A tradition of high sophistication is now well established in genre writing.  It’s been going for a while in spy and crime fiction and a little while back; Tad Williams put in a good entry in the fantasy genre.  George R. R. Martin’s fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire (ASIF) is widely cited as a worthy entry in the same.  It’s important to support this trend in genre writing.  However, when one uses the term ‘sophistication‘, there is a question as to whether what is meant refers to ‘literary sophistication‘.  Immediately the discussion becomes fractious and confused.  No, I don’t think most works of genre fiction are worth examining in the frame of reference provided by literary criticism – the value of literary sophistication is debatable anyway.  ASIF, nevertheless, is worth looking at from this point of view.   It has such a degree of sophistication that I will be devoting two entire posts to its analysis.  In this post I’ll be examining how it manages to survive some of the standards criticisms levelled by the literati at genre fiction (fantasy in particular).  In my follow up post I’ll be looking at its incredible exploration of the concept of honour – the central binding theme of the entire saga.  Hopefully these posts will give you a new appreciation of Martin’s work.

For those who don’t know, A Song of Ice and Fire is a planned seven book series of fantasy novels.  The plot is too long and involved to summarize adequately here.  Though you can get a gist of what it’s about by reading this wikipedia entry.  Alternatively you can watch the recently aired first season of Game of Thrones – an excellent adaptation of the books by HBO.  The basic gist is that it’s a story concerning a large medieval style world that falls into a civil war waged between a number of different ruling houses after the death of the King.  Each house has its salient features and notable characters.  But unlike many house saga fantasy stories (think Dune – imo), each character is individually realised and not a mere instantiation of the abstract qualities attributable to the families as a whole.  Meanwhile, to the North and South grow two supernatural forces that threaten to consume the feuding houses and bring about a dark age of wintry horror.

As always, this review is best read by those who have some familiarity with the plot first hand.  Spoilers ahead.  My reviews are for those who want to understand better what they are reading, as opposed to those who are looking for new things to read.  (Alternatively if you require a high degree of proof that something is worth your time – then my reviews may also prove useful in this respect).

I’m going to consider ASIF from four separate critical perspectives: exposition and world building, magic in fantasy, theme and symbolism.  In this post I’ll be looking at the first two of these, the second two will be explored in a post to come.  Some of these will produce negative criticisms of Martin’s work – but others will be more positive.   With respect to the negative,  if we’re going to encourage a higher degree of sophistication in genre fiction, then we need to encourage our beloved authors to take some of these criticisms on the chin.

 

Exposition and World Building

Interestingly, a consideration of exposition is actually not an element of criticism that really belongs exclusively on the literary side.  There is much more agreement between the literary/genre critical styles than you would think.

Exposition is that part of story telling wherein various elements are told to us – as opposed to shown.  The distinction can break down if you push it hard enough, but the basic idea is that a piece of exposition might say something like:

Samantha was horrified by the zombie.

Whereas a piece of text that sought to show her horror rather than tell it might write something like:

Samantha ran from the zombie screaming at the top of her lungs.  Later she was found in the foetal position, holding a teddy bear while rocking gently back and forth.

Literary fiction has traditionally had no problem at all in employing large amounts of exposition (try Henry James for example) – and sometimes you’ll hear the literati sneer at texts that avoid it.  But it’s actually highly subject to fashion.  Hemmingway popularized a style during the first half of the twentieth century that minimised the use of exposition, for instance.  So it’s not really honest for anyone to complain about a text merely because it uses/doesn’t use exposition.

Typically, those that prefer the showing method, criticise exposition for being too dry, analytical and removed from the drama.  Those that prefer exposition tend to criticise the showing method as being too superficial, lacking in intellectual depth; as well as being too ‘movie-like – as previously mentioned.

But what is almost universally by all genuine critics from all backgrounds is the following maxim:  use as much exposition as is necessary, but no more.  Show as much as needs to be shown, but no more.

How much exposition is the right amount?  It’s usually incredibly difficult to say, and often simply a matter of taste.  It generally depends on what the author is trying to achieve with their story.  They should use as much exposition/showing as required by their own aims.  A critic’s (a good critic – that is) is to try to get a sense of the aims of an author and assess their efforts relative to that understanding.  Not an easy job – but that’s the way it has to be approached if you want to be able to make some allowances for taste in your critique.

Martin, I feel, gets the balance between the two roughly right.  He can write a scene well – and while not every element of every scene can be thought of as a deliberate note in a symphony of meaning – you just can’t apply those sorts of standards to this sort of writing.  Nevertheless a lot of the writing could do with tightening.  Take this passage describing the character Sansa on her wedding night:

Her hands trembled as she began fumbling at her clothes.  She had ten thumbs instead of fingers, and all of them were broken.  Yet somehow she managed the laces and the buttons, and her cloak and gown and girdle and undersilk slid to the floor, until finally she was stepping out of her smallclothes.  Gooseprickles covered her arms and legs.  She kept her eyes on the floor, too shy to  look at him, but when she was done she glanced up and found him staring.  There was hunger in his green eye, it seemed to her, and fury in the black.  Sansa did not know which scared her more.

It gets the job done.  And we get an adequate sense of the apprehension appropriate to the event.  Here’s how I would probably edit this:

Her hands trembled as she took of her clothes.  Gooseprickles covered her arms and legs.  Her eyes were locked to the floor, but when she was naked she found the strength to look.  He was staring at her.  There was hunger in his green eye and fury in the black.  Both were terrifying.

We don’t need all that information about every single piece of clothing that she removes.  If she gets naked in the end – then obviously they are removed.  We’re told earlier in the scene what she is wearing because the process of putting on the clothes is described in as much detail as when they are removed.  I don’t need to know this twice!  What Martin wants to do here is just get across her nervousness, shyness, and the intense dynamic between the two.  All the exposition here is just getting in the way.

But this is what fantasy authors do.  They like building worlds in every single little detail.  And so when it comes to fantasy I often find it pretty hard to do my job as a critic.  Because to my taste, the fantasy genre is too often devoted to enormous projects of world building that just aren’t necessary to the story being told.  Yet, this is almost one of the explicit aims of many fantasy writers.  And I don’t doubt that many fans of the genre find that it is necessary for their immersion and escapist intentions.  Each to their own.

Martin’s work is certainly a world-building epic.  It has even been hailed for the gritty realism that it has brought to this task.  So I have to question whether I’m willing to question the work on it’s own terms and accept it as such.  Well – given the high quality of the work, I might be so willing – if it weren’t for the fact that I think that it conflicts with what I see to be many of Martin’s other goals that he seems to be setting for himself.

The most important of these is the story’s status as allegorical symbol for the real world.  If you’re a person that reads to expand one’s understanding of the real world, then this aim has a far higher value than its aim as escapist fantasy.  What’s more – it’s easy to feel justified in pulling-rank and claiming that the objective value of allegorical work is far higher.  At least, one could certainly adduce a large number of arguments to this effect.

What I want to argue is that even if Martin doesn’t intend it (I’d be surprised if this were the case), his story does have incredibly high value as an allegory.  I’ll be making the case for this throughout this post and my follow up to come.  For me then, its a shame to have to work through such an enormous amount of world-building in order to be able to appreciate that allegory.  Many, I think, would be prevented from such appreciation precisely because of the degree of world building the Martin has undertaken.

To understand the symbolism, as well as the more abstract thematic content, one needs to be able to see it from above.  You need to be able to hold as many details in your head at once in order to be able to see the patterns of connections, the structure of symbolic interplay and meaning.  It’s really hard to do this when you have seven books to work through – each well over a thousand pages each.  This is one of the main reasons why it’s rare to find massive literary epics that span multiple books.  (Proust is an exception I believe.)  It’s just so much harder to pull off a story that fits together as a coherent whole when it’s so large.

Besides being able to see it from above, sometimes there are just features of narrative which require you to have read the whole thing before you can assess it.  A particular plot twist toward the end can throw an entirely different light over everything that has come before –  (consider ‘Fight Club‘ as an example).  Until you’ve swallowed all seven books of ASIF – you never really know if the Martin isn’t just setting us up for a giant mind wipe right at the end.  Since all of the books haven’t been released yet – my analysis may suffer from just this sort of limitation.

Then there’s the problem of sorting out which details are thematically relevant, and which are just part of the detail.   And don’t try to tell me that every single detail in the thousands of pages written so far are all beautiful diamonds of pure thematic resonance.  No one is that good.  (And one day I write why I think Proust isn’t that good either – despite what many say).

So I think I have good reason for saying that Martin has gone too far with his world building – and that it detracts from much of what he is trying to achieve.  I think there is a pressure coming from the fantasy tradition that is perhaps the culprit here.  World building epicness has unfortunately become conflated with serious gravitas in the genre.  Just because it’s long – doesn’t mean it’s good.

Having said that – it’s not the worst of crimes by any measure.  And given that Martin manages to avoid the worst excesses of the genre in other respects – I’m personally willing to give him a pass on this.

 

Magic and Fantasy

In most fantasy stories there is a power structure that is underwritten by a magical power of some kind or another.  It’s kind of hard to imagine fantasy fiction without magic – so you can’t  criticise the genre for making use of it.  But I think there is good reason to criticise how it’s typically used by many writers in the genre.  There are two main aspects to the way magic is commonly used that detracts from its potential to really achieve a high level of sophistication.  Martin’s treatment avoids the worst of these two aspects (or at least, has the potential to) – and this reveals a lot about the level of sophistication that he has managed to achieve.

One aspect of the way fantasy typically employs magic  - and the most important with respect to the commercial success of the genre – is its use in the growth in power of an individual or group of characters.  The most clichéd and common instance of this is the rise to power of a single protagonist (usually a young, orphaned boy), who from humble beginnings becomes the most powerful magician in the world – a chosen one that saves everyone from some great evil.  This is an ID-satisfaction device that is used  to suck in readers and allow for vicarious desire satisfaction.  The device has been so well honed in modern times that it’s not unreasonable to call the practice exploitative – insofar as it simultaneously compels readers to shell out money to read the next instalment, while getting in the way of the reader actually achieving a real degree of desire satisfaction.  The reader is trapped into a dream of power acquisition that detracts from their potential for genuine achievement.

The problem I have with this aspect (at least with respect to this review) is not its exploitative nature – but really the sorts of constraints that it places on the other elements of the story.  Since it has to follow this rise to (magical) power story, it cuts of all sorts of interesting plot avenues that could throw light on the theme under exploration.  Since most modern fantasy doesn’t have particularly sophisticated thematic aims – this isn’t so much of a problem.  But since  ASIF is quite sophisticated in its thematic material, there is potential for the magic to get in the way.

The rise to magical power narrative isn’t strongly foregrounded at the beginning of the ASIF – but it’s there.  Martin doesn’t rub your face in it – but there are actually a monstrous number of symbolic references to the rise to magical story to come (e.g. Bran’s dream of the three eyed crow and Dany’s penchant for extremely hot baths) It takes a couple of novels to start ramping up, but certain characters do begin to develop magical abilities and others gain control over various magical beasts like dragons and wargs.  The realisation of these powers become the most salient set-pieces of the entire narrative.  Without having seen exactly how these aspects play out (I’m mid-way through the third book) – I fear that this narrative could totally disrupt the subtle exploration of the concept of honour that we’ve seen in the first couple of books.

Having said that, however, there is great potential for Martin to use the rise to magical power narrative in a way that actually enhances his presentation of the thematic material.  As I said earlier, the central theme of the novel revolves around the concept of honour (which I’ll be exploring in greater depth in the next article).  The characters that seem to be most exposed to magical abilities are the ones that in many respects seem to be the most honourable – namely the Starks and Daenerys Targaryen.  As such, the rise to magical power narrative could be in fact be used her by Martin as an allegory for the importance of the existence of honour in society.

There are multiple symbols of this in the early novels besides the growing powers of the Starks and Daenerys.   Characters without much honour are conspicuously absent any great power.  Daenerys Targaryen, for instance, is a character that is cruel, dishonest and controlling – yet he doesn’t inherit his sister’s ability to withstand great amounts of heat.  (The family’s bloodline is said to descend from Dragons).  The history of the Targaryen family also seems to sure up this interpretation.  The source of their power that allows them to conquer the seven kingdoms are the dragons which serve them.  Yet shortly before the events of the novels begin, their reign comes to an end when the king Aerys Targaryen is murdered.  The king is described as being mad and completely bloodthirsty before his reign ends – without honour – and importantly is without any dragons, since they have all died out before the story begins.  The suggestion is that the loss of honour within the Targaryen family is linked to the loss of power gained through their control of the dragons.

When characters stray from an honourable path, their access to their magical powers is often also sniped.  When Sansa Stark lies to protect Prince Joffrey over an altercation with her sister, her warg (a magical wolf-like creature) is put to death.  When Robb Stark betrays his promise to marry the daughter of an allied lord by marring another girl instead, he begins to lose his connection to his warg – by keeping it outside and feeling ashamed of it in front of his new wife.  The same thing happens to Jon Snow when he breaks his oath to the night’s watch and makes love to a wildling (a group of people in the north that don’t accept lords or kings as their masters).  Soon after, he forced to part with his pet warg.

The least honourable family – the Lannisters – seem to have no access to magical abilities at all.  But more than this – they are the family most dismissive of the supernatural evil growing in the north.  If this evil is an allegory for the harm that befalls a community devoid of honour then it would stand to reason that the most dishonourable family would fear it the least.  The Starks – who generally seem to be the most honourable overall – are in fact the most involved in watching over the north for the return of the supernatural bad guys.  For those on the front line of the great northern wall – The Night’s Watch – honour is the chief virtue.  All other aspects of life are sacrificed in its name: lands, title, love and family.   Once again – it seems appropriate that those who most cherish honour are the ones most concerned about the supernatural evil that grows beyond the great wall.

I’m not entirely convinced this sort of symbolism is maintained consistently throughout the narrative – once again a problem of length. (For instance, the Red Priestess that gains control over Stannis Baratheon seems possessed of great magical power – yet she doesn’t seem honourable at all).  But it’s reasonable to assume that it’s consistent enough to be a valid interpretation.  If in fact that’s how Martin intends his use of the magical power narrative to play out then I wholeheartedly endorse this use.  It’s a well sustained and highly sophisticated use of symbolism that sheds a great deal of light on his treatment of his theme.  In general though, fantasy writers are going to need to start avoiding the use of this plot device if they want to improve the sophistication of their stories.  There’s only so many times the same narrative structure can be used to shed new light or understanding on any given topic.

But there is another aspect of the use of magic in fantasy that is worth looking at briefly.  Typically – unless the writing is completely hokey (think  most of Star Trek – as an example) – a particular set of rules is developed for how magic can be used in that world.   Without these rules, resolution of conflict becomes arbitrary and lazy, and the story loses any potential for suspense, since the reader comes to learn that the world can be saved with a handy bit of ‘magic’ at the final moment.  At the end of every episode, the Vulcan re-energises the flux matrix of the warp capacitor, leading to a trans-dimensional bolix spiral that rescues everybody and saves the day.  (Or think of how dissatisfied many Battlestar Galactica fans were when they learned at the end it was all the work of God).

The more sophisticated brands of fantasy writing will apply a much more complex set of rules over the use of magic.  The resolution of suspenseful plot points becomes more challenging since characters will have to find creative, yet coherent solutions when the rules block them from achieving their aims.  The catch-22 of this kind of increased sophistication is that while the increased rigidity and complexity of the magical laws can heighten satisfaction and appreciation at the level of plot and character – it makes it much more difficult to successfully use those magical elements as symbolic representations at the level of the thematic material.

It’s for this reason that where magic appears in literary fiction, it typically is presented without  a coherent set of laws that govern how it is to appear in the narrative.  A good example would be “A Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel Marcia Marquez – from the magical realism school.  (I won’t go into detail about this work – but take my word for it – whacky stuff happens and it’s often never explained why according to any kind of rule.)  Literary authors are often less concerned with entertainment, and so aren’t too worried about resolving points of conflict in a suspenseful and satisfying way.  But this raises and interesting question.  If literary fiction doesn’t make use of such laws – why shouldn’t we think of such fiction as being hokey like Star Trek?

The reason is because the aim of such fiction is to use those magical elements to achieve a kind of symbolic  resonance that enhance our appreciation at the level of the theme.  It can often take a great deal of analysis and careful attention to see just how this kind of contribution is made.  And there is a lot of detail I could go into here.  But simply put, literary authors want their use of magic in their stories to mean something.  They don’t care so much if it effectively resolves a particular plot point or not.  This might be to symbolise something abstract concerning the theme – or it might be a symbolisation of a character trait.  In the latter case, this is particularly so when the magic at issue is a power possessed by a character.

The interesting thing about Martin’s use of magic in ASIF is that it strkes me as being much closer to the kind of magic you find in literary fiction as opposed to that found in standard fantasy stories – at least in the first couple of novels.  The small number of magical events at the early stages are left almost completely inexplicable.  If there are rules in operation at all, then they seem to work differently in different circumstances.  Yet, if my preceding analysis is correct, then those magical elements are doing a large amount of symbolic work.

Since Martin is writing popular fiction I get the impression that as the novel’s progress there may well be further fleshing out of the magical laws in operation in his world.  But if he manages to sustain the powerful symbolism established in the first couple of books then he will have achieved that holy grail of artistic achievement – a work that appeals to both the critics and the masses.

 

Theme and Symbolism

We’ve already seen a lot of reasons why ASIF has a high level of sophistication that warrants significant attention.  But you haven’t seen anything yet.  Ultimately, the success of a work must be judged in terms of the higher ideas that it is exploring, and that’s what I’ll be looking at in my next post.  The further into these novels I delve, the more I come to believe that what Martin has achieved in this respect is simply breathtaking.