Age group: 16+
Genre: Fantasy
Publisher’s
write-up:
‘Kings and queens, knights and renegades,
liars, lords and honest men. All will play the Game of Thrones.
Summers span decades.
Winter can last a lifetime. And the struggle for the Iron Throne has begun. It
will stretch from the south, where heat breeds plot, lusts and intrigues; to
the vast frozen north, where a 700-foot wall of ice protects the kingdom from
dark forces that lie beyond. The Game of
Thrones. You win or you die.’
Ever since HBO launched a TV show
based on George R. R. Martin’s A Song of
Ice and Fire; where the TV show was named after the first book of the
series, Game of Thrones. While I was
suggested the TV show by many of my friends, I could never get past twenty minutes,
for I found it too gory but then, I decided to give in years later when I
picked up the first book of the series.
It happens in a new world
created by the author which is simply referred to as the known world in the books. The story is divided into chapters
told from the third person perspective of the main characters which include
Eddard (Ned) Stark, Catelyn Stark, Sansa Stark, Arya Stark, Brandon Stark, Jon
Snow, Tyrion Lannister and Daenerys Targaryen.
In Westeros, a continent to the
west of the known world, Jon Arryn, the Hand of the King (chief adviser) of the
Seven Kingdoms, dies under mysterious circumstances. Eddard Stark, the Lord of
Winterfell and a close aide of King Robert Baratheon succeeds as the new Hand
and moves to the capital with his two daughters and starts investigating the
cause of Jon Arryn’s death. His daughter Sansa is betrothed to Joffrey
Baratheon, the song of King Robert and Queen Cersei. However, strange events
start to unfold – Ned Stark’s young son Brandon is pushed off the tower and
whilst he was being treated, there was another assassination attempt on him.
Catelyn Stark, the Lady of Winterfell gets to know that the knife used in the
assassination attempt belonged to Tyrion Lannister, from the house which Queen
Cersei belonged to. This leads to political instability and a war between the
House of Stark and the House of Lannister.
On the other side, in the
continent of Essos, you have the Targaryen siblings – Viserys, the pretender to
the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms and his sister Daenerys, plotting to
retake the throne for the family. The Targaryens were ousted by Robert
Baratheon twelve years ago by means of a rebellion. Viserys is trying to form
an army large enough to travel back to Westeros and retake the Kingdom and for
this, he secures an alliance with a nomadic tribe, the Dothrakis, by marrying
his sister to their leader Khal Drogo.
There is also another angle to
the story, from the point of view of Jon Snow, who joins the night watch, who
guard the Northern Wall of the Seven Kingdoms. Jon Snow is the bastard son of
Ned Stark and the more he spends time at Night Watch, the more he gets to know
the truths of the order.
The plot was slow, and the title
was highly misleading, for, the Game of
Thrones does not even begin till the death of the King, which took place
after I was much more than half into the novel. Till then, all I had was some
childish fighting between teenagers – Sansa and her sister Arya, Arya and
Prince Joffrey. The first 500 odd pages of the book effectively seemed like a
filler wherein the story was going directionless, there were three different
perspectives, and within that, excluding Daenerys and Jon, the six others are
at different locations within Westeros, each of them pursuing different
interests. And when you have so many perspectives, inevitably you also have so
many characters that it was becoming extremely difficult for me to keep track
of characters, events, the setting and the whole unfolding of the plot lacked
coherence. I had to take multiple breaks while reading this book and from the
time I started reading this book till the end, I read six books in between to
keep me distracted from the utterly boring pages of this book.
I understand that this is a long
novel and I have experienced something similar with The Luminaries (which is slightly longer than Game of Thrones) and
there too, I felt lost for the first 200 pages but it didn’t run as long as in
the case of this book. But I would concede that the author did a reasonable job
in establishing the characters during the initial stages – Ned Stark as the man
bound by honour and duty to the king, Tyrion Lannister – the cunning yet witty
dwarf of the Lannisters, Cersei – the manipulative queen, Joffrey the arrogant
young prince who feels too entitled, Sansa the conformist and Arya the rebel. I
felt that Tyrion Lannister proved to be the only saving grace whose presence
would help the reader to at least look forward to the next chapter from the
perspective of Tyrion for at least, they were interesting.
After the death of King Robert,
the novel, took the turn for the better, with things moving fast, the war for
succession getting very tense, with the Starks on war against the Lannisters,
the King’s brothers staking a claim to the throne, I breezed past the final
third of the novel and considering that the series would continue along similar
lines, I would give the series another chance and would eventually read the
second book in A Song of Ice and Fire.
With that said, an interesting
final third does not exonerate the author for boring me with fillers for a
substantial part of the book and on that note, I would award Game of Thrones, a
mere five on ten.
Rating – 5/10
Have a nice day,
Andy
Andy
No comments:
Post a Comment