Is A Game of Thrones good?

or, coming back home; or sing me a song of ecstasy and devastation

• A Clash of Kings

• A Storm of Swords

• A Feast for Crows

• A Dance with Dragons

• Fire & Blood

Nobody asked for it but I was quite serious about my intentions to reread A Song of Ice and Fire and then write about them.

So buckle up, buttercup, we’re heading back to Westeros.

There be spoilers ahead, so if you somehow have never watched the show or read the books, (why are you here?) you’ve been warned.

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It really can’t be underestimated how important this single novel was to modern fantasy literature. Nearly all of the new big names in fantasy for the 20 years following the publication of A Game of Thrones cite it as a massive influence. The farther we get from that publication date, the less directly true this becomes, but I do think that A Game of Thrones and its success (not to mention a certain TV show) created the modern adult fantasy landscape.

And so the question nearly thirty years later is:

Is A Game of Thrones even good?

The simple and resounding answer is, Uh, yeah. It’s pretty dang good!

There are so many reasons for what make A Game of Thrones a remarkable book. But many of the elements that make it so great are not the lessons people seem to have taken from it. What people remember are the twists and the deaths, the killing of main characters, of narrators. And so we have thousands of pieces of media rushing to shock you or to upend expectation. And because this is their primary goal—to get to the cool, mindblowing moments—they don’t bother to do all the work required for those moments to actually blow your dang mind.

The beheading of Ned Stark isn’t one of the defining moments of modern fantasy because Ned Stark was, in many ways, our primary protagonist and POV into this world.

The reason this moment mattered is because in every conceivable way, fantasy readers have been trained to expect their protagonists to make it through insurmountable odds. Even with the deck stacked against them, there’s always an out. And so even as Ned makes choice after choice that set his neck on the block, we still expect him to make it out somehow. Whether saved by Littlefinger or Varys or Renly or through the strength of his moral character. Even when he’s imprisoned, we expect him to somehow escape, for the rest of the series being his act of rebellion and revenge.

Of course, none of that happens. He loses his head and dooms his family. And the series that follows…well, we’ll get there.

I’ve read a lot of fantasy books in the last seven years. Since I had read very little genre fiction in my life, this allowed me to really plow through the best of the best when I finally came to fantasy. After that, I found more great novels and plenty of seemingly hidden gems. Of course, eventually the well runs dry and, sadly, I’ve been mostly disappointed with a lot of what I’ve picked up in the last two or three years.

Returning to George RR Martin reminded me why I fell in love with fantasy as an adult.

A Game of Thrones is not just a good book of fantasy literature. It’s the work of a master craftsman at the peak of his abilities.

The novel begins almost humbly. Even randomly. We’re out in the wilderness where some incidental worldbuilding is referenced in conversation. Then this little scene that seems to be about class differences in this world slowly twists into the realms of horror. In a fairly short amount of time, Martin turns a somewhat comedic expository scene into one drenched in dread.

From there, we shift to Winterfell, a vast castle held by a noble family. The world becomes small and tangible. Most of the cast of characters and narrators exist in the same location. He uses this small, consolidated cast to develop a vast world with deep histories, both in terms of lore and politics.

The novel is almost a comedy of manners at this point, albeit set in one where horrific monsters exist. But those are far away, little more than legends, fairytales told to children to keep them in line. In the real world of people and civilization, the only monsters are other humans. Some of them even called honorable knights.

We have two sisters whose personalities clash almost completely. We have a bastard son roughly the same age as the heir to Winterfell and these half-brothers seem to get along well enough. We have a husband and wife who came together out of political necessity but have found love. However, the wife hates her husband’s bastard son. Instead of resenting her husband, all her anger falls on the boy. We have two younger sons who will never be heirs to their father’s kingdom and are really too young to have any responsibilities.

There’s a lot to work with here! I’m actually convinced that Martin could turn this situation into a very different novel that never leaves the walls of Winterfall. Sort of a fantasy version of Downton Abbey.

Martin gives space to establish normality. We see these characters in their every day life. We come to understand them so that when their lives are thrown into chaos, we care because we know what they have lost. We know what they wish they could return to.

And chaos arrives, of course. The king, Ned Stark’s oldest friend, arrives to give Ned new power and authority in the capital, which is roughly a thousand miles to the south.

And the King Robert we see is not the one Ned remembers. This, too, could be a whole novel! How time, distance, and experiences cause friends as close as brothers to become strangers to one another. We could explore how those you love most are the ones who hurt you most. Maybe the only ones who really can hurt you.

But Robert doesn’t arrive alone, and of course his wife and her family are ones with a long history with the Starks. Not one that the Starks or Lannisters are willing to set aside to work together and bind the kingdom closer.

The novel is set up for court intrigue. It’s something, honestly, that few, if any, do as well as Martin. With great economy, he gets the reader to understand the complexity of the court, the moral flexibility of its members, and the ways in which they’ve allowed King Robert to bankrupt his Kingdom, becoming fully indebted to his wife’s family, the Lannisters. Along with that, we see, through Ned, how the Lannisters have degraded his dear friend, turned him into this insatiable fat blowhard more interested in his ego than in his kingdom.

Another unfortunate habit this novel set in motion is the vast sprawling polyphonic epic fantasy series. Martin definitely wasn’t the first to do this, but the success of this novel did lead hundreds of imitators to dust off their keyboards and hammerfist out drafts with dozens of POV characters.

Which, uh—many of these are very bad. The reason should be obvious.

I happen to be reading all of Roberto Bolano’s novels that I haven’t read yet (which is most of them, excepting the famous ones everyone already read ten years ago) and what I find in Bolano was what I also found in Martin.

Polyphonic novels are difficult. Trust me. I’ve written a few very bad ones! Part of what makes them difficult is differentiating the many different POVs so that they don’t all blur together. Most writers—especially first time authors—are just not equipped to handle the complexity and nuance required to pull this off. Bolano did this in a lot of subtle ways, using sentence structure or specific word choices, linguistic tics, to immediately create a new voice.

Martin is less subtle but no less effective. We know Jon and Daenerys from their self-doubt and we can differentiate them through their different primary concerns: being a bastard and being the daughter of a murdered king.

Sansa is prim and proper and enamored by court where Arya is coarse and clumsy in finery but fascinated by people, by the natural world.

Ned is honorable and taciturn where Tyrion is jovial, sarcastic, and biting.

Bran is a little boy trapped in his body and Catelyn is a woman watching her family dragged apart in several different directions.

What makes the novel live and breathe and thrive are the ways these perspectives juxtapose, clash, and weave together to create a tapestry that covers the continent. More than that, Martin uses perspective to dole out bits of information about the world to always the wrong characters, so the reader comes to learn more, put pieces together, but the characters are working with only a handful of threads to this vast tapestry.

Arya Stark, for example, learns about the plot against her father. But being a troublemaking eleven year old, she struggles to convey the information and then even when she blurts it out, the adults think she’s making up some confused story to get out of trouble.

And then, through these different perspectives, we learn things about other narrators. Through Jon and Daenarys, we learn of Jorah Mormont’s disgrace, but we sort of learn it in opposite directions. Jon hears it from Jorah’s father and understands it as a stain, a grand disgrace, and relates it to his own bastard birth to his honorable father. Daenerys hears it from her brother, who she hates, and from Jorah himself, who primarily blames Ned Stark.

And so these two characters destined to narratively collide at some future date have the same piece of information but understand it very differently. Since Jon’s father led the rebellion against Daenerys’ father, leading directly to her exiled life with her cruel brother, Daenerys is, of course, willing to believe that Ned Stark is the villain Jorah paints him. Too, when she finally meets Jon as a Stark, she’s, uh, not predisposed to appreciate his presence.

Returning to this novel, I now see the way he lays the groundwork for interpersonal and even political conflicts that won’t be seen for thousands of pages. But this is part of what makes the novel work so well, what makes the world feel so solid and full and lived in.

Then there’s the addictive quality to the story. This likely comes from a long career of being a celebrated and award-winning short story writer. Each chapter is its own tightly contained short story. These many stories weave together and build atop one another, layering the narrative and conflicts in fascinating ways that keep you turning the pages.

But there’s one thing that I think really holds the key to a lot of extremely successful fiction like this:

George Martin makes you feel smart for understanding the story.

I’ve never heard it described this way, but this is really a very old technique that requires quite a bit of subtlety. Nearly every mystery novel or novel with a mystery does this. And A Game of Thrones is full of little and big mysteries. I mean, what sets the novel in motion are two very different mysteries:

Who killed Jon Arryn? and Did the prologue have a zombie eat a fucking knight?

Structuring a novel around mysteries is always a good bet. It keeps the reader reading simply to figure out the solution to this question haunting the novel. If the characterization and conflicts are interesting, that’s a nice bonus. But what separates a novel people like from a novel people love, I think, has to do with this empowering sensation of feeling smart for understanding the text you’re reading.

Harry Potter, for example, works this way. Each book has its own little mystery to be solved by Harry and his friends. These different mysteries all end up being one big interconnected mystery to be resolved at the end of the series. But the book guides you to these solutions sometimes by beating you over the head with the solution hidden in plain view. So she pays out these hints here and there, sometimes with red herrings tossed in to spice things up (red herring could be the entire wiki article for Snape, to be honest).

The goal in each book is to have the reader discover the solution to the mystery a few pages or paragraphs or sentences before the characters state the solution. You’re meant to have the aha! moment right before Hermoine tells you the answer.

This is actually a difficult thing to pull off! If readers figure things out too quickly, they won’t like the solution. If they don’t figure it out at all until you tell them, they might perceive the solution as random or a sort of Deus Ex Machina solution. And so you need to place the breadcrumbs out in view to be followed, even when the characters go in the wrong direction, so that when they finally discover the heart of the mystery, you feel right there with them.

The Sixth Sense, for example, gives you everything you need to figure this out fairly early. We all know some asshole who claims to have figured out the twist within the first five minutes. But most of us didn’t come to this answer until Haley Joel Osment whispers that famous line. Instead of confusion, though, we inwardly shriek Of course!

On the otherside of this, you have a movie like Ocean’s Twelve, where the solution to the caper is left off-screen and has to be explained at the end of the movie. This made everyone in the theatre feel cheated for obvious reasons.

Martin does this dozens of ways throughout A Game of Thrones. We’re fed red herrings that the characters gobble up, but we’re given just enough to figure out what’s going on in almost every interaction. Even the parentage of Jon Snow could be solved in this first novel.

But we can’t know for sure, but we feel smart for putting it together: is Jon a Targaryen? We hope, but don’t know, but we sure feel like we figured something out. Of course, just as much information is given to imply that Tyrion is a Targaryen.

Game of Thrones is a novel that rewards the reader in many ways, but I think people underestimate this sensation of feeling smart for understanding a text. Without this, I don’t think Game of Thrones spawns a very popular message board still being widely used.

When I read these books in 2011, I can’t really explain just how many fan theories were out there and how well sourced and documented they were. This is before the TV show, mind. People had written thousands of words to justify their pet theories. They’d been debating these theories for almost twenty years by the time the show premiered.

I never wrote it down anywhere, but I strongly believed that Littlefinger was going to be the one left on the Iron Throne at the end.

And I had good reasons! Even after the conclusion of the series, I still think it makes more narrative sense for Littlefinger to be the king at the end. I’ll even tell you why if you really want to hear about it.

But this is the power of Martin’s writing. He built a world so solid and real, brimming with humanity and intrigue, with redemption and devastation. We can find what we’re looking for in the novel, but it is also a gift. A gift to be able to invest so much of our own thoughts and ideas into a story about imaginary people in an imaginary world.

And so, is Game of Thrones good?

I’d say that any book you can talk this much about is at least worthy of your time and attention. But, yeah, it’s real good, man.