Important Information

Title: A Storm of Swords

Author: George R.R. Martin

Publisher: Bantam / Spectra

Cover art: really couldn't get much cheesier... they oughtta come up with something better.

Length: 800 pages in hardback

Rating

6 out of 7 (shockingly... keeps getting better; but when is it going to end?)

“The novels work not just because they are thrill-packed adventures rendered in painstaking detail, but because Martin is so good at conveying character that they have a universal human dimension that strikes at something fundamental. The reason Hamlet still has something to say after four centuries is because its hero is a powerfully conflicted individual whose actions, though morally troubling, are motivated by something we can all relate to though none of us is a medieval Danish prince: love for a parent and rage at the violation of something as sacrosanct as family. A Song of Ice and Fire has precisely that understanding of the basics of the human experience: family, home, security, trust, love.”

--SFreviews.net

This is an interesting review (not idiotic because I think we can have a real professional disagreement on this one and not call each other idiots) because of the favorable comparison to Hamlet. We created Inchoatus because we believed there were works within speculative fiction that were very exciting from a critical sense and matched some of the best stuff coming out in the mainstream or arthouse publishing companies adored by so many academicians. We’re SFreview's side. But in this case we’ve been chronically complaining about the lack of introspection in Martin’s characters. Hamlet is perhaps the most introspective character in all literature. From his contemplations of suicide in his soliloquy “To be or not to be” or his contemplation on the brief nature of life and the leveling influence of death in his “Alas, poor Yoric” speech, Hamlet is constantly thinking about himself—and everyone else’s—place in the world. This is something we feel is completely absent in Martin’s characters and it is for that reason that we hold back from our highest rating. We see people shaped and (sometimes forcibly) evolve. We see the values presented that SFreviews mentions. But we see these things in metaphor from the actions of the characters who are still reacting to events around them rather than owning their experience as Halmet does. We’re happy to review dissent on this opinion. Forward us passages where you think Martin’s people ponder to the extent that Hamlet does and we will revise our ratings.

The reviews that we’ve turned up for this work are unabashedly adoring and they all sing the same praises: character, pace, a sense of reality, a sense of complexity and, above all, a sense of caring about what’s going on. You know you’re on to something special when so many critics are saying the same thing. Martin has clearly touched a chord.

This is going to be a short review. We’re into the third book now in A Song of Ice and Fire and we’re faced with one resolute fact: Martin is getting better as he goes along. A Game of Thrones was very impressive, A Clash of Kings was even more impressive, and now we have a mighty triumph in Swords.

Usually, authors begin flagging towards the back end of their series. Not Martin. It seems as if, like the universe expands in an accelerated fashion, so this saga continues to improve.

Once again picking up right where Kings left off after the great battle for King's Landing and the rebellion of the North spearheaded by Rob the Lannisters begin to try and pick up the pieces of their kingdom and deal with the growing threats around them. The land which was once full of kings now seems empty of them yet the violence has escalated. Rob wars in the North and seriously threatens the coalition put together by the Lannisters who themselves are beset by rival houses from all sides. We follow all of the Stark children as they scatter across the lands in their various pursuits. We delve deeper into the political machinations of the prior generation that sparked so much of the current violence.

We have the politics, the reversals, the betrayals, and the action that permeated the earlier books. Now the story is punctuated by music, by character development, and by a growing sense of the tides of history. We described in Thrones that the universe of the Seven Kingdoms seemed perfectly crafted and deterministic… this sense is now coming in to full flower.

But we’re not nominating this book for a 7. At least not yet.

We’re worried for this series for two reasons:

First is our chronic complaint over the lack of self-reflection. While we’re starting to see much deeper motivations revealed to many of the characters the lack of philosophical ruminations is still faintly puzzling. 

However, the second is much more severe. This is the third book. There is a fourth on the horizon: A Feast for Crows. How many more books will this continue? When will it end?

We complained bitterly in our review of The Wheel of Time about the absurd length. While Martin’s writing and craft is vastly superior to Jordan’s, we honestly believe that a series can support no more than four or five books and remain a viable work of literature over any stretch of time. The series is excellent: it will be bought and read by countless fans… but it cannot survive into future generations if its length grows beyond reason!

We hope that Martin is pressing forward to a conclusion. We hope there's a point at the end of it! This can be one of the finest achievements in a fantasy genre that sorely needs to prove that its bestsellers are also works of literary merit. We stand ready to award the books are highest ratings… but it has to draw to a meaningful end.

Martin is going to continue to dominate the fantasy genre for some time. As readers weary of the interminable Wheel of Time and sicken of the preaching in The Sword of Truth and tire of the same story over and over and over again from Terry Brook, Raymond Feist, and David Eddings, people are going to continue to buy and devour these novels in A Song of Fire and Ice. As a world-building novel, Martin is going to set the height of the bar by which all others are going to be measured for some time. We still don’t believe that comparisons to Tolkien are apt: his achievements do not match the cosmology constructed by Tolkien but people reading Martin may find that they care about the Starks and the Lannisters as much or more than they care about the Bagginses and the House of Isildur. It is a pleasure to see fans spending their money on works that merit the attention and we hope that Martin will serve as a kind of lighthouse for other good authors to follow and come help spruce up the rather tainted genre that is fantasy fiction.

Adherents in the saga will continue with gusto and should. As we mentioned before, the series continues to improve the more Martin writes and he shows no signs of slowing down. This is an excellent series of books to give to new readers in the genre who may have turned up their nose at Tolkien for one reason or another. It’s a remarkable tale of action, adventure, and politics. We imagine that anyone who is intrigued with The Da Vinci Code or other deeper suspense novels dealing in a touch of mysticism in the mainstream publishing world will find these books equally enjoyable.

One of the things people look for in books they read is some sense of joy. It’s there in the works of Neal Stephenson as in few other authors today. But it’s also there in the triumphant satisfaction of The Return of the King, in the missionary zeal of the fremen in Dune, and in the intellectual delights and epiphanies in Stories of Your Life and others…. There is a great deal of joy in lesser but more bestselling works that are too numerous to mention. While Martin doesn’t delve into the corruption and anguish as Jeff VanderMeer and China Miéville seem so prone to do (as the heirs to the dystopias of 1984 and Brave New World) we see also in these books a deepening cycle of pain. Every good thing that this world has seems to be taken away and people who were once joyous become creatures of pain. These books are tremendous. People should read them. But if this absence of joy is going to trouble you or you’re looking for something more affirming, then you should probably seek elsewhere. If there is going to be joy in this series it's probably another three books or so off.