SPOILERS! This review will have tons of spoilers in it. You can skip down to the summary at the end if you like, but it will still reveal a few plot elements.
The plot is fairly simple actually. There was a war 15 years ago against an evil king. We know he was evil because he killed our hero’s sister (they say he raped her, but there is no reason given.) Also they call him the Mad King a few times, so he must be bad. The new king is put in power with the help of Ned Stark, a Lord of a northern castle. Apparently he has a lot of troops at his disposal, and musters them up in times of strife to kick Southerner butt. Anyways, typically, Ned is the honorable, but clueless Northern Lord. He must go south to the capital to help the new king rule the land. Why? Because A: the new king is a fat loser and a drunk, and B: his evil wife and her family are trying to get control of the throne. We know that this family is evil for a number of reasons. The first being that you would have to be evil to want to oppose our lovable drunk of a king. Two, when the king visits Ned in his northern castle, the first thing he does is go down to the crypts to visit the crypt of his slain betrothed, Neddy’s little sister. The queen gets in a huff about this, so clearly she is evil. Later in the book, we find out that she is humping her brother and that all of the kings heirs are actually her brother’s children.
But is the queen really all that evil? Well, let’s put it in perspective. Imagine you go on a long journey across the country with your boyfriend. You drive for days and days. The whole time he’s moody. Then, when you finally get to your destination, the first thing he does is go visit the grave of some old girlfriend who died 15 years ago while leaving you in the car. Not even bothering to drop you off at a coffee shop or anything. Wouldn’t you be seriously pissed? Now imagine you were a queen! So, yeah she was ticked that he visited his dead girlfriend before anything else. Wouldn’t you be? But, you say, she was humping her brother, and that is totally evil. Well, in the book, Martin establishes that the old monarchy used to do just that to keep the blood pure. So it wasn’t all that unusual of a thing and certainly within the bounds of their culture. Secondly, we’re told that the king routinely humps everything that moves. Would you want to sleep with someone who goes whoring every night? Me neither. This seems to be a sexual double standard where the queen is evil for having an affair, but the king is not. We are also told in the book that one time the queen did get pregnant with the king’s child once, but she had it aborted. That must be evil, you say? Well, Martin shows us that the king sometimes beats the queen, and that the queen wouldn’t willing sleep with the king (both the king and the queen say this) so my guess is the king got drunk one night and raped the queen. Would you want to have the baby of a fat, drunkard, loser who beats you? Me neither.
Something evil does happen however. When the queen and her brother are having sex, one of Ned’s kids happens to see them. The brother then tries to kill the kid by throwing him off the castle wall. But when Ned confronts the queen with this, the queen says, what would you have done? Ned thinks that he might have done the same.
Anyways, off to the Southern lands we go where Ned finds out that the King has pretty much bankrupted the kingdom. One of the largest debtors is the Queens family the Lannisters. Martin tries to suggest that this makes the Lannisters into conniving thieves or scum or something. But couldn’t they also be trying to influence the king to protect their investment when it looks like the kingdom is going to go bankrupt?
So Ned is the stranger in a strange land, and Martin tries to show us that lots of political stuff is going on without Ned’s knowledge. Ned does some really colossally dumb things like threatens to expose the queen’s progeny for what they are. The king dies in an accident (he gets too drunk and gets gored by a boar). Martin tries to show us that perhaps it wasn’t an accident and one of the king’s squires (a Lannister) gave him too much to drink thus making sure he would be killed. But the king didn’t seem to need any help getting drunk any other time, and I don’t think that some squires would be able to say no if the king asks for more wine. On his dying bed, the king tries to make Ned the royal protector until his son comes of age. With the death of the king, and Ned threatening to screw everything up with his honest ways and take power, the queen has him seized, and has her son crowned. Ned is put in jail. The new king does some pretty evil stuff and we come to realize that, yeah this kid is not a good king. But perhaps that’s because all of old king’s advisors were evil little turds and the new boy is following their advice. Plus, he is a snotty little kid with supreme power. But I wouldn’t call this kid evil. He has Ned killed because he was publicly humiliated my Ned earlier. So much for Ned. I don’t like the fact that Martin is vilifying a young boy. I remember I did some pretty bad things when I was a kid, and if I had supreme power, I would probably have done worse stuff. But that doesn’t mean I was evil. I was just young. Here, the boy has had a drunk for a father, and a mother that spoils him. Small wonder that he is less than perfect.
Things are made worse when up north, there is an attempt to kill Ned’s son because he saw the sex thing (although he conveniently can’t remember, plus there is a whole dream, crow, mystical conversation sideline that just goes nowhere). This ticks off the mom to no end. They trace the dagger of the killer back to the queen’s little brother (not the one she’s having sex with) who is a midget. The evidence is really weak (a noble says he gave the dagger to the midget, but the noble proves again and again that he is untrustworthy). Ned’s wife takes the little guy prisoner to take him back up north for a “trial”. This ticks off the queen and her brother (the one she is having sex with) and he attacks Ned in the street (this is before Neddy is killed of course) and has his men killed. Again, these action are supposed to appear evil, but how would you feel if your brother were kidnapped and taken away for a secret trial and the person responsible is right in front of you? You might do the same thing. In fact he showed a lot of restraint by not killing Ned. But shortly after Ned is killed anyways.
Another plot thread we’ve got is the former king’s two children. They are living in the southern lands of the barbarian hordes. It’s the tired cliché of the Southern barbarian hordes at the door step. We follow the tale of the two children, one a young boy (who is killed for being childish) and a young girl (who is married off to the barbarian king at 13 and then we get to read sex scenes between her and the barbarian king. Great fun). The tension builds up as the young girl convinces her barbarian king husband to attack the Northern lands, but when he agrees, he is killed by an infection and his horde dissipates. So much for that, good thing we read 200 pages about an attack that never happens. That makes me feel all happy inside.
Another tired, clichéd plot thread is the evil, undead menace from the North. There is a wall up North to prevent the Others from getting in. But it’s undermanned and under funded. It supposed to be creepy, or dramatic I guess, but we all know that nothing is going to happen in the first book. So we just get teaser after teaser. We follow the exploits of Ned’s bastard son as he joins the wall gang at 15. Blah, blah, blah, undead zombies that can’t even kill a 15-year-old kid. Snore.
After Ned gets off-ed by his own stupidity, his oldest son (not the one that got thrown off a wall) gets all ticked off and decides to march South to kick some Lannister butt. The Lannisters have anticipated this and are attacking people not loyal to the new king. I guess that’s supposed to be evil too, but I don’t see how. I mean Ned’s son is doing pretty much the same thing. Here again I have an objection. Why is Ned’s son allowed to lead the army. He is only 15. Would you follow a 15-year-old, never tested in battle? Especially when he has so many more, experienced men around him? Needless to say, Ned’s kid kicks butt, because he outwits the Lannister army.
END OF SPOILERS (more or less)
So we have the three clichéd plot elements, the clueless Northern lord in the crafty South, the Southern barbarian hordes, and the evil undead menace to the North, all in one book. Why do we need all of this stuff in one book? It ends up jumping from main character to main character so often that the plot moves at a glacial pace.
The evil enemies in the book are really not all that evil. In fact, many of the supposed evil characters are CHILDREN!!!! I found it really difficult to like the protagonists in the book as they continued to do supremely stupid things at every turn. The characters we are supposed to hate aren’t actually all that evil. Plus, Martin’s portrayal of children in this book is totally unbelievable. I know that in the old times kids were supposed to grow up fast, but come on! Kids barely in their teens leading armies and beating experienced intelligent adults? What message is Martin trying to give here? That children can be inherently evil, and then they should be off-ed? Kids are way smarter that adults? Noble blood beats experience every time?
This novel is very weak, I have no intention of reading the next three even bigger tomes in this series and I encourage you to give them a miss as well.
As a side note, there is a RPG in the works for this series and I just have to wonder why. There is absolutely nothing remarkable about the world in any way.
Lastly I would like to credit David Brin for inspiring me to read more critically. Check out his web site (www.davidbrin.com) for a very interesting read on Lord of the Rings, and Star Wars.
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