A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin (4.5 stars)

Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series has been on my list for a long time. A desire to watch the HBO series finally pushed me into picking up the first weighty tome, well figuratively anyway, this is yet another very heavy book I was happy to carry around digitally on my kindle, and as an aside, the typographic complaints about the kindle edition are all out-of-date, I didn't notice any problems.

I'm not a huge fantasy fan, but this novel grabbed me with its dark tone and intricately constructed characters. There is no clear good and evil here, no perfect shining knights who take the moral high-ground at all costs and always win the day, and no fundamentally evil Sauron-style bad guys either. Martin constructs characters that face tough moral choices, make both good and bad decisions, and die. Yes, main characters actually die, and not just the ones on the evil side of the fuzzy moral divide. I think Tyrion is my favourite character so far.

Of course to allow for the deaths of important characters you're going to need quite a few characters to carry the story. Martin uses about 8 different character points of view, and introduces a huge cast of characters throughout the novel, both in the central plot line and while filling in the history of each of the houses. There are a lot of houses, and despite the house-symbol mnemonics, I struggled to keep track of all the minor players, especially when the various lords 'called their banners' to gather their armies. I also got fairly sick of reading about dire wolves and dragons embroidered onto tunics or painted onto armour.

I felt like this novel was mainly build-up and stage setting for a truly epic tale, which is fine, although I certainly found myself wishing for some more action in the first two thirds of the novel. The first two thirds was mainly court intrigue, political machinations, and the occasional I'm-going-to-be-a-ninja-later-just-watch-me training montage from Arya. By the way, I'll be very impressed if Martin kills off Arya before she gets to unleash her fighting skills on the Lannisters. Oh, and if Martin manages to not mention 'a clash of kings' every few pages in A Clash of Kings, that would be great too - it reminded me of this youtube video.

While I'm at it lets get a few other minor things out of the way. Martin went to great lengths to create an impregnable fortress, and in the process made the Eyrie a ridiculously impractical place to live. You basically need to do a day's worth of exposed rock-climbing up a cliff past many fortifications to get there. I'm all for impregnable fortresses (I'm sure this one will get taken by deception, not force, in later books), but a castle like that is somewhere you retreat to as a last resort, not somewhere you live day-to-day, hold court, receive guests etc.

I loved Martin's description of the iron throne constructed from swords, I hope the HBO props department did a good job of it.

Sansa's naivety and selfishness (such as forgetting to even ask about her sister Arya) after the capture of her father was very well written and the culmination of her character construction up to that point. Eddard was naive in many ways himself, and I was glad to see that things didn't magically pan out for him just because he's a good guy.

Two dragons breastfeeding from a human woman is one of the stupidest things I have ever read.

Yes, I have started on the next book :)

4.5 stars

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (3.5 stars)

It's clever, very clever. Comedy in the form of a novel is one of the toughest gigs around. Getting someone to laugh with just the written word, without the benefit of the body language and expression that comes with images or a live performance, requires a special talent. Heller has that talent, although I confess the best he got from me was a few 'heh's.

Heller wields absurdity, irony, and hypocrisy as weapons to expose the absurdity, irony, and hypocrisy of war and military bureaucracy. In effect it feels like a really, really long Monty Python skit written down in words. Clevinger's mistake in asking the audience for questions after a briefing would also fit perfectly as a Blackadder scene, with these responses:

"Who is Spain?"
"Why is Hitler?"
"When is righ?"
"Where was that stooped and mealy-colored old man I used to call Poppa when the merry-go-round broke down?"
"How was trump at Munich?"
"Ho-ho beriberi."
and
"Balls!"
all rang out in rapid succession.

Heller brings his acid touch to a wide range of subjects from the meaningless military pennants awarded for meaningless activities:

Like Olympic medals and tennis trophies, all they signified was that the owner had done something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else.

to the agricultural subsidies that benefited Major Major Major's family (and yes, he is promoted in the novel to Major, making him Major Major Major Major), which pretty much fits exactly with the republican position on US corn subsidies:

Major Major's father was an outspoken champion of economy in government, provided it did not interfere with the sacred duty of government to pay farmers as much as they could get for all the alfalfa they produced that no one else wanted or for not producing any alfalfa at all.

The plot is complex. It dives down tangent after tangent and continually introduces new characters while jumping all over the place. Despite all that confusion it is in fact highly structured. Early in the novel Heller writes as if the reader is intimately familiar with a series of events which have not yet been described. These story threads are eventually explained and tied back in much later in the novel, finally providing the context for a joke that was already told.

And of course the novel gave birth to a phrase that is now common vernacular. Not many novels can claim such an obvious effect on popular culture:

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions.

The characters are excellent, and you come to realise that despite some unusual behaviour (such as perching naked in a tree to watch a funeral), Yossarian is extremely rational and entirely sensible to be trying to avoid getting killed.

A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishman are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can't all be worth dying for.

Heller's portrayal of Milo's black market empire and the market forces that eventually bring him to bomb his own troops is absurd and masterful.

Towards the end of the novel we are brought roughly into the horror of war as Yossarian has a dream-like walk through a Rome soaked in violence and we finally witness Snowden's death that pushed Yossarian over the edge. This is the section I liked the least. The final chapters lose all comedy and become a series of long discussions, such as the one between Yossarian and Major Danby, that seem very direct and out of character. It's almost like Heller got to the end and decided: quick, drive the point home!

This was my second time through this novel and it isn't an easy read. I'm giving it a fairly low score to match my level of enjoyment, but I think it is definitely worth reading.

3.5 stars.