Winter is coming!
No, I don’t mean that literally, though there were a few flakes in the air today. That is an often thrown about line from one of my favorite fantasy novels. It got me thinking about autumn and about how much more satisfying everything seems to me in the fall/winter seasons; food tastes better, warmth feels warmer, friendships seem deeper, and you guessed it reader books seem more profound.
I have been a long time lover of fantasy novels. While other people were reading the classics like Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, and Wuthering Heights, I was reading The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, and Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time. I cut my teeth on fantasy novels. They were the books that gave me a hunger to read. They were the books that made me choose them over television or comics even. I have always had a love affair with fantasy.
So when I say a book like A Game of Thrones is one of my favorite pieces of fantasy you can consider me somewhat of an expert. I don’t claim all knowing Nostradamus like foresight but I do consider myself to be a good recommender in this subject.
The thing that sets Thrones apart from some of the other books in the fantasy genre is complex. Many fantasy novels follow a similar thread. An evil overlord thrusts some young child who is more powerful than they realize into a dangerous situation. Along the way the child is befriended and aided by a wise elder mentor, a strange magical creature, and a rag tag army of misfits and such. In Lord of the Rings for example, the child is Frodo, the evil overlord is Sauron, the elder mentor is Gandalf, and so on. In no way is this a judgment on Tolkien. I firmly accredit Tolkien for starting this “ Great Fantasy Novel Blueprint”.
Back to Thrones, Thrones throws out the single young hero thread by allowing us access to many protagonists. In fact, George R.R. Martin allows us to read the book from 8-12 point of view characters. Some of these characters are protagonists, some antagonists, some fall in a grey area in between, and some start off in one and switch to another. Such is his skill as a writer that in Thrones you may hate a character and by book 3 understand completely why he chose the path he went down.
The many point of view characters allows us not to get fixated on one character as a main entity. Instead we are given a handful of characters that we can identify with on different levels. In Thrones for example, one of the first characters we are introduced to is the head of the Starks of Winterfell, Eddard. Eddard is a family man; he has a loving wife, many kids, and a great family castle called Winterfell. Eddard is someone who you identify as a good man in the books immediately and you want him to succeed in whatever endeavors the writer puts before him.
Eddard is not the only character we get a point of view from. There are his sons and daughters, the king of the land, his bastard son, a strangely grotesque misshapen dwarf who is heir to a large family of Westeros (the land of the books), the dwarfs evil and malicious brother and sister who are quite fond of one another. The differing points of view allow you to judge each character individually. Obviously you will have characters you root for more than others, some that you look forward to reading about more than others.
As an example I identified largely with Jon Snow, Eddards' bastard son. Eddard loves him and treats him like a real Stark but he is keenly aware that he’s not a Stark and this is not his place. There is also Tyrion, the aforementioned dwarf. Tyrion has a brash attitude, he already knows people will be inclined to dislike and underestimate him. He uses this to his advantage by living up to their expectations and saying things that would be considered rude or socially unacceptable.
The deep characters are set against a wonderful world. Martin uses magic very limitedly in Thrones. One of the point of view characters comes from a family of dragon raisers but no dragons have been seen in the land in many years. There are no over the top magicians, magic swords, spell battles, or wands. The weapon of choice in Thrones is political maneuvering and swords and shields.
As a last point to my appreciation of this book, there is a long-standing rule of fantasy that the antagonist is usually going to survive the peril the writer places him in. If not the sequel gets harder to write. Martin makes it obvious by the end of Thrones that he has no problem killing point of view characters dead. This is in a way good and bad. Its good in that there is always a sense of peril for the characters you’re invested in. It’s bad in that he might very well kill one, leaving you frustrated and genuinely angry.
Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, and A Feast for Crows are some of the finest fantasy I have ever read. I could go into more detail about them but I would recommend you just read them yourself but do so knowing that you will get angry, frustrated, laugh, feel joy and perhaps even cry. That is what separates a great fantasy novel from a good one.
So when the skies darken and the snow starts to fall, pull out a nice thick fantasy novel like Thrones and allow yourself the pleasure to slip away into another world, after all this ones just to hard sometimes.
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