A Game of Thrones

Synopsis
Intrigue! Treachery! Good vs. evil! Undead enemies! Romance! Incest! Direwolves! Dragons! Winter!

This fantasy epic has everything—it's meticulously plotted, it has a diverse array of fully realized characters, and it has more than enough plot twists and omg! moments to keep me thoroughly entertained and amazed.

WARNING: This review contains spoilers for this book and the others in the series.


My thoughts
A Game of Thrones has been on my radar for years, but I only got around to reading it when HBO debuted the show based on the book. I flew through it and then devoured the rest of the series. (I even bought the ebook for the latest book on a layover because none of the airport bookstores had the hardcover and I couldn't wait six hours to start it.) I haven't gotten this excited about a series since I discovered Outlander. I wanted to talk about it with random people on the subway, and I wanted all of my friends to read so I could talk about it with them.

I'm usually a little leery of fantasy, but GoT works on many levels.

Setting
I adore history and fiction, and GoT gives me the best of both worlds. It's better written than most historical fiction, and it doesn't have to contort itself to fit in actual historical events. GoT's setting is loosely inspired by medieval Europe, but mostly it sprang from George R.R. Martin's imagination. The kingdom of Westeros, inhabited by Starks and Lannisters, is recognizable as England circa the Wars of the Roses, but only if Scotland were full of mysterious malevolent creatures that bring the dead back to life. Most impressive is that Martin has given his world a rich history and multiple religions.

Page-turning action
Martin knows how to keep the action coming: he opens with the undead, then beheads a deserter, unmasks an incestuous pair of siblings (and introduces an entire incestuous dynasty), paralyzes a seven-year-old, marries a thirteen-year-old off to a ferocious warlord, and scatters the Starks to distant corners of the kingdom—and that's just the first hundred pages. In the next fifty pages, the seven-year-old narrowly avoids death again, a prince nearly gets his arm ripped off by a direwolf, a would-be assassin does get his throat ripped out by another direwolf, and a third direwolf is killed. And Martin is still just getting warmed up. (And if you're not hooked by then, you might just be dead inside.)

There's a lot of heart-pounding action, but I absolutely couldn't put the book down after one chapter where the dead come alive. Martin introduced this concept in the prologue, but it was totally nerve-wracking once I'd come to know the characters.

Characters
There are a lot of them, and even the relatively minor ones have impressive backstories that often become relevant in future books.

The Starks are the heart and soul of the book, and all of them (except Rickon, who can be forgiven since he's three) have tremendous character arcs. Martin splits the narrative between eight different characters, six of them Starks (only the eldest, Robb, and youngest, Rickon, are left without their own chapters). Patriarch Ned provides the moral compass for the book. Jon Snow, Ned's illegitimate son, is interesting both for his mysterious parentage and for his perspective on the happenings in the northern part of the kingdom. Arya, the feisty younger daughter, quickly became one of my favorite fictional heroines of all time. She's nine and she's awesome. Middle son Bran is one of the most intriguing characters in the series. He's the paralyzed seven-year-old and his return from the dead hints that he has a greater purpose in the series. One thing that's been lost in the TV show is the depth of the interactions between the siblings, and I think it's partially because the characters are older in the show. But reading the vulnerability that Robb shows in Bran's chapters and the reactions of Bran and Rickon to their father's death absolutely broke my heart.

Back to the characters. The Lannisters are easy to hate. Tyrion, the only one who gets to share his point of view, is the only likable one and he's maligned by his own family because he's a dwarf. Tyrion's twin siblings are carrying on an incestuous affair with each other, which makes them instantly despicable. Also, Cersei is married to the king, so that complicates matters. And their son Joffrey is an arrogant fool who matures into an evil sadist by the end of the book.

Meanwhile, in the book's third theater of action, Viserys, the prince of the exiled Targaryen dynasty, plots return to power by marrying his younger sister, Daenerys, to a warlord and using his army to invade Westeros. On the surface, Viserys is a bullying psycho (because insanity is what happens after generations of inbreeding); the TV show does a fantastic job of uncovering his layers—the pressure he feels to restore his family's dynasty, his devastation upon realizing that he is incapable of earning the love and respect a leader needs, and the incurable arrogance that ultimately leads to his tragic downfall. However, Daenerys is the one who comes alive in the book. She starts as a helpless pawn sold into marriage, but she manages to forge a connection with her husband, Khal Drogo. In the end, she grows into a woman who can stand up for herself and she becomes a leader in her own right.


Plot twists
Martin seems to take an almost perverse delight in playing with his readers. The Lannisters get blamed for the death of Jon Arryn, which kick-starts the entire story; two books later, that turns out to be a giant red herring. They're also blamed for trying to kill Bran as he lies in a coma; two books later, that one is revealed to be true, although the conspirator turns out not to be any of the usual suspects. Martin drops hints, but they're subtle and there are so many false leads that it's difficult to pick up on the correct ones.

But the thing that makes people love Martin or hate him is his utter ruthlessness. He kills off both Ned and Drogo, and both deaths seem to come out of left field. (Jason Momoa's reaction is classic.) Their deaths force the other characters to grow, but that doesn't make them any less shocking. (Then there was Viserys's death, which was shocking in a wholly different way.) Ned's death was unexpected because he had been a point-of-view character and his story seemed far from over. Drogo's death threw me because of the potential ramifications for Daenerys, who was just beginning to feel secure. Martin is a cruel genius—he started with a character who had nothing at the beginning of the book and gave her a promising future with her husband and their unborn baby (who was destined to be a great leader) and then he took it all away.

And the biggest plot twist—Jon Snow's true parentage—still hasn't been revealed, but Martin brilliantly lays all the groundwork for it in GoT. (Yeah, I'm an unapologetic R+L=J-er.)

Here's my reasoning: Over the course of the book, seemingly every character takes the time to point out that Ned has never done a dishonorable thing in his entire life—except for that one time when he cheated on his wife and fathered a bastard. The only logical conclusion is that he never cheated on his wife, which means Jon can't be his son. ("Logic!" said the Professor half to himself. "Why don't they teach logic in these schools?" *Ahem.* Sorry.) If you listen carefully, you can hear Martin chuckling in the background, poking his readers and going, "Do you get it yet?" (I finally did, embarrassingly late in the book, while I was driving through rural Croatia and didn't have any problems of my own to think about.)

Anyway, if Ned isn't Jon's father, then why has he always treated him as his son and how/where did he find a child who looks so much like a Stark? Ned's chapters frequently include flashbacks, which are useful both for establishing the recent history of Westeros and for slipping in references to his beloved sister, Lyanna. The party line is that Robert Baratheon was betrothed to Lyanna, who was the love of his life; Robert went to war when Lyanna was kidnapped by the Targaryen prince Rhaegar. But! Ned remembers that Lyanna was a free spirit who didn't think Robert would make a good husband. Is it possible that Lyanna was more Dinah-in-The-Red-Tent than Dinah-in-the-Bible? In his deliberately vague flashbacks to her death, Ned mentions blood (she died from complications after childbirth), crushed rose petals (from the wreath Rhaegar gave her when he named her queen of beauty at a tournament), and a promise (that Ned should raise Jon as his own son).

If you're still not convinced, maybe you'd enjoy the fascinating society Horace Miner describes in his essay on the Nacirema.

Bottom line
Thoroughly enjoyable and easily one of the best books I've read this year.

Fine print
A Game of Thrones, by George R.R. Martin
Genre: fantasy
Photo from Goodreads
I bought this book (twice, actually; I gave my first copy to a friend)
I read this book in April 2011