
In practice, this means reading through chapter after chapter from the point of view of people we couldn’t care less about, just to get a glimpse of those we do. And in Martin’s world, we now know, that glimpse may well be brief, and consist of an axe descending to separate a beloved head from its body.
This unsentimental realism is what makes “Song of Ice and Fire” such a natural fit for HBO, where “The Wire” and “The Sopranos” made a dramatic principle out of the fact that anyone could die at any moment. But there are only so many times a writer can hit the reset button before a reader realizes that he or she doesn’t, in fact, care who will be king of an imaginary kingdom. And human weakness and venality are only recognizable as such when there are humans we care about involved. In Martin’s universe, there are precious few of those to begin with, and their numbers have a nasty way of getting smaller all the time.
PHOTO: Charles Sykes/AP
Author George R.R. Martin appears at a book signing for "A Dance with Dragons" at Barnes & Noble in New York, Thursday, July 14, 2011. HBO's "Game of Thrones," based on RR Martin's epic fantasy novels, was nominated for an Emmy for best drama series on Thursday. (AP Photo/Charles Sykes)
