A Game of Thrones, by George R.R. Martin

I am, of course, one of the innumerable people who came to this book on the back of the highly successful big-budget HBO television series, which propelled the genre novel to the top of the New York Times bestsellers list this month, fifteen years after it was originally published. Despite my mother lapping up this sort of book and having an immense collection of fantasy books, I had never even heard of the series or George R.R. Martin until the televised version – and then fell in love with his world, the characters and the slick, fast-paced dramatic developments.

As the series left its audience hankering for more, I decided to delve into the books so that I could find out what happens sooner. I took my time reading this rather than devouring it quickly – after all, it was a story that I already knew, and the adaptation was mostly very faithful – and to my surprise, found it a book I wouldn’t have particularly liked.

I don’t usually have the problem of much preferring the first media I come into contact with over other versions, and I don’t think that is the case here. I don’t think I like the television version more than the book because I saw it first: I think I prefer it because, extreme rarity though it may be (not counting things like Twilight or The Da Vinci Code, which are abysmal books and slightly less abysmal films), I think it simply tells the story better than the written version.

You see, in the book, the prose style doesn’t sit well with me. Martin is clumsy and makes odd pacing decisions – for example, right at the dramatic climax of the action, he has Bran sit through a history of magical pygmies who lived in the lands before human beings. His imagery is mostly turgid and obvious, and one of the only times he comes up with a really lovely image – wind blowing snow from mountain tops resembling banners – he then reuses it a few pages later. He seems to discover certain words late into the writing process and then cram them in over and over again before the book ends, notably ‘whickering’ and ‘crenels’, which he uses far too much towards the end, especially when he really means ‘merlons’ or would be better-off using that word. I can forgive Americanisms like ‘real’ for ‘really’ and ‘butt’ in a medieval-style fantasy – after all, it’s an imagined world – but have to agree with one reviewer of the TV series who suggested Martin should have thought twice about calling a character in a world based on England ‘Shagga’.

Whoever made the decision to age up all the younger cast members in the book made an extremely good decision. Martin has said that he wanted to reference how fast the young had to grow up in medieval times, but a fifteen-year-old is still a fifteen-year-old, and a bit of reading about Galahad soon makes Jon and Robb seem a bit off. Bran similarly acts much more like his age in the television version, and the only ones who seemed to be just right were Sansa and the reprehensible Joffrey.

When it comes to Daenerys, I kept being taken out of the moment to think about the author. This thirteen-year-old may get the best character development in the piece, but with all the nipple-pinching and perfuming of her ‘sex’ and public copulation, the impression of a poor young girl suffering and growing strong after learning to be her own woman and not an object cannot quite overpower the impression of Martin creating the little girl just to be sexualised and abused before she manages to grow to independence – not so much through maturation as necessity and magical contrivance.

I found myself quite enjoying the way certain characters from the HBO version fit my mental images exactly, and some did not. Ned, the three Lannister siblings, King Robert and his councillors were all exactly right, as were more minor characters like Sandor, Samwell and Hodor. Some characters didn’t fit their descriptions at all but still entered my mind because they worked extremely well onscreen, like Catelyn, Bran, Arya, Jorah Mormont and Sansa. Joffrey I found peculiar tension with because the actor looked so like Joffrey should and yet didn’t match the book’s description, so at different points I was picturing him and others the lanky, curly-haired youth I could see in my mind’s eye after the descriptions given by Sansa. Others, especially
those aged up, I didn’t link with the actors at all.

Undeniably, Martin has done an excellent job with characterisation and turning what might have been swords ’n’ sorcery into political intrigue and slow-boiling military campaigns. His depiction of a court full of whispers and spiders is extremely clever. But in book form the things that seemed so clever seemed obvious and predictable – and not just because I knew what would happen in advance.