Replaying the Game

It has been around 13 years since I first read George R.R. Martin's series A Song of Ice and Fire. At the time, the third book (A Storm of Swords) was the most recent. Since then, of course, we've had the long wait for books four and five, the ongoing wait for book six, and the arrival of the excellent HBO TV adaptation of the series.

As all of this has unfolded, I've found my memory isn't all it might have once been. I remember the broad strokes of the books, but at the same time I find myself regularly challenged to remember the exact ways in which they differed from the way the show has told the story. But I also remember really enjoying the books. A lot. And that's been slowly building up into an urge to simply read them all again. So it was that I recently finished reading book one, A Game of Thrones, for the second time. It was a very different, but still very enjoyable experience.

There are a lot of elements coming together to make the book so great. First of all, Martin really designed an amazingly elaborate world for his series. And more importantly, he doesn't dump all that work on you in giant bricks of exposition as other less skilled fantasy writers often do. Bits of history, religion, geography, and more are peppered throughout the tale, but they come up only in contexts where they're important to the narrative or the characters.

Second, I was struck by just how important and powerful a choice Martin made in centering each chapter on a single character's perspective. So many books stick with a single character's viewpoint, or use a more omniscient narrator to tell you exactly what's in the mind of every character. The device here fits with the idea of a story that lives in moral grey areas. You get conflicting views from different characters, characters' inner thoughts regarding each other, strategically unreliable narrators, and an understanding of why characters (who have less perfect information than you the reader) make the sometimes bad decisions they do. Even characters I really don't really like at least make abundant sense when Martin is letting me inside their heads.

Third, it's clear upon the re-read that Martin is not just making this up as he goes along. He has clearly hit some bumps along the way, and probably he himself would be the first to acknowledge that. But he clearly knew his endgame, and the major plot points along the way. This allows for wonderful foreshadowing throughout the book. I particularly enjoyed picking apart Bran's dreams/visions for new context, slyly winking at Jaime Lannister's declaration that he'd rather die than live as a cripple, and speculating anew about the identity of Jon Snow's mother (which seems much more obvious upon the re-read).

Many people will tell you how boldly this book defied the conventions of typical fantasy, citing the relatively reduced role of magic in the world, and the (spoiler warning, I guess; but at this point... really?) death of the one who appeared to be the main character 100 pages before the end. But I think the real triumph of the book is how it thwarts some expectations while embracing others. For example, you know from the moment Dany receives her dragon eggs that she's going to be hatching some dragons before the book is over. But it's this deft blend of fulfilling and upsetting expectations that makes the book so compulsively readable.

Even having read it once, even having subsequently and memorably watched the story brought to the screen over 10 episodes of great television, I still loved reading this book again. It was and still is an absolute grade A book. It's hard to imagine at this point that any fantasy lover hasn't read it, but hey, if you haven't: do it!