The Ice Is Melting

When he began serious work on the Ice and Fire series in 1994, he conceived of it as a trilogy, along the lines of The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien’s magisterial fantasy work that has clearly inspired Martin’s novels and has also provoked him to believe that he could do Tolkien one better. At this point, far from being a compact trilogy, A Song of Ice and Fire is starting to sound endless. It’s an object lesson in what can happen when a writer not only bites off more narrative material than he can chew, but seems determined to create the fantasy epic to end all fantasy epics.

Nonetheless, the Ice and Fire series has its brilliant aspects, not least of which are Martin’s hyper-fertile imagination and his ability to wield language to create a world that is at once dauntingly alien in time and place and tangibly real. Here are the opening lines of A Game of Thrones (1996), the first of the novels and the namesake of the HBO series:

This is concise and elegant prose. It hints at medieval diction (“lord father,” “king’s justice”) without laying it on thick, and it tells you that you are in some other place besides our planet Earth (“ninth year of summer”). The “man beheaded” both creates the requisite suspense and foreshadows violence to come—of which there is a superfluity in the Ice and Fire novels.

I admit that I, although never a fan of the fantasy genre, have joined some 60 million other readers worldwide as an Ice and Fire addict. For one thing, the sheer length of each of the six novels—A Game of Thrones, at 704 pages, is the shortest—assured me for several years that I would have enough reading material for many an airplane trip. And as a medievalist with a Ph.D., I’ve marveled at Martin’s ability to evoke a huge and rich range of medieval places and cultural phenomena.

But it’s an understatement to say that the Ice and Fire novels have their longueurs—and ever more of them as the series progresses. Martin seems to be a prisoner of his own inventiveness. He can’t resist giving each of his many characters not only a place in the narrative but a complete backstory and cast of supporting characters, each of whom must have his own backstory and supporting cast. Ice and Fire is like the nursery rhyme about going to St. Ives and meeting the man with seven wives: “Every wife had seven sacks, and every sack had seven cats, and every cat had seven kits.” And every kit has a signature weapon, a sexually proficient mistress, and a coat of arms that Martin must laboriously explicate.

Part of Martin’s problem is that he divides the novels into long chapters, each told from one of his characters’ points of view—which means that he feels obliged to devote full attention, in turn, to each of them. In A Game of Thrones, the tightest in construction, the number of such “viewpoint characters” is a manageable nine. But by the time Martin gets to A Dance with Dragons, he has ballooned them up to 31. There are entire families and kingdoms I could do without. (Please, no more Dorne!)

Indeed, there is only one family of completely compelling interest in Ice and Fire: the ambitious and morally complex Lannisters, as they strive either to be powers behind the throne or to sit on it. The most interesting Lannister of all is the despised second son, Tyrion, a misshapen dwarf (Peter Dinklage in the HBO Thrones) flawed by his weakness for wine and prostitutes but blessed with a superior brain that enables him to see through the schemes of others and a touching pity for the weak victims of the more ruthless Lannisters. If Martin kills off Tyrion, I plan to stop reading.

In a 2014 interview, back when the release of The Winds of Winter seemed just around the corner, Martin faulted Tolkien, whose mythic sensibility he otherwise admired, for what he called Tolkien’s “very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper.” Martin’s apparent determination to improve upon what he regards as Tolkien’s simplistic reading of human history has inspired him to a grimier historical realism and a more thorough moral ambiguity. Martin was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam war, and the battles he narrates in Ice and Fire are slaughterfests that gruesomely re-create what medieval hand-to-hand combat with razor-sharp blades was actually like.

This is fair enough. But Martin overindulges in the grit and garishness. He parades before us a series of villains each more sadistically happy to mutilate human flesh than the last. As for his “good” characters, the consequences of their inevitable mistakes of judgment are invariably unforgiving. Add to the ubiquitous butchery the many detailed and often creepily voyeuristic sex scenes in Ice and Fire (replicated and even amplified in the HBO series) and you know you’re not in the Shire anymore.

Martin also exhibits his own brand of simplistic sentimentalism. One of his central but most tiresome characters is the Princess Daenerys, sold as a teenager by her throne-seeking brother to a studly Genghis Khan-like warlord. That—plus said warlord’s masterly taking of her virginity on their wedding night (inexplicably portrayed as rape on HBO)—is the last time Daenerys elicits any reader interest. The warlord soon dies, and Daenerys, accompanied by some adopted dragons, travels around freeing slaves, yammering about her own moral superiority, and otherwise playing the liberal do-gooder, a nubile combination of Eleanor Roosevelt and Mrs. Jellyby.

In another obvious nod to political correctness, Martin has peopled his novels with a number of implausibly proficient female warriors. Yes, there was a real-life Joan of Arc—perhaps a model for the most likable of these creations, the girl-knight Brienne—but the others seem to owe more to feminist demands for more “strong women” in fantasy than to any reality, medieval or otherwise.

The Ice and Fire series was already getting out of hand by the year 2000, when Martin published A Storm of Swords, its 1,008 pages well exceeding those of A Game of Thrones and its successor, the 784-page Clash of Kings (1999). The next manuscript that Martin turned in would have yielded a whopping 1,809 printed pages. He was unwilling simply to divide it in two. Instead, he broke out some of the manuscript’s viewpoint narratives into a fourth novel, the 784-page Feast of Crows (2005), saving the rest for the 1,056-page Dance of Dragons. The awkward format of two novels proceeding more or less synchronically, except published six years apart, was one that only an already-bestselling author could sell to his publishers.

Not surprisingly, the combination of Martin’s prolific output and his dilatoriness in producing it has forced HBO’s Weiss and Benioff to hurry their series to some kind of resolution, if only to keep the actors who play the parts (especially the child actors) from looking too old. The first season of Thrones hewed closely to the story line of A Game of Thrones, but in subsequent seasons, Weiss and Benioff have killed off and/or conflated characters, telescoped incidents, and otherwise substantially altered Martin’s narrative—even before they ran out of narrative to work with.

I certainly hope that George R. R. Martin manages to finish Ice and Fire one of these days, if only to spare himself the ignominy of having a fan-fictioner complete the job for him. Hubris begets catastrophe, and you could say there was plenty of hubris in Martin’s assumption that he could better the work of every fantasy author who preceded him. But he is too gifted a writer to deserve the remorseless fate of so many of his own well-intentioned, but deeply flawed, characters. “Winter is coming” is Ice and Fire‘s watchword. But not, I hope, for Martin himself.

Charlotte Allen is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.