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to carry around digitally on my kindle, and as an aside, the typographic complaints about the kindle edition are all out-of-date, I didn't notice any problems.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