I read the series for the first time when I was 18 and loved it. Became a devotee, reread it regularly, hung out at the forum, etc… Then, for reasons that I’m sure need no explaining, I paid no attention to it for five years. Recently had a look at the books and now I’m kind of ‘meh’ about the whole thing. When I think back on it, ever common praise that was heaped on the books is actually more a pointer to their mediocrity.
“Martin is so unpredictable and he’s not afraid to kill of his characters.” Actually he’s quite predictable. People always point to the death of Eddard in the first book, but in reality having the adult father of the main characters die off early on is a common plot device in fantasy. It’s a convenient way to clear out the old order and give the main characters something to do. But in the rest of the story, it’s clear that Martin has some characters that he likes a lot: Jon, Tyrion, Daenerys, Arya. Those ones escape from death time after time thanks to amazing coincidences and plot contortions.
“The writing and dailogue are so great.” When I hung out on that message board, we had collections of great lines from the books that we all agreed were just absolutely brilliant. When I read them over, I see that most of the brilliance was just various ways that the characters threatened each other with torture and death. I guess that stuff was amusing to me as a teenager, but not anymore.
“Martin’s depiction of the Middle Ages is totally gritty and realistic.” Somewhat but not very. For an accurate depiction of medieval life, there are other fantasy authors who do it better, such as Robin Hobb or Madeleine Howard. The “grittiness” is really just the fans’ way of saying that he has a lot of characters being tortured and killed in nasty ways. Again I may have liked that in the past. Now I find that I can only read about characters being fed their own severed body parts a certain number of times before it gets kind of old.
So, in conclusion, not the worst books I’ve ever read, but not the best either. I don’t believe I’ll bother finishing the series even if Martin does.
I’m re-reading it for the third time, and I think it’s great. The number of fantasy books I re-read is amazingly small. This one holds up. I’ve been amazed at the number of small details I missed in the first two readings - there’s a ton of “aha!” kind of moments where I realize a bit of foreshadowing or suddenly have some dots connected.
Yes, it’s a common plot device, but it usually happens at the beginning of the story, and not after spending a great deal of time fleshing out the character. I never expected it the first time through, and even now I keep hoping that I’m remembering wrong.
I’ll give you that, but I don’t read fantasy for the literary quality. Martin is heads and shoulders above many fantasy writers when it comes to his writing skills, but he’s no literary genius.
I never thought it was supposed to be a depiction of the middle ages. It’s fantasy; that doesn’t mean that it’s supposed to be realistic. He does, however, create a realistic world. Little, if anything, threatens the suspension of belief.
I really like the books, I am massively bummed that he’s more or less abandoned the series. So few books hold my attention the third time through, and only a handful keep coming up with stuff that I either missed in previous or have forgotten. I think they’re brilliant. And I don’t say that about very many books at all.
I think revisiting fantasy books you read at 18 and being underwhelmed is hardly surprising, is it? Reading skills improve massively as we read more serious books as we get older, so we get much more analytical and sharp in assessing books.
That being said, what is your frame of reference for such a mediocre assessment of GRRM? I read the Song of Ice and Fire as an adult [by a quirk of timing I actually picked the first one up about 2 months before the publication of ‘A feast for crows’, so I got to read all of them in rapid sequence - now I’m waiting for the 5th like everyone else] and it is in a different street to any other series of that type I’ve read.
I’d be surprised if you could recommend me one other fantasy series that was nearly as good. Not shocked, but surprised. It’s not a genre I’ve kept up with over the past ten years, so it’s quite possible there are some other gems out there -Steve Erickson often gets mentioned in this connexion for example. But compared to all other epic fantasy stuff I was reading growing up the Song of Ice and Fire is head and shoulders above.
I would agree that ‘A feast for crows’ was really average, on reflection. Some great writing in parts, but just seemed really bogged down with structural problems to do with the overall vision of the work.
I mostly agree with the OP. I think much of the reason SoF&I gets so much praise it’s because it’s iconoclastic. It’s intentionally different from other major fantasy works. Characters die, there’s a lot of grey area morality, the story arcs go on unexpected tangents, but that can only get you so far.
I think the quality of writing is well above par, but not phenomenal. The fantasy genre has so much stagnant, generic writing that something different turns a lot of heads, but the novelty wore off for me about half way through the second book.
That said, the only fantasy I’ve really liked is Tolkien, Pratchett, and CS Lewis, so maybe I’m a grump.
I forced myself to read the first one for the first time a few months ago.
I was amazed that people had recommended it to me. The language (both the exposition and the dialogue) made me want to throw the book across the room at least once a chapter. To me, the characters flaws did not make them complex or realistic, it made them loathsome. I found Martin’s version of the noble savage myth just as awful as most versions of that myth and his pro-pedophilia argument (which seems to be that it’s fine, the adult just needs to take it slow) really fucked up; those scenes were disgusting - that they were presented as romantic made them worse.
The idea of a multi-faction war while a greater threat approaches is interesting. I admit, I kind of want to know how it turns out. But I don’t want him to write it and I don’t want to follow his characters through it.
Tyrion had his nose cut off and his face sliced open so far he was pretty much incapacitated for a month. And that was just one battle.
Arya’s been tortured, beaten, and is now blind for an indefinite period of time (though if we go by times between books being released I’d guess 20 years)
These are the characters GRRM likes!
Besides, I’d argue that it should be no surprise that at least some characters miraculously survive despite all odds. It is a fictional story after all and if he literally killed off everyone every book there’d be no real story to tell. The point is that who we think of as the protagonists are ever shifting. Admit it. You didn’t expect Robb’s death did you? There was so much more that character could have done.
About two or three years ago, a friend of mine gave me the first book to read. He loved it and was waiting for the next book at the time. While I liked the characters, I did not like the style. Every time it got interesting to me in a chapter, he stopped, advanced the timeline and switched to another character. After having that happen to me five or six chapters in a row, I got sick of it and stopped. It bothered me that much.
So, I think he could write something I would like as the individual chapters eventually became page turners for me. But how he put it together really put me off.
I agree with you in general, and with this in particular – the writing is better than average for a fantasy novel, but it’s not otherwise remarkable. And throughout the books are peppered all these lines (usually spoken by Tyrion, or involving Tyrion in some way) that I get the feeling I’m supposed to react to with, “Oooh, zing!”…but I don’t. The only one I can think of right now is “…in the end, Tywin did not shit gold.” That did not leave me jaw agape in awe of Martin’s wit like I felt it was supposed to.
I bought the first three, read half-way through the series to that point and chucked them. Total waste of time. Martin used to be a good author. Armageddon Rag was excellent. Fevre Dream was quite good. This series…utter crap.
I liked it well enough to get through the first two books, but after I’d heard it was supposed to last through six or more volumes, I didn’t bother continuing. It was good enough for a trilogy, maybe, but there wasn’t enough there to warrant drawing it out further than that.
I get you with the rest of your arguments, but I don’t think this one really works. As you say, having the adult father (or both parents) of main characters die off early is a common plot device in fantasy. But up until he does die, Eddard* is* a main character himself, if not seemingly *the *main character. Having read on, we know that it’s his kids, among others, that play a much larger role in the story than he did, but we don’t know that beforehand, because we’ve put him into the wrong role.
Edit:
It seems a bit unreasonable to declare an example of way-too-young sex, unpleasant as that is, a pro- that argument. Especially when it’s a subject as, as you say, fucked up as pedophilia.
I really don’t think i’d call the Dothraki anything approaching “noble” savages, either.
Yeah, they’re more “fucked up raping and murdering savages”. They’re pretty much as not-noble as you get. They have an honor that they more or less stick to when they feel like it and their culture is certainly… interesting, or at least somewhat more complex than “me big bad man kill you” but noble? Hell no.
I’m baffled by the assertion of “better writing than Tolkien” but I guess to each his own. I like the series. It’s not meant to be strictly realistically medieval but it’s a fair bit closer than your average fantasy. Main characters die – Eddard WAS a main character, as the kids except for Robb and Jonn are too young to be even kid’s-fantasy-book adventurers (you realize Arya starts the series at about nine years old, right? Sansa’s twelve, which makes her a year older than Harry Potter when he starts but she’s about as useful as tits on a septa). Considering that this is obviously not a kid’s book and Robb, at least, is not exactly set up for Protagonist-Boy in the first book, Ned really looks like the hero, right up until he gets the axe.
Then we get Jamie Lannister, incestuous child-murdering psycho, as a protagonist. Arya kills her first man at what, ten? Eleven? And then the Red Wedding? No, lots of brutal and barbarous stuff happens here, and it’s all quite personal.
The books are flawed in many ways, but I would not call them predictable or the characters cookie-cutter.
They’re one of the most enjoyable fantasy series I’ve read, gritty and “realistic” in that they are without any sugar-coating of the brutality of medieval times.
My only complaint is that he is clearly just making up the story as he writes it with only the barest hint of an overall plot, serial drama fashion, like King’s Dark Tower or old Flash Gordon cinema serials. It’s a fun ride, though, and I’m not tired of it yet.
I had a similar reaction to most of the Forgotten Realms books that I absolutely loved when I was a teen. Once I got to my mid-20’s and later I went back and re-read some of them, and realized how bad the writing really was. I just didn’t know any better at the time…
I read them all in rapid sequence, and while I enjoyed them with a few reservations as I read them, I now find I can barely remember what actually happened. If a new one came out, I’d have to reread the whole set, and I didn’t like them well enough to do that.
The violence–especially the sexual violence–seemed to cross the line into gratuitousness on more than a few occasions. I like gritty, realistic, subtle fantasy (See Patricia Anthony’s Flanders, or Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Lions of Al-Rassan, but in Martin’s books it seems like the violence, not the tragedy, was the point. I couldn’t read much Donaldson, especially the Gap books, for the same reason. Furthermore, I like a character-driven story, and Song of Fire and Ice is not character centered.
More annoying than Song of Fire and Ice, however, is a certain type of fan who will accuse a person of being some sort of pussy who just can’t handle anything dark or tough if they don’t like Martin (or Donaldson, for that matter). Just because I don’t think Martin is the greatest thing to hit the canon since Milton doesn’t mean I read Chicken Soup for the Soul and cry into my Nicholas Sparks novels.
A bit of a hijack but you can quote what’s bad about them? I’m not questioning you! But I recently reread the Dark Sun pentad from '92-'95 or so and found them fine. To me, Denning is okay. But others, including someone a few years older than me, found his writing terrible. When I asked for examples, though, she couldn’t give them to me. I really want to know what makes him in particular, or the DND books, bad.
I still like Cunningham as an author but don’t like Salvatore anymore. I never did like Greenwood’s fiction writing but love his gaming material. I used to like Kemp but not after the last Cale trilogy. I didn’t think it was very good and so have given up on him. The new Ed Greenwood Presents Waterdeep stories have been good to me, with maybe one exception.
So, hit and miss.
Reminds me of the Dr Who novels in the 90s. I started reading all of them but they jumped around so much in quality that I eventually gave up on them. There might be some good ones out there but I will probably never know.
I think this is the same with Martin. He didn’t work for me; he works great for others. It’s why there are so many authors out there.
