WIQ: A Song of Ice and Fire

Yes, I’m back already for another Why I Quit. This time, it wasn’t just one book that I quit, but an entire series. I think my resignation was well deserved, but you can judge for yourself once you’ve heard my impressions.

A Song Of Ice and Fire is one of the most popular fantasy book series of all time, which of course was adapted into Game of Thrones, one of the most popular TV series of all time. I would probably be considered a basic bitch in the ASOIAF fandom, because I started with the show and not the books. Plus I was very late in coming to the show, I only started watching after Season 7 had aired.

Buuuut, once I did start the show I got hooked, and hooked bad. Over the course of about six months I watched the entire series probably four times. But then, as the re-watches wore thin, and with the final season still over a year away, I had no other way to continue spending time in the Game of Thrones world besides reading the books.

I mentioned in a previous post that this was precisely the reason I finally started using audiobooks. I’m a slow reader, and I didn’t want to spend the next two or three years retreading a series I already knew by heart, to the detriment of all the other books on my reading list (obviously the show is different from the books in many ways, but you know what I mean). And it turned out that the more passive experience of listening to the books was precisely what I needed, because I blew through most of the series in less than a year.

Book 1, A Game of Thrones

This novel was everything I hoped it would be, as someone coming fresh off of the TV show. It told essentially the same story with the same characters, but with more details, more background, and more of the in-world history.

I was also surprised by how descriptive and beautiful the prose was in some places. For instance, the jousting scene between Loras Tyrell and the Mountain is downright beautiful; I still remember the something along the lines of ‘Loras and his horse streamed down the pitch like a silver thread’.

The book is certainly long-winded, and maybe a bit convoluted, but overall a really solid fantasy read that leaves you wanting more.

Book 2, A Clash of Kings

Not much to say here, because my reaction was essentially the same as to the first book. The same story as what you see in the show, but with a lot more detail and more background, which fleshes out the whole world and also makes sense of some things that don’t quite connect in the show.

I greatly enjoyed it, and this is the point where I was most invested in the series. I enjoyed every little difference from the show that I noticed, and I was really looking forward to seeing the story in the book take its own path.

Book 3, A Storm of Swords

Sadly, this is where the series starts to fall apart for me. And it is not the story that falls apart, but the writing. In my recollection, this book is about eighty percent buildup, ten percent payoff, and ten percent setup for the rest of the series. That ratio might be just fine, if executed correctly, but this book was not.

The final few chapters do get super interesting, in terms of plot, but even some of those scenes go by so quickly that they don’t satisfy all the buildup. This is where the TV show shines; the showrunners, for all their flaws, were able to take the insanely convoluted world of ASOIAF and distill it down to the most important character interactions, while the books expound endlessly on unimportant details, and pretty much gloss over the real meat of the story.

This one book exemplifies both the strengths and weaknesses of the entire series. We have tons and tons of character development, plot twists, and disgusting details that are horrifyingly similar to real history. BUT, we also have really, really long exposition dumps, and character introductions that drone on incessantly, as well as the most egregious literary sin in my opinion, lazy prose...

There is one specific sentence structure that Martin overuses to the point that I could barely concentrate on the story anymore:

[Character] [verb phrase] so [adjective] that [character] nearly/almost [verb phrase].

Paraphrased example:

‘John swung his sword so hard that he nearly fell off of his horse.’

Seriously, this structure is so ridiculously abundant in books 3 and 4 that I still remember it clearly two years after I quit this series. It goes well beyond a ‘writer’s tic’, it’s a full-blown crutch for Martin.

I know different writers have different relationships to prose, and it’s not necessarily wrong to reuse similar structures, but when you’re writing thousands upon thousands of pages and reusing the same sentence over and over while just switching out the verbs and adjectives, it comes across as lazy. Like, why should this book be over one thousand pages, when so much of it is just the same sentence with different names, verbs, and adjectives?

You might say that this is inevitable in epic fantasy series, that there are only so many possibilities for the structure of a sentence and that after thousands of pages this becomes unavoidable. In which case I would refer you to The Lord of the Rings, or Dune, or even just the earlier books in A Song of Ice and Fire.

Yes writers have a tendency to favor certain structures or rhythms, but reusing one single structure hundreds of times in a single book is not inevitable, it’s bad writing.

Book 4, A Feast for Crows

Okay, so, I don’t feel good about saying this, but I think this is the worst book I’ve ever read. And I realize that might not be fair, given the massive scope of the story, the laundry list of main characters, and the fact that I have read very few bad books (a condition I will discuss in a future post).

And it’s also not to say that there are no good aspects to this book, because there are still enjoyable scenes and plenty of interesting characters. But this is where the flaws really start to add up, and at least for me, threaten to capsize the entire series.

One of my biggest gripes is that we completely abandon many of the main characters from previous books in favor of totally new and unrelated characters. In itself, this isn’t necessarily a problem, but Martin makes it a lot worse by spending most of the book on storylines that lead to dead-ends--literally and figuratively. Characters embark on long, meandering missions that end with their own death or imprisonment, and which don’t connect back to the storylines from the other books (at least not within the span of this book).

Somewhere in this 750 page leviathan is the worst scene in the whole of the series, wherein Jamie Lannister meets with a council of Frey’s at the siege of Riverrun. The scene drags on and on, giving each individual character’s entire family history, and each one gives their own long monologue about what they want and why they should get it. And in the end, Jamie just rejects everything everyone said and storms off to do his own thing.

This was such a letdown that I remember actually being mad at the book, and even at Roy Dotrice for reading it to me. I was on the verge of quitting right there, but then in the last few lines that chapter abruptly gets awesome, ending on a twisted, subtly cruel moment between Jamie and another important character (no spoilers). Despite the outrageously long-winded scene that preceded it, I liked this chapter ending so much that it convinced me to keep reading a little longer.

Book 5, A Dance of Dragons

Finally, a return to form… almost. In Dance of Dragons we finally return to the characters I had missed in the previous book, and the story feels like it’s moving again, but unfortunately it just creeps along like a dying slug, and the writing is long-winded and repetitive in the ways I’ve already mentioned.

To me it felt like the big cogs of the story were turning again, but I’d used up all my patience getting here. The escapism became frustrated, inspiration was lagging. Sooooo... I quit. I didn’t hate it, and I did want to know where the story was going, but to me it was not worth the time it would take to get there, especially considering the low quality of the writing at this point.

A lot of people are upset that book 6 may never come out, not to mention book 7, which is supposed to be the final installment. I, too, want a satisfying ending to this series. But even if those two final tomes actually come out, I doubt that I’ll read them; as often happens with sudden obsessions, I’m all burned out now.

And anyway, I already got from this series the most important thing that fiction can provide: a good long escape and plenty of inspiration. For which, George R.R. Martin deserves a lot of credit. His stories struck a major chord in our culture, and provoked an almost obsessive escapism in me, personally.

It sucks how the TV show squandered the legacy of the whole series, for me and many others. They took an intricate, character-driven fantasy epic and turned it into bubble-gum nerd-pulp by the end, which nobody wanted, especially the nerds. But this is why I say we must learn to enjoy the series in its incompleteness, to revel in its protracted degradation.

‘Mmmkaayy that’s my ASOIAF hot take! But what do you think? Did you like the books? Did you obsess over the TV show? What should the real end of the series be? Let me know in the comments!

Peace,

Gilbo Gabbins