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| A Clash of Kings |
There’s only going to be one book review today, since the book in question was nine hundred sixty-fracking-nine pages long. It should count as two book, at least.
In preparation for the second season of Game of Thrones, I read George R. R. Martin’s A Clash of Kings. Ladies and gentlemen, we are in for a hell of a ride this next season. There are battles and betrayals, daring escapes, and the series shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, as I read this second entry in the Song of Fire and Ice series, I realized that you kind of have to read it as a series of episodes rather, taking things as they come, rather than trying to spot the overarching plot. The Song of Fire and Ice reads as a delightfully messy sprawl to me. In that way, this series is almost Dickensian.
I love Martin’s device of having the whole story (if there is one–there probably is, but it’s too soon to tell) told by a wide cast of characters spanning two continents. You’ll never get bored since you’re being sent all over the place. There are numerous plots going on as well, some of them supernatural. Anytime you might get close to getting bored, Martin takes you some where else.
The downside of all this variety is that it makes summarizing this book a bitch. The first book in the series, A Game of Thrones, set the stage for a massive civil war. In A Clash of Kings there are few characters that aren’t fighting some kind of war. Jon Snow is above the wall where mythical creatures have started to walk again. The Starks are fighting for independence. The Baratheons are fighting for a crown. The Lannisters are caught in the middle and are therefore fighting everyone.
A summary with any kind of detail will get me deep into tl;dr territory. But I can talk about a couple of themes I picked up on. The first being, of all things, public relations. The major players in this book are constantly wondering what people will think of their actions. They don’t want to appear cowards. The contenders for the crown want their claims to appear as lawful as possible. Consequently, the major players spend as much time worrying about how their strategies will play as they do planning their stratagems in the first place. You can’t really consider Martin’s Westeros as an analog for our own Middle Ages, but it is interesting to wonder if the whole concept of public relations is as new as we think it is.
The other theme I picked up on was opportunism. In A Game of Thrones, only the characters with the strongest positions–the most men, capital, etc.–dared to make a claim to a crown. But as the civil war grows, minor lords seize the opportunity to settle old scores or to carve out some new territory. One of these minor lords decides to try and turn himself into a king as well–hence the sheer bloodiness of this book. If I tried to count up all the people who get killed in this book, I’d need one of those clicker counter things.
Because these books are so episodic, they can’t be said to end so much as pause until the next one comes out. So far, I’m three books behind current on this series so I don’t have to pine very long. But I can imagine the frustration of those readers who read them as soon as they’re published. I still stand by my position: Authors, take as much time as you need to write a book, so long as it’s worth the wait–no matter how much I might whine.