A Storm of Swords

Well, that was awesome.

Heading into the third installment of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, I had a few reasons to be wary. For one thing, this would be the first book I'd be reading without having seen the corresponding HBO season of television beforehand; what if I found it more difficult to follow certain plot points? I'd found the first two books engaging and easy to read, but perhaps that had only been because I was already so familiar with the material at hand. For another thing, it was this book, of the five that have been written to date, that most fans hail as the greatest and best. The HBO series will spend two seasons covering this book, a full twenty episodes where each previous book had been covered in only ten. I've often pointed out on this blog how great expectations and massive hype can yield disappointing returns. Why should this book have been any different? And for a distant third reason, this was one long-ass book. Clocking in at 1128 pages, it's the second-longest book I've ever read, falling short only of Les Misérables, and being just the third thousand-pager I've read to date. Sure, the previous two books hadn't been brief at 800 and 960 pages, respectively, but this one was an absolute monster.

Yet here I am, just ten days after first opening the book, absolutely raving about it. A Storm of Swords delivered on all the hype and left me completely in awe. Simple number-crunching says I averaged 113 pages a day on this bad boy, and my short term memory reminds me that 500 of those pages came this weekend alone. I don't know what to say about the plot that won't be considered a spoiler, and I know I've done my best to pitch the series so far in previous posts. Let me try once more.

Plenty of components contribute to the greatness of these books and this overall story, but the one I'll focus on here is how wide open and all-inclusive Martin has been at "world building." The man has created and painstakingly described dozens of families and more than a hundred locations scattered across two entirely fictional continents. And by narrating from the limited third person point of view - and more importantly, switching points of view between ten characters or so each book - Martin manages to tell a number of smaller individual stories from a number of different perspectives. In this way, he allows A Song of Ice and Fire to be more than just a "fantasy epic" or some other vague catch-all; instead, each of the individual stories contributing to the overall narrative belong to different genres. One major character is hellbent on conquest, building an army and intending to retake the throne that was usurped from her father. Another is simply trying to make her way back to her mother and siblings after having been kidnapped. One character is a close relative of the king, and deals mostly with politics, tactics, and strategy, arranging marriages and alliances or planning traps to defend his city. Another character is a dishonored smuggler looking for redemption. Another has journeyed off to a far-away and hostile land to infiltrate an enemy's camp. Another is tormented by strange dreams and seeks clarity on what they could mean. And then there's the guy torn between allegiance to his biologicial father and to the man who raised him, each of them firmly rooted on opposite sides of a conflict. This doesn't even round out the characters whose points of view are written from, and there are scores more characters, most of them compelling and interesting in their own right.

In short, it's been just a fantastic series so far, and I'm thrilled to find out what happens next. I'm not sure I'll jump straight into the fourth book, though; Martin has claimed that the first three books and the last three (of a planned seven) are two separate trilogies, and that the fourth and middle book serves as a piece that links the two together. I'll know for myself once I get through it, but many fans claim that lacks a number of the characters and storylines that made the first three books so memorable, and that it introduces a lot of new characters and plots that don't really bring much to the table. I'm not saying I'll be taking any sort of substantial break from this series, but after banging out its first 3,000 pages in just over a month (in addition to like a thousand by other authors) it may be time for me to take a well-earned vacation from reading in order to focus on some movies and video games, neither of which I've logged anything of for forty days.