Ramblings On...George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones (spoilers)

“Winter Is Coming”

Before I sat down to catch up on the the first season of the series, I wanted to jot down some things about the book, unbiased by an interpretation of the book for television...

My boss put me onto this book probably about a year and a half ago.  I started reading it, but it was long, and unfortunately I just wasn’t willing to put in the time.  I was about half way through the book and was getting bogged down with the characters I found slightly annoying.  I just had other things I wanted to read.  That’s pretty much happened to me my whole life.  People point me in the direction of a book I will surely love, but until I am ready, I just won’t read it.  I had heard so many wonderful things about the series, and I loved the imagery and depth of the characters in the part I had read, so eventually I decided to really sit down and read the book.  I got through it in less than a week.

I am one of those people that looks to see how long a book is and generally steers away books longer than four hundred pages.  I know that if I can’t see an end, I may not bother with it.  I may get a little into it, feel I’m never going to finish and just stop reading it.  Just so you know, I have a doctorate level education, so I’m not exactly an intellectual slouch.  Well, not an educational slouch anyway.  The jury is still out on the other one...

This book is so descriptive that Martin really pulls you into his world.  It isn’t the overly ornate description of surroundings like an Anne Radcliffe gothic fiction novel, but Martin’s world comes to life for us through his beautiful imagery.  Tied in with the imagery is a short sentence structure that would make Hemingway proud and a short chapter scheme that helps even the most commitment phobic of us want to read “just one more chapter” before we put the book down...Each chapter is from a main character’s perspective, switching off with every chapter.  Even though it is from his or her point of view, the book is written in the third person, so you never have to guess which character’s story you are into at the moment.

The Seven Kingdoms have had a particularly mild time for nearly a decade.  The harsh winters had subsided and had left them in what felt like an unending summer.  The past days of dragons, giants and “the others” in the woods were tales told to scare children.  Their time had come and gone.  The last of the dragons were gone with the usurping of the tyrannical king, and a valiant hero took the Iron Throne for himself...

One family’s motto rang true. The Starks of the North knew that only one thing was certain...eventually, the winter would be back.  Their family motto:  Winter Is Coming.  And it is.  The children of the vanquished king prepare an army to take back the Iron Throne.  The valiant hero who took the throne was a warrior, not a statesman. And the Wall that needs more guards than ever have to go begging for anyone to take the black...

I figured that since so much happened in this book, I would write about some of my favorite characters instead of embarking on the impossible task of actually recapping the book...

Jon Snow.  You know, when I first started typing that, I wrote Jon Stark.  Basically because even though Jon is the bastard son of Ned Stark and can’t by law inherit or even take Ned’s name, he was raised with his legitimate children.  Depending on where in the Seven Kingdoms one is born, a bastard gets a surname fitting of that realm--in the North, the surname is Snow, another realm has Flowers, another Stone, I believe another has Rivers...Jon doesn’t know who his mother is.  Actually, no one really knows who Jon’s mother is.  There were whispers, and when Catelyn, Ned’s wife, asked, Ned made sure those whispers stopped.  Jon saw this as a sign that Ned was ashamed of who his mother was.  Catelyn saw this as a sign that Ned was protecting the mother for some reason...which made her hate Jon even more.  But these things say more about Ned than they do about Jon, so moving along...Jon was raised at Winterfell with Ned’s other children, which means he was educated with them and was taught swordplay with them.  This may or may not have been a good thing for Jon.  Frankly, although Jon posed the question about “taking the Black” to his uncle Ben before they knew Ned would be leaving to be Robert’s Hand, when Ned decided to go Jon had little choice but to leave for the Wall.  Catelyn would put up with the bastard being there when Ned was there, but she wasn’t going to put up with him in her face every day if Ned was not.  Did living the first fourteen years of his life with a Lord’s family give Jon false expectations regarding what he could be or do in life?  Maybe.  As a man of the watch, he will never get married or father childen...The men guarding the wall are much like jedi knights that way.  Their oath and allegiance is to the kingdom and keeping it safe.  They cannot have split allegiances.  They cannot love anything but their duty.  When Jon first talks of going, he is told he should father a couple bastards himself.  He should find out what he is giving up before he goes up there.  In the end though, he didn’t really have a choice.

Up a the Wall, Jon doesn’t get along with the others so well at first. He is better than they are as far as fighting is concerned.  He realizes that it isn’t all glorious, but that the men protecting the wall are generally there for a reason--and it usually isn’t a noble one.  Over time though, he realizes that every man has his own story, and that men don’t like you when they fear you.  Once Jon understands these things, he is able to help those others with him.  Eventually, he sees them as family.  He becomes a leader of the boys who are training.  After training is over, he doesn’t get put with the Rangers, which seems insulting to him.  It is easy to forget sometimes that Jon is really just a boy...Sometimes he acts like Harry Potter does in The Order of the Phoenix.  If you recall, in that book Harry is at that perfect age where he gets angry about things, and lashes out.  He takes things very personally, and all in all has a very difficult time, as we all did. You’re not quite a grown up, but you’re not really a kid either.  Sometimes Jon shows that, and it’s hard, because he acts so much older than his age, and seems wise beyond his years, to remember that isn’t quite a man yet.  This is a lot to put at the feet of a full grown man, let alone a child still in the process of becoming a man. 

But Jon has the potential to be an amazing man.  He has that honorable, principled side his father has. I can’t wait to see how he grows up.

Eddard Stark.  I was surprised to find out that not everyone loves Ned like I do.  I love how principled he is.  Sure, he seems rigid at times, but I hate saying a principled man is “principled to a fault”. It’s like being “honest to a fault”.  How can having an excess of these qualities be bad?  Aren’t these qualities in such a sparse amount to begin with? Shouldn’t we applaud people who are truly noble?

I told a best friend once about my admiration for  people who believe in something profoundly.  She turned it and said that I apparently admired ignorance. I laughed and told her that I guess in a way she could say that.  I truly admire people who have strong principles and/or beliefs.  Ned is one of these strong principled people.  He was told that he should flee, but he refused to.  It would have been better for him if he had, clearly. But would he have been Ned if he left?  I guess what I would fault Ned with was being too trusting that others would do what he would do.  I have always tried to treat others the way I would want to be treated, but understand that people may not share in that perspective and treat me accordingly. After all, you need to be smart about your altruism...But Ned expected people to play by the same rules he played by, and that just wasn’t happening.

Ned wound up at the Red Keep because Robert asked him to be his Hand. What I found interesting, and sad about this is that this really was the sum and total of Ned’s life.  It seems that he was always fulfilling the promises made by another.  That was his plight in life.  He comments toward the end after he is arrested that the King dies, and the Hand is buried, but truthfully, this was not the first time this had happened to Ned.  His brother died years before and Ned was buried then.  Or at least the life that was supposed to be Ned’s was buried then.  When Brandon died, Ned became Lord of Winterfell.  He married the woman that his brother was betrothed to.  Essentially, Ned stepped into his big brother’s shoes.  He did it because it was his duty, he didn’t feel sorry for himself and the loss of the life he was supposed to have.  It hurt to see that Ned didn’t feel he was good enough to walk in his brother’s shoes.  This wasn’t supposed to be his life, his brother would have been better.  He was just the sloppy second choice...I guess in that sense I saw Ned as almost a Faramir character.

We find that most of the noble men have bastard children, but none treat them as Ned treated Jon.  We also know that the Lords and Kings tend to have multiple bastards, but Ned only has the one.  It seems that Robert thought that Jon’s mother was just some girl, but Catelyn, and others, believed otherwise.  Was she just some girl or was she the woman that Ned was in love with?  Was she the woman that Ned would have married if he had been able to live HIS life, as opposed to his brother’s?  It seems that Catelyn thinks more of the coupling than just sex.  She sees the fact that Ned won’t allow anyone to talk about or ask about Jon’s mother as proof that Ned is protecting Jon’s mother.  Why would he do that other than because he cared deeply for her?

We also see that Robert, in coming to Ned, knew he needed Ned.  It seems that Robert was hoping that Ned could clean up the mess that he had created...or at least the mess he had allowed to happen.

It is painfully ironic that a man so steeped in principle and doing what was right dies by beheading for a treason he didn’t really commit.  Of course no one knows that.  They think he was a traitor.  Nobody knows that Joffrey is Jamie’s son, not Robert’s.  Ned knew, but he didn’t tell anyone. Instead, in line with his sense of honor, he gave Cersei time to flee with her children...which she did not do.  Ned was even given the advice that he should back Joffrey and rule as regent for the four years before Joffrey was active king.  Ned would not because he knew that the true heir of the throne should be Robert’s brother Stannis. Even though he didn’t like Stanis, he saw it as the right thing to do because Stannis should be the heir by blood.  But again, if Ned had acted any other way, he wouldn’t have been the man he was...

Daenerys Targaryen.  I don’t think I can adequately express how happy I was when her brother was crowned in a very gruesome way with molten gold. Dany was very young, only about 13, when her brother sold her to a savage king in an attempt to get an army to take back the throne.  Dany proves herself a strong woman, even though she was been held down and ridiculed by her brother her entire life.  Her mother died giving birth to her, and she wasn’t even alive when their father was on the Iron Throne.  She only had the stories told to her by Vaserys.  She knows though that they are supposedly the last of the “dragons”.  

As a wedding present she is given three eggs that are supposed to be petrified, but Dany can sense something in them.  Of all the points in this story, this one was pretty transparent.  What was totally not, was her husband dying.  That was shocking for me!  Bringing back the dragons though has earned her respect she otherwise as a woman would have lost in with these savages.  It will be interesting to see where her story will go.

Arya Stark. It’s funny, but I always love the tom boy girl character...like Eowyn in LoTR, but totally not me.  i was a real girly girl...Although NOT like Sansa in that I was way too smart to be Sansa..but Arya is an awesome character.  She and Sansa are like night and day.  Because she wanted to learn swordplay, Ned got her a “dance instructor” read that private tutor for swordplay.  She was totally learning on the sly, and even gets mistaken for a boy at times...but she is strong and independent and fierce.  She is a great character.

Robert Baratheon. Robert himself in the book isn’t anything to write home about, but what I love about him is that old saying that a happy ending depends on where you end the story.  Robert was the brave, valiant hero that won the throne.  He was gallant and true.  He was a fighter and not cut out to rule.  Ruling made him weak and soft, which is just what his wife wanted to lull him into submission.  Robert is a man of extremes.  He was fierce in combat, but being stuck in a castle, with people around him to do everything seemed to draw the lifeblood out of him.

Robert was everything we love about heroes.  We find out that before he became King he was tall and strong and handsome.  He was everything we would expect in a cavalier knight.  Even though he won the throne, which seems like something that would be cause to celebrate, it came at too high a price.  He lost the woman that he loved, and we see that even all these years later, he hasn’t let her go.  He is married, but he doesn’t love her.  He takes mistress after mistress.  When he finally goes to visit Ned up at Winterfell, the first thing he wants to do is pay his respects to Lyanna. With Ned, he even talks about her, and how things would have been different if she had lived.  Robert was a man who lived and loved fiercely...

He knew how far he had fallen, and so he went to Ned to help him out of it.  He knew Ned wouldn’t pay him lip service like everyone else did around him.  Ned would tell it like it was.  Even when Ned seriously ticked Robert off, so much so that Robert threw him out, he then forbade Ned to leave.  He knew he needed Ned if he wanted any chance at all...Sadly, Robert waited too long to seek Ned’s counsel, and it meant the end for both of them.

I’ve started reading A Clash of Kings, and will get something up after that one too!  The first season, which I believe is the scope of the first book, is out on DVD and Blu Ray March 6, 2012.  Season Two: A Clash of Kings premieres on HBO in April!