A Song of Ice and Fire

Browsing Amazon yesterday to see whether I can afford duplicate copies of my Morrowind and Oblivion discs, I ran across a publication date for George R. R. Martin’s Dances with Dragons.  This will be the fifth novel in his long-awaited Song of Ice and Fire series.  (And I do mean “long”;   the last installment,  A Feast for Crows, was published six years ago).   I began rereading the first novel in the series, A Game of Thrones, this year when I learned that HBO will do a series based on it starting in April (if I finish before Dances comes out I will complete my third reading of the novels available so far).  Best of all, HBO cast Sean Bean to play Eddard (Ned) Stark, lord of Winterfell and Hand of the King:

Martin is that rare thing, a Real Writer of fantasy novels.   He can do all the standard stuff:   string a plot (or plots, in this case) together, draw interesting characters, set scenes.  But he also adds a moral dimension to his work that renders it utterly intriguing, for me at least.  Even better, this moral dimension is grounded in the central metaphors of the series–darkness and sunshine, frigid and hot climates, sleet and snow vs. warmth and light–in short, ice and fire.   Best of all, the good men and women (the Starks of Winterfell) hail mostly from the northern icy wastes where a 700-foot wall of ice was built long ago to keep out some dire threat, only briefly sketched so far, while the vile baddies (the Lannisters of Casterly Rock) hail from the south.  Except for the dragon queen, of course, who is, for the moment, exiled to the east (hmm) where she marries a dashing horse lord.   Intrigued yet

Martin draws events from British history of course–Hadrian’s wall and the Wars of the Roses–and from British decor and culture as well–knights and ladies, jousts, long hours of training to the sword and bow, and so on.  But Martin creates wonderfully innovative turns on all of this lore.  A central hero in the narrative (who seems like a villain at first of course) is Tyrion Lannister, scion of an important house.  Because he is a little person,  Tyrion has learned to survive by his wits–and a witty guy he is.  He enlivens every page on which he appears, and luckily for us, HBO cast Peter Dinklage to play him in the series:

Here’s a tidbit to give you an idea of intriguing qualities that Martin instills in his sideplots.  In the early chapters, a party of Starks come upon a direwolf who died while giving birth to six pups.  Because the direwolf is the sigil of their house, and because Ned Stark has six children, we just know this is an omen.  Each child gets a direwolf, and each wolf proves to be utterly loyal to his or her human.  The direwolves in fact become a crucial part of the developing main plot, and I, at least, have come to care as much about what happens to Ghost (who has all white fur) and Nymeria and Lady and Shaggydog and Greywind and Summer as their human companions do.

If you want to know more about the novels, there are plenty of great websites devoted to them.  I recommend a self-titled wiki, as well as a website called “Westeros,” from which I snagged the photos above (credit to Helen Sloan).

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