A long time ago and in the far away land of Brooklyn, Tom gave me a copy of George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones to read. It's one of those brick-sized fantasy novels with knights, dragons, and all that jazz. It was just about the best one I'd ever read, and I'm a big fan of fantasy lit. I became avid about the series, which is now in its fourth book, A Feast for Crows.
Well, it's been almost ten years now, and I'm about half way through A Feast for Crows. And I've got to say, it's awful. Abysmal. I keep reading, because I'm still fond of the world, and Martin is great at writing action that hooks you in. But the book is a bomb. The characters are flat. Nothing happens that we couldn't have predicted. It's pretty much just a recitation of sex and mindless gore--Everything major that happens in the plot happens because someone had sex with someone they weren't supposed to, and the illicit sex caused one of the people involved or a third party to get violent. This is a fine plot device sometimes, but when it's happened about 30 times, it gets boring. No character ever makes a surprising choice; they mainly react to the sex plots, or try to kill the people who cut their hands off or killed their brothers.
Martin has given in to the Robert Jordan temptation and now has such an enormous plot, with something like 20 point of view characters and 10 major settings, that I can't even remember what the pivotal event that set the story off was in the first place. (The other day, it came back to me--it was that King Robert died. Was he murdered? Aren't we supposed to be wondering if he was murdered, or did we figure that out at some point?) A lot of people have rued the fact that the plot got so huge, but let me just point out that the more central problem is that the conflict is lost, and so are the characters we were rooting for initially. I admired him for killing the protagonist in the first book. Tom and Kid Showbusiness both hated that he did that. And now I agree--it was a mistake to kill the guy. Or at least, if he was gonna kill Stark, he ought to have left more of his family alive! Now we're supposed to care about what's going on in Dorne. But we readers joined up for the Starks.
Did I mention that the characters are flat? This includes the women characters--Martin isn't so great at writing about gender, though hey, he could be a lot worse and at least he's got a few women characters. But come on--even a totally evil queen would take some care not to have too many people tortured to death. Evil people can't stay in power if they have everyone tortured to death. That's not how terror politics works. You can't just torture whoever you want; you've got to keep even your nearest allies afraid that they'll be arrested and that no one will stand by them. That means you can't torture according to your whim. You've got to disguise your whim with some kind of ideological legitimacy.
What's really bugging me now is that the book is so violent (this is related to the evil queen). Gratuitously, unrealistically violent. And Martin keeps reciting family genealogies and heraldry for every secondary character, which I think he thinks passes for "depth of world creation," but in fact is just boring, not to mention meaningless.
Beginning, middle, end. That's what Tolkein does so well. (End is the hardest, I think. But all this series really has is a great beginning.)
2 comments:
It seems that fantasy fiction writers have a limited span of creativity. And once they've written one or two best-sellers, the series inevitably falls off as they've used up the ideas they generated over their 20-30 years of not writing books.
The other thing is that, since Tolkien, every sci-fi/fantasy writer has taken it upon themselves to do what he did. That is, they want to create a completely unique and unprecedented vision. Which is fine, but as a driving force behind creation it's ultimate self-consuming.
The author becomes obsessed with uniqueness and "originality". This makes it impossible for them to write up two or three more books in the same style as the first ones. Which, of course, is really all we loyal readers want.
I'm surprised you didn't link to his website. There's even a rambling monologue on the subject of the next book in the series being super dupe late.
for me it was Lloyd Alexander.
axm
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