A Game of Thrones

With all of the hype surrounding the recent HBO series A Game of Thrones, which I haven't seen yet but plan to, I thought I'd read the book first. I thought it was okay, but ultimately ended up finishing out of sense of duty. I wonder if I'll end up reading the other books in the series out of the same sense of obligation.

An 800-page fantasy book that at times reads like the overheated imagination of a hard-core Dungeons & Dragons player, A Game of Thrones, by George R.R. Martin, is full of the tropes of the genre. There's lots of mentions of wolves, ravens, and dragons (they are supposedly extinct, but with the title of the fifth and most recent book of the series I'm not so sure about that). The setting is an imaginary place that seems to be shaped like England, with a massive wall to the north that keeps some kind of creatures called "The Others" out.

The land has seven kingdoms, but is ruled by one king, the fat and jocular Robert. His old friend is Eddard Stark, who is the leader of the family that has dominion over the north. After the death of Robert's main advisor, known as the King's Hand, Robert calls Eddard to the castle to replace him. That's just one of the many plot threads, and it would be almost impossible to summarize this huge book. Suffice it to say that the queen, Cersei, from the si, nister Lannister family, is up to no good, and is closer than normal to her twin brother. There's another brother, Tyrion, a dwarf who is the most engaging character of the book.

Eddard and his wife suspect the Lannisters of murdering not only the King's Hand but of also having something to do with their young son falling out of a window. There's all sorts of palace intrigue, and every so often the scene shifts to another land, where the scion of the usurped king has married his sister off to the leader of a barbarian warlord.

The story is very complicated, and difficult to get into. There's an appendix in the back, with a list of all the characters, and this proved to be extremely necessary in the early going. Martin cuts back and forth between several story lines, with a handful of characters being focus points, and at times he was away from one story for so long that I forgot what was going on. The book also doesn't so much end as stop--nothing was wrapped up to my satisfaction, necessitating going on to the next book to get answers. A prologue, in which characters interact with "others," is hardly referenced again in the entire book, and remains a mystery.

But the book has its charms. For a sword and sorcery genre book it's extremely well-written, even if it flirts with self-parody. I especially enjoyed those chapters that deal with Tyrion, particularly when he is jailed in a "sky prison," in which there is no fourth wall, just open space leading thousands of feet down to a rocky death (the floors are also ever-so-slightly sloped downward). The book is also not sentimental--characters die without warning, and sometimes they are good guys.

This is the first book in the "Song of Ice and Fire." I'm not sure if I have the stamina to attack the second book. HBO will be making that into a series, so maybe I'll just watch that instead. It will take far less time.