The Essential Malady

A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin, Bantam Spectra, August 6th, 1996

After re-reading and re-reviewing A Throne of Bones recently, I decided I would follow-up by reading A Game of Thrones while waiting for the physical release of A Sea of Skulls. Like many, I was introduced to this series through the HBO television adaptation and was not previously familair with the books even in name. I really only started reading fantasy works beyond Lewis and Tolkien in my thirties; so am relatively new to much that has been written since (and even before). 

I also did this with some trepidation as the series remains unfinished and the last release was back in 2011 when the television adaptation began. Like Patrick Rothfuss, George R. R. Martin doesn’t seem to have it in him to finish what he started and by most accounts I’ve read, the latter books waffle on and introduce far more characters than can be easily kept track of. This was also true from memory of the television series, which became more and more convoluted before I stopped watching it around the seventh season.

Although they are both overweight gammas who haven’t finished their fantasy series’; these comparisons end when it comes to writing as Martin can certainly tell an engaging story with an interesting setting and characters. The world-building in this first book alone is incredible. Without slogging readers with long-winded exposition, it introduces fascinating histories, characters and a believable group of Houses vying for power and influence in the land of Westeros. Rothfuss’s book was a painful slog that imagined his otherwise uneventful days in university in a fantasy setting with him as the hero he certainly was not.

The only reason I have no plans to read past the first book, is because I know it will only get worse and that there will probably never be a proper ending. There is also the moral turpitude to consider which was certainly present in this book and only gets worse if the television series is anything to go by. Indeed, I have previously mentioned my decision to generally avoid such material. This book is thankfully much tamer than I expected though is still unecessarily crude in a number of places. I certainly won’t be watching the series again and likely never would have had I not started watching it before my conversion to Catholicism in 2017.

What is more important here is not what the series is but what it could have been. Because their are the seeds of a fantasy series that would have been loved well beyond the death of the author. Even in the event the author comes to finish it, I don’t expect it will be well-remembered by generations yet to be born though one can hardly deny it hasn’t been extremely popular in his lifetime. 

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