Laura Miller’s New Yorker piece on George R. R. Martin and his fans (who are legion) was great, and left me dying to read Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series. I like fantasy, I like complexity, I like HBO tv shows: done deal, right? I borrowed the first two books, A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings from my friend James, who has read them several times since childhood (Game of Thrones was written fifteen years ago).

By way of brief description, the books describe the power struggles of various high-born families in the Seven Kingdoms, and take their plot and setting cues from something approximating English medieval history (I think Martin has said that the plot is loosely based on the War of the Roses). They are huge books – both volumes run to over 700 pages – giving other sprawling fantasy worlds reason to reconsider their level of commitment.

Game of Thrones is a much easier sell than Clash of Kings: it is laden with surprises and ends with a fist-pumper of a scene. Clash of Kings suffers from the lugubriousness of an already expansive universe that Martin only continues to complicate, edge outwards and fill in, introducing more and more characters, locations and intrigues. Of course, that’s no problem in itself, but I found the second volume a bit tedious in places, and while I occasionally skipped over pages of description in the first book, I skimmed whole sections of Clash of Kings without regret. So while it was no great difficulty to continue on to the second book after the first, I’m in no hurry to go on to the third any time soon. (Dana Jennings’ NYT review of the fifth book in the famously long-incomplete series has swayed me slightly.)

Obviously, a lot happens in the 1500+ pages I read. (If anyone is giving out prizes for understatement of the year, I’ll take one.) But a few general areas of note. (Note that because there are so many significant plot changes, there’ll inevitably be SPOILERS. And note that I’m in no way trying to convert non-fantasy readers to these books. If the words ‘meat and mead’ anger you, you shouldn’t read this at all – click here now.)

I Sex and women

When an early description of a family’s bloodline contains the words ‘for centuries they had wed brother to sister’, you know you’re in for a hard-to-defend-to-your-friends kind of read. And no bloody joke. In Game of Thrones alone, you get twincest and a very closely written scene between an adult man and a thirteen-year-old girl. It’s enough to make you realise how grateful you are for age-of-consent laws.

Many of the male characters fall somewhere on the spectrum from bawdy to lewd. Hardly a conversation goes by among fighters or in the kitchens where a man doesn’t wish for a girl ‘to tumble in bed’. Even the king does it. It’s so widespread, cumulative and repetitive that any feminist or structural editor might feel their fists slowly curling up at their sides.

But there are two great female characters in these books, who offset this constant objectification. Queen Cersei Lannister, the king’s wife, is a villain with a bottomless hunger for power. Her machinations are almost totally untempered by tenderness, and she has a hysterical edge that’s truly terrifying. And Daenerys Targaryen, exiled daughter of the dead and deposed King Aerys, begins the books as a thirteen-year-old sold off by her brother as a bride to a savage horselord, but grows into a queenhood of her own.

II Structure and size

The books comprise short chapters written in close third-person, hopping around between the tennish main characters. In Game of Thrones, most of the POV characters belong to the Stark family, who rule at Winterfell, in the North. There are lots of surprises in these books, not least of which is that one of the POV characters dies. It’s been noted many times that a virtue of the series is its willingness to subvert common conventions of the genre: whereas loyalty in fantasy series can usually be secured by one act of kindness, here it may merely be a mask for future betrayal and ambition; a talisman that might be thought to guarantee protection falls by the wayside, leaving a sympathetic character vulnerable. These upturned tables make Game of Thrones exciting in a way many hero-based fantasies aren’t: the usual sympathetic-character life guarantee is out.

If you’re not good with keeping track of a large cast of characters, you may find this series totally impenetrable. The first book is more manageable, as a good first part of it details a relatively stable period in the narrative. But in the second book, more than once a name made me think, ‘Who the shit is that?’ This is partly because the story, like a real war, requires footsoldiers. In films, they would be credited as Cruel, Ugly Bannerman #4, but here they get names and family trees. By the time I finished the book I was beyond the point of caring if I could remember who everyone was, but there is a helpful appendix for people like me, listing characters by allegiance.

III Reader sympathies

The multi-POV structure of these books makes them a huge (and sometimes very successful) exercise in engaging readers’ sympathies. In some cases, it’s not that tough a job. Six of the Starks are POV characters, and there’s a lot of foundation-laying to get you behind them: the first book follows the family very closely, with Lord Eddard Stark becoming the king’s foremost counsellor. He’s wise and nobel, and he loves his wife. He never talks  about tumbling girls. Other characters often happen to say that the Starks put honour above everything, and the Stark children are mostly winning, if occasionally one-dimensional, types: there’s a girl who’s a tomboy, a girl who’s ladylike, a toddler, a noble-by-character-but-not-by-birth bastard son, etc.

But the more interesting propositions are Tyrion Lannister and Daenerys Targaryen. Tyrion is a Lannister, which family are basically the Mean Girls of the series. They are conniving, they are ambitious, they are cruel and some of them have sex with each other. Tyrion is a dwarf and facially deformed, and is not regarded well by any of his family, despite his political nous and dry wit. Daenerys, the aforementioned exile child, starts off as a passive and pliant child, whom we know comes of murderous blood. Yet Tyrion is smart and self-aware, possessing kingdom-saving good judgment. And Daenerys grows from a timid girl into a resourceful and regal young woman.

We get less of Daenerys and Tyrion in Clash of Kings, which is perhaps one of the reasons I lost interest. Martin introduces a few new POV characters, including Davos Seaworth, an ex-con turned knight, and Theon Greyjoy, once ward of the Starks.  Perhaps the main reason the second book paled a little for me was that these new characters felt totally convenient, chosen purely as Martin’s eyes and ears in each relevant new locations. Davos is a bit vanilla; I can hardly remember anything that happens in his sections, and I couldn’t bring myself to be interested in him since he is a loyal supporter of the least sympathetic claimant to the throne. Theon is a bit more interesting, but he’s also a coward and a prick.

IV Conclusion

I am feeling ambivalent about continuing with this series. New York and Melbourne are both currently covered in advertising for the HBO series, so I’ll probably try and chase that up eventually, at least. Sean Bean in armour? Sign me up! And during the course of writing this I came across some future plot points that intrigued me, both on the story level and in terms of Martin’s end game with the series. What I’ve noted above deals only with the first two volumes in a series acknowledged as genre-vitalising and truly epic in scope. No doubt one of these days I will find myself wishing for some 700-page funsies, and for those I know where I will turn.