Finally, after months of brief reading bouts and long breaks I finally finished this book. This is the first instalment by the way, to those who are only familiar with the TV series thinking that the whole series is called Game of Thrones. To the uninitiated, the novel series is called “A song of Ice and Fire” and Game of Thrones is just the first book in the series. But who am I kidding? Everyone has heard about Game of Thrones thanks to HBO. It even mentions the series on the book! The age we are in where the source material has to be sold citing the screen adaptation.
“Original Series”… pfft, yeah right. But that also tells us about the quality and success of the TV series. You don’t see Harry Potter books saying- “Now has a super hit movie adaptation”
I first read about this book some 5 years back when I randomly Googled “Best fiction books” and landed on a page and among the list was this one, right after some religious scriptures (Just kidding.. Jeez). Me being me I simply tucked it away in the To-Read list and forgot about it. Then came the TV series and took the world by storm. To be honest I only heard about the TV series around the end of 3rd season and by the time I downloaded it the 4th season had also started broadcasting. I decided I won’t watch the TV series and would read the books first, and now I laugh at my own confidence back then. One of my FB friends said “Watch only the first season. There are so many characters that it’s hard to keep track. Watching a season will help you understand the characters and you can recall their faces while reading the books.” I thought that was a good idea since that’s how I enjoyed Harry Potter series so much. So I sat down one day and played the first episode. Remember how you think you’ll have just one more shot of liquor and then you wake up next day in someone’s bathroom?… No?.. Hehe neither do I.. No really!!! But I imagine that this must be how frustrating it would feel because I realized a few days later that I had finished watching all 4 seasons.
Having no more episodes to watch I decided to pick up the book and read it. Because of work, because of other commitments, and simply because of my laziness, by the time I finished the book the 5th season had also concluded (and my sister had finished reading all five books), but I’d now known how awesome the book really is. So now I have the will to not watch the latest season. I’ve heard of some spoilers from season 5 but I try to ignore them simply because I wish to be astounded when I read the full account in the books. Yes, the book is so much better than the TV series, duh, and mind you the TV series is also one of the best adaptations of a book on screen. I could actually imagine the faces while reading and they didn’t sound much off from their on-screen avatars. So I guess this review is also a promotion of the TV series (something that it doesn’t even need) and somewhat a comparison between the two.
The Story:
The story revolves around Westeros, a fictional continent looking suspiciously like the UK. Viewers of the series please tell me you’ve noticed this too. The continent is probably UK of an alternate universe since we notice that seasons are not annual here. Summers last for years and from what we hear winters last even longer. But something is wrong. In the timeline that this story happens the summer has been ‘summering’ for over a decade which scares the people that the winter is going to be longer and harsher. Winter is coming they say but it’s still nowhere to be seen. This winter is supposedly going to bring with it the White Walkers. Who are the White Walkers? Well if you’ve had the guts to watch or read the “Walking Dead” you’d know that they call the zombies ‘Walkers’, and since its UK we’re talking about they’ll only spawn “White Walkers” right? But the White Walkers are the least of our concern right now because it seems the unrest that the untimely death of the King’s ‘Hand’ in the early pages of the book has set off a domino effect that would rip the Realm apart even before the Walkers arrive.
If you got a penny for every time you read “winter is coming” in this book you can probably buy the next book in the series and so on, but winter would still not be there. “Winter is Coming” is literally the house words of the Stark house, one of the dozen extremely detailed royal houses/families in UK… I mean Westeros. After twenty years since the publication of the first book the slightest glint of hope we have is that the upcoming book is titled “Winds of Winter”, but it’s still just winds so who knows?
I think Westeros must be an alternate universe also because even after more than ten thousand years of history “The Realm” is still ruled by Kings in palaces, guarded by knights, with people predominantly doing manual labour, the country still with no scientific advancement whatsoever. It’s a country you don’t want to live in, to say the least, where people can slit your throat just out of spite.
Writing:
Coming to the writing style, the narration is incredibly detailed. The author George R.R. Martin has woven a fantasy tale so intricate that you’d have to go check the map frequently to understand where the characters currently are, and maybe even check the glossary to understand who in the world the character is. There are hundreds or even thousands of fine elements to the story that could easily be overlooked, but they all fit together in our subconscious mind to produce this amazing world. That’s why it seems so real, because everything fits naturally (even the unnatural).
“The Devil is in the detail” someone said and this devil is so inconspicuous. One such instance I can think of is when a character says about another inconsequential character that he must be depressed as he has no heir and only an ugly daughter. Having seen the TV series I understood instantly that this passing mention about this daughter might be taken as random dialog by the author to fill the page but the said inconsequential character will emerge as a major threat to them in the subsequent books and the daughter also plays an important role. The character’s having no heir also proves to be the driving factor for him to stoop to desperate actions. I was blown away at this single passing statement which had nothing to do with the current book, but goes on to prove that Martin had the whole story laid out in his mind, not just brick by brick but grain by grain. It’s just mind blowing when you think that it’s been 20 years since the first book’s release and there’s still 2 books yet to be published until conclusion.
A great story is something in which the setting has a history, because without history the characters would seem one-dimensional. Everyone we meet in our life has a history. They behave the way they do because of their history. So it only befits that the characters and the entire Westeros have a past, and boy do they have some past. Each character has a painful past making them choose the right or the wrong way, and Westeros itself has centuries if not millennia of history to be told, and we get an oversimplified version once and numerous tidbits now and then that fit perfectly into the big jigsaw puzzle.
Narrative Style:
The narrative in the book is from the perspective of different characters. Each chapter is named after a character. Don’t mistake it to be a story written in first perspective of the characters though. It just means that things are narrated with that character as the focus. Something that happened in a chapter that was from character A’s perspective would take time to reach the character B’s chapter (because there’s no telephone) and there would be no mention of it until the raven arrives with news.
This makes the story so much better because it removes the narrator’s voice from the narration itself by not making it compulsory for the narrator to surprise us with information that was previously withheld. In Dan Brown novels you’d have noticed how some information is hidden from the reader intentionally and when the time is right the narrator says “this is so-and-so because of so-and-so reason. I misdirected you earlier. Haha!” The problem with the ‘narrator voice’ is that it pulls us out of the immersive story to hear things in the author’s voice making us realize that this is a story after-all. It really upset me while reading 1Q84 when, more than halfway through the book, the author suddenly said something like “…to me or to you readers….”; coming out of the trance I looked behind my shoulders, then back at the book and thought “Are you talking to me?”.
So, this perspective story telling helps us see the incidents through the eyes of the character currently in focus and experience the events (sometimes hearing a summary of something that we’ve read in detail from another character’s perspective which helps a great deal to jog our memory) and, since it’s not a Harry Potter book with a defined hero, we have quite some character perspectives to read in (from what I’ve heard the number of perspectives increase with each book). Perspective narrative also shows us deeper sides of the character making us empathize with them, and since the books has a whole gamut of characters you are bound to find someone you’ll fall in love with. And when that happens… well… consider yourself warned.
Like I said earlier, there’s no hero and there’s no villain here. Even though there are typical black and white characters like Eddard who holds honour before everything else and Joffrey who is the standard-issue sociopath, there are plenty of characters in the ‘Grey’ area who we just can’t put in a category. There’s no Good versus Bad but plain matter of family, honour and power. Some choose the right path and some choose the less honourable way to protect their family and/or to win power. All’s fair in love and war right? A war for justice, a battle for power, a game of thrones (that ‘ah’ moment when the title shows up in the book, and there are a few such moments).
Women and the S-word:
Some people criticize the book for its portrayal of women as objects of desire, excessive description of sex and its frivolous references to rape. What can I say? This story is about a medieval period type of country and, believe it or not, women were actually treated like that back then. But despite all the simple minded brothel women making appearances there are dozens of strong female characters in the book, characters that define and influence the progress of the story much much better than the heroines in majority of movies today do. So what are they even complaining about?
And as for the objection about frequent love-making passages- someone has to be hopelessly lonely and a desperate-wannabe-critic to say that women find it repulsive. Are we in the 1950s and James Bond novels have just been released? Hello? Ever heard of Fifty Shades of Grey? The inexplicably most sold book of the decade? THAT weird thing was written by a woman (which even I had problem going through, and I’ve even seen the Hostel duology). I have to say that this is where the TV series messed up, with all the gratuitous nudity that add no value to the story, except maybe lure some watchers. Whether it helps or not, it still is the number one most watched TV Series today, and you won’t complain about it when you watch the show. It’s THAT good. But read the books first. If you still do complain this Quora answer should make you reconsider it-
It’s that simple… taste. Just because your guy likes the book/show doesn’t mean he’s sexist, just like how playing action video games doesn’t make your kid violent. No, really. There are studies showing no relation whatsoever mom!!
Conclusion:
Though it took me months to finish the book I’m sure in the hands of a proper reader the book won’t last more than a week even though it is a huge tome. The book will get you immersed, make you demand more and ultimately leave you heartbroken. So read with caution. And after reading this if you intend to (and I bet you would) get lost in this fantastic world with the subsequent books, bring a sweater, because…
Winter is Coming!
