Why do I like A Song of Ice and Fire?

{SPOILERS}{SPOILERS}{SPOILERS}

I recently found myself trying to explain to my wife, and to my father (who couldn't get into the books) what it is I like about GRR Martin's stories. And that got me thinking...Why do I like it so much? It's not the sentence-by-sentence writing -- not that I think Martin is a bad writer, but, by and large, I don't find the language especially beautiful. It doesn't, for me, have the musicality of, say, Tolkien's writing. No sentence from ASoIaF has stayed with me like the end of Return of the King : " [The] sails were drawn up, and the wind blew, and slowly the ship slipped away down the long grey firth; and the light of the glass of Galadriel that Frodo bore glimmered and was lost. And the ship went out into the High Sea and passed on into the West." Then again, as Martin has said repeatedly, he's not trying to be Tolkien...He's trying not to be Tolkien.

And why do I love the Lord of the Rings? Well, the writing certainly, but let me scamper to another quotation, this one from Nietzsche. In the words of The Immoralist, "From time to time grant me a glimpse, grant me a single glimpse into something perfect, something completely developed, something happy, powerful, triumphant, from which there is still something to fear! A glimpse of a man who justifies humanity." Perhaps ironically, given the influence of Tolkien's Catholic faith on The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien's great work does just this for me. It grants a vision of beauty for beauty's sake, nobility for nobility's sake, and justice for the sake of justice. Martin doesn't do this, and (I think) he doesn't mean to; he intentionally denies his readers a glimpse of something that justifies humanity, and this is part of the deep allure for me -- But more on that later.[1]

A glimpse of a hobbit that justifies humanity...

So far I've only succeeded in identifying the features I like about a different series than ASoIaF. I'd say there are three general reasons: Firstly, Martin is skilled at seeding his books with mysteries for the reader to identify and solve, and it's a great deal of fun to try to figure out where the books are going and which clues you've missed on the last reading. Secondly, Martin is an impressively subtle world-builder; he lends his world and characters an inner logic without having to spell it out all at once. Finally, he plays on fantasy-readers' expectations of a glimpse of something splendid and perfect; what I find remarkable about his books is that he dashes that hope again and again, but never wholly breaks it.

But to start with, the books are fun. On an obvious level, if you're into sword-fighting, quippy banter, magical creatures, fantasy-stuff-etc, Martin's books deliver. Beyond that, and what I think makes them relatively distinctive among fantasy lit, they are mystery novels of a kind. The first one, Game of Thrones, is explicitly structured as a murder mystery, with Ned Stark trying to figure out who killed Jon Aryn. And that's not the only mystery. We want to know who Jon's parents are, what the Dornish are up to, what happened at Summerhall, and what Howland Reed is doing. Reading the books, especially rereading them, I feel like I'm playing a game of Clue (The Classic Detective Game), sorting theories against the available evidence[2] (Lyanna, in the Tower of Joy, with Prince Rhaegar....Stannis, in the Pavillion, with the shadowbaby). As with a good game of Clue, it's not just a matter of finding evidence; you have to see through lies and half-truths. The characters in the book don't want to share their information with each other, and since all the storytelling is structured by POV chapters, most of the information you get is filtered according to the interests of one character as they address another -- and according to that character's own foibles, deficiencies, loves, and hatreds. This is why Ned Stark would be terrible at Clue; he's show everyone his cards and offer to cooperate. But when you play the game of Clue, you win or you die...

It doesn't hurt that Martin is good at creating sympathetic characters. True, Joffery isn't exactly sympathetic, but you'd have to have a heart of stone not to pity him, at least -- Fathered by an alcoholic manchild who wields supreme power, sheltered from all repercussions by his mother and his station, Joffrey is killed on his wedding day for being more or less the kind of person his parents made him. Same with Viserys: He was a cruel, narcissistic idiot, but was also a teenager and a product of his experiences, and he died horribly with no one left who would mourn him. At any rate, though, most of Martin's characters are a lot more sympathetic than Joffrey or Viserys, but they're more than that -- They're personable. Who wouldn't want to spend an evening in a bar with Tyrion, or Bronn (who's a terrible person) for that matter, or a night walking The Wall with Jon Snow? And I think it's important to the mystery-aspect of the series that so many of the characters, even ones who aren't good, are personable. I find myself attached to these characters on a personal level, and that feeds my desire to know what is going to happen to them.

What I've said so far -- The books are fun. They're fun because they have swords and stuff, and they're fun because they pull readers in with mysteries about characters they like. Another aspect of Martin's series I admire is his world-building. Of course, you don't have to like world-building, but it's an aspect of most high fantasy, and Martin pulls it off with surprisingly subtlety. I'd point, as an example of this, to the piecemeal way we get information about the children of the forest. We first hear about them from Bran's POV, when he mentions that his father "would sit before the fire in the evening and talk softly of the age of heroes and the children of the forest." In the next few chapters, we learn, mostly by oblique references, that the children disappeared a long time ago, and that they have something to do with weirwood trees. Later on, a story told to a Bran indicates that humans stole the children's land. The information stream is gradual, and more importantly it's integrated into the storyline. We get hints about the swamping of the land-arm to Dorne through a description of Moat Cailin. Over time we learn that the children have something to do with magic, and something to do with Bran. Martin works his mythology into the narrative in a way that, by and large, doesn't interrupt the narrative.

I'd be surprised if I were the only fantasy reader who sometimes sees a mythology section coming and skips it for later...It's not that I'm not interested, but I want to see what's happening with the story, not get bogged down in five straight pages of made up history that reads like the KJV. What I really like about Martin's writing is that he provides world-building information as part of his narrative, and he repeats and reinforces that information organically. When Bran finally meets the children of the forest, I don't have to thumb back to a single section near the beginning of the books where we get a bunch of information about them in an epic poem of dubious aesthetic merit.

So there it is, I'm a sucker for world-building, and I think Martin does it well. Add to this that world-building information tends to eventually become important in high fantasy works, and Martin does it in a way that can actually be absorbed by the reader, rather than thumbed-over, or half-remember a thousand pages later.

I said there were three reasons I like the books, though. Martin writes a fun mystery; he's good at world-building...and what? Well, maybe the biggest reason I like ASoIaF is that GRRM is magician at shattering his readers' hearts. More than that, he's good at channeling and frustrating his readers' hopes, and that's what renders certain parts of his books genuinely moving to me.

The world of Westeros is grim, and dark and dangerous, but it's not hopelessly grim. Were it so, Martin's books would not be so brutally sad, nor would they be so interesting. This is why A Song of Ice and Fire does more for me than, for example, the recent DC Comics films. On a certain level, I like Nolan's Batman Trilogy, but it doesn't move me. His films are so resolutely grim that they make me steel myself, rather than open myself up to any pathos their narrative could engender. By the time Bane lays waste to Gotham in the third film, it just doesn't touch me; I know what to expect and I'm ready for it.[3]

Martin pulls us along with hope, like asses after a carrot, or opera-goers after the Tristan Chord.[4] In the first book, before we know how far GRR is willing to go, we have hope that Ned will out the truth, and everything will be set right; he is beheaded. Next we hope Tyrion can bring order to King's Landing and control Joffrey; he is mutilated and cast from power. We hope that Oberyn can denounce Clegane and save Tyrion, and that Robb can learn from his mistakes and become a good king; they both die. Perhaps we hope that Daenerys will ride her dragons across the narrow sea and restore peace to the realm that might have been hers, but so far everything the Dragon Queen touches turns to blood and chaos.

Something still capable of arousing fear...

Even when Martin gives us what we want, it doesn't feel the way we expect. Theon gets his comeuppance, but it's so horrible we wouldn't wish it on anyone. We want Tyrion to overcome his father, but how does that happen? Tyrion murders Tywin on a privy, and then kills the woman he loves before going into exile.

Martin's talent, however, isn't for writing darkness, though he clearly can do that. It's for making us hope when we know better than to hope. Like Tyrion with Shae, we know better, but we fall in love anyway, and we do it over and over. If the night is dark and full of terrors, Martin's talent is for making his readers believe that there is a sword in the darkness, a light that brings the dawn, and a hero to be reborn, even as he leads his readers unrelentingly into a long dark. It's precisely because Martin makes his readers wish and hope, rather than steel themselves, that the red wedding, and Ned's death, and even Joffrey's assassination, are so sad. Winter is coming, but what I find remarkable about Martin's writing is his ability to instill in his readers the hopes of the children of summer.    

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[1] It's also worth noting that it would be difficult for Martin to incorporate such elegance of language, given the way he structures his story into POV chapters. It would be absurd, and bad writing, if a teenaged Viking prince, a northern lord, and a smuggler-turned-illiterate-knight all had an inner monologue that sounded like the refined prose of an esteemed professor of linguistics.

[2] Actually, I'm horrible at Clue. GoT is a lot more fun for me than Clue, but similar in principle. I imagine that people who are good at Clue feel about it the way I feel about ASoIaF theories.

[3] I get the sense that Nolan's trilogy, among other contemporary films with aesthetic aspirations, mistake grimness for aesthetic merit. Of course, terrible things may be aestheticized effectively, but horror and sorrow aren't prerequisites for beauty or sublimity, else Mozart's Night Music would be rather trivial.

[4] This refers to a musical tension which Wanger maintained throughout his opera Tristan und Isolde, and which is never fully resolved until the death of the lovers at the very end of the opera. The aesthetic goal of this compositional choice is to evoke longing by constantly bringing the music close to a resolution which is then denied.