Being a casual fan of the television show “Game Of Thrones,” which is based on this series of novels “A Song Of Ice And Fire [1],” when I saw this book and its cohorts on sale at Costco the first time I visited there after getting a membership card, I figured it would be a good purchase. I had wanted to read the books since I was in Thailand, and had been unable to fit it into my schedule since then, or find the books as conveniently. In a sense, it seems superfluous to review a book like this, but I will give my best efforts, since it is a large and complicated first volume in a large and complicated saga that has acquired a great deal of cultural cachet as a result of its grim approach as well as its epic storytelling. This book is full of witty comments, some of which have become inside jokes between me and my acquaintances, and between millions of other people as well, like, “A Lannister always pays his debts,” and “You don’t want to wake the dragon,” among many others. The novel is sprawling across two massive imaginary continents, and solves its narrative complexity by using multiple unreliable POV characters who are helpfully given at the beginning of every chapter. Some of them are entertaining to read, like Jon Snow and Tyrion Lannister.

There is a lot of material in this book not to like, some of which is grim because the author takes a clearly amoral view of his characters, making the Queen guilty of incest, making one of the most dishonorable characters of the book—a man who betrayed two kings, one by treacherously rebelling against him and his successor by cuckolding him with his sister, one of the more decent characters of the novel. Those characters that are rigidly honorable, like Ned Stark, meet bad ends, and those who are mean bullies also meet bad ends, like Queen Daenerys’ cowardly brother. As the wicked Queen Cersei says, “If you play the game of thrones, you either win or die,” and this novel takes that advice to heart, so much so it is no wonder that it ended up providing the title for the HBO series as well. Then there are the various aspects of polytheism, of human sacrifice, slavery, raping and slaughtering, casual injustice, of dragons and undead horrors, that a clearly not matters to be trifled with either, that serve as the context for what is clearly a very wicked world that takes much of its narrative force from the wickedness of human history. It is not clear if the author has any larger point to make by putting a Medieval fantasy with so many real-life touches, except to point out that even an author who does not have a clear interest in moral decency and seems far more impressed by subtle wit is fascinated by matters of cosmology.

There is undoubtedly much skill shown in this particular book, skill at crafting a coherent narrative out of many complicated tales of the legitimacy of rulers and in the way that people suffer because those in authority cannot come to any kind of lasting peace. Though none of them are POV characters, it is the immense suffering of ordinary people, who are slaughtered and oppressed, their farms and houses burninated by brigands hired by nobles and nobles who act like brigands, that rings the truest about this story. This is so even though the novel spends a great deal of time trying to point out this world through the vantage points of its diverse group of elite main characters, many of whom are outsiders in some fashion because of physical deformity or illegitimacy or being in exile. Though the reader is intended to empathize with these characters, it is really the ordinary people who one most cares about, even if one does not always know their names, simply because they have to be governed by the sort of people that one reads about in these books, people who cannot rule themselves and have no business ruling anyone else. If that’s not a lesson for our own time, I don’t know what is, a lesson that rings true regardless of the odd cosmology and geography of these books, and the vivid if dark wit that often fills its pages.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/06/09/non-book-review-the-wars-of-the-roses-the-conflict-that-inspired-game-of-thrones/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/07/05/the-first-of-his-name/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/04/08/childs-play/