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Book Review: A Clash of Kings by George R.R. Martin
212 months ago
Back in October 1998, I was working in the Gallery Place neighborhood of Washington, D.C., when on a lark I went into the old Olson’s book store (RIP) near the Shakespeare Theater on my lunch break. The science fiction and fantasy section of the store was pretty meager, but it was the only bookstore in the neighborhood, and I had time to kill. As I scanned the titles on the single row of hardbacks, my eye caught something I couldn’t believe I was seeing — A Clash of Kings by George R.R. Martin. Sitting on the shelf, a good three weeks before street date. Of course, I bought it — I was incredibly thrilled at my luck. No other fans had read it! When I got home, I posted the chapter list on Usenet, and to my surprise, almost every single response claimed that I was lying. I chalked it up to sour grapes and finished the book before it event hit the street.
Now, thirteen years later, I have just re-read A Clash of Kings as part of my epic re-read of A Song of Ice and Fire corresponding with both the HBO television adaptation of Game of Thrones, and the imminent release of Dance With Dragons. Clash of Kings is still an immensely great book, which like the first, centers on the arrival of a new king’s Hand — in this case, the unlikely Hand, Tyrion Lannister — in King’s Landing. Unlike Ned Stark, however, Tyrion is much better equipped to deal with court politics, but a different set of personal weaknesses endanger his reign. Meanwhile, war engulfs the river lands, Robert’s brothers Renly and Stannis both vie for the Iron Throne, Dany continues her journey to the east, and the Night’s Watch strikes out to discover where all the Wildings have vanished to. Theon Greyjoy is added as POV character, and along with Tyrion, offers one of the most interesting arcs in the book.
It’s somewhat easy for Clash of Kings to be overshadowed by Storm of Swords (the best in the series thus far) and Game of Thrones, but there is still much to recommend about it. The ending is both sad and hopeful at the same time, a true Empire Strikes Back style ending, and Martin begins to turn the screws on his characters in ways that not even Game of Thrones could anticipate.
Book Review: A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin
21 year ago
I first read George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones back in 1997, just after I graduated from college — I had completed Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time (to that point), and was enticed by the Jordan blurb on the cover of the paperback. Combined with a fondness for George R.R. Martin’s short stories and Wild Cards series as a teenager, I knew I should give it a chance. I remember being up late at my mother’s house in the height of winter, feeling an odd chill as I finished the prologue, impressed by the mix of fantasy and horror. Of course, with its rich cast of characters, focus on politics, and subtle approach to magic, A Game of Thrones is much more than its prologue.
In many ways, A Game of Thrones represents a tremendous paradigm shift in fantasy. Characters are flawed, and central figures — even protagonists — can die horribly. We may take this for granted now, but in the late 1990′s, fantasy was still largely wed to the Tolkien model. Not so after A Game of Thrones. Robert Jordan, David Eddings, Terry Brooks, et al, all seemed adolescent in comparison to Martin.
I have since gone back and read it six times over the past 14 years — whenever a firm date is announced for a new volume of a Song of Ice and Fire, I go back and re-read all the books in the series. The recent announcement of A Dance With Dragons for July 2011 is no different — except this time, I’m reading the series on my Kindle and not in print. Fortunately, the typography and art translates well on the platform, and reading it on Kindle is very similar to reading it in print. Even knowing the story as well as I do, including through a recent screening of the first six episodes of the HBO television adaptation, I find there’s still much to enjoy. The tragedy that befalls Ned Stark and his children is still as great as it was on first reading — and the hindsight of the later books only helps to underline this.
For many years, I have tried to find fantasy series that can compare, and though some come close, none have been able to match A Game of Thrones. And as good as the television series is, the source material is still better. If you’re still on the fence, you really have no excuse. Read it. And don’t complain about the Kindle price — it’s worth the $9.
Review: The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall
01 year ago
I’ve never been much of a fan of family sagas, but the idea of a family saga about polygamist fundamentalist Mormons was intriguing enough to lead me to read Brady Udall’s The Lonely Polygamist. The book is centered around a man named Golden Richards, a well-meaning, but dim-witted cipher, who has been defined his whole life by the people around him. Now a member of radical Mormon splinter group, husband to four sister-wives (including two full-fledged sisters) and father to 28 children, Golden finds himself struggling with a midlife crisis. Secretly working as a contractor building a new addition to a brothel, Golden finds himself tempted by his boss’s common law wife, an emotional and spiritual indiscretion as anathema to polygamists as it is to traditional couples. Meanwhile, his fourth wife, Trish, and troubled son, Rusty, deal with their own existential crises, all caused by the strain of living within a large polygamist family.
The lonely polygamist of the novel is nominally Golden, but could also include the other viewpoint characters, Trish and Rusty, as well as members of the sprawling supporting cast. Even surrounded by so much family it is possible to be completely and utterly alone. The various secrets held by the different characters collide at the climax of the book, as desperate and tragic act forces each member of the family to re-evaluate their commitment to each other.
I found The Lonely Polygamist to be well-written and enjoyable, even amusing at times, while exploring themes of loneliness and the isolation of being part of a non-mainstream subculture. Udall doesn’t judge his characters so much as present them, and it’s hard not to find some sympathy for Golden, Trish and Rusty. However, I was deeply dissatisfied by the ending, where the character changes were sometimes subtle and not necessarily in the best interests of the Richards clan. If anything, a book that should have been a repudiation of polygamy became an affirmation of it. And where you fall on that issue will largely inform how you ultimately feel about it. I respect it as a novel, but I disagree with its conclusions. Perhaps you’ll disagree.
Review: Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes
01 year ago
Reading over the Amazon reviews of Karl Marlantes’ brilliant Vietnam novel, Matterhorn, it’s hard not to grasp the scope of divided sentiment that still exists regarding the Vietnam War. Granted, most of the reviews are positive, but the few negative reviews are extremely negative, questioning Marlantes’ commitment to the Marine Corps, America, mom and apple pie. It’s not too unlike the campaign to discredit John Kerry during the 2004 election, due to his anti-war stance as a veteran in the 1970′s. What many of the book’s critics fail to grasp is that Matterhorn is a novel, not a memoir, and that literature can be used to make a statement reflects the world as the author sees it, not absolute truth.
Matterhorn follows Lieutenant Waino Wellas and the men of Bravo Company as they hold and fortify, then abandon, then retake a strategically located hill near the Laotian border. The novel traces the military decisions from their genesis at battalion headquarters, through the junior officers leading the company all the way down to the grunts in the field as those decisions are executed. Showing each layer as he does, Marlantes reveals the game of telephone that is warfare in Vietnam, with the orders distorting through the filter of incompetence, personal initiative, heroism, terror and bad weather.
Matterhorn is also a kind of bildungsroman for Mellas, introducing him as a green officer with political ambitions and watching him change into a cynical veteran who has lost his faith in both the Marine corps leadership and humanity, even the meaning of life itself. His journey, as well as the journey of various supporting characters, is as riveting and compelling as anything I’ve ever read. There is a sincerity and integrity to these characters as Marlantes has molded them, taking what could have been flat cliches and turning them into characters who pop off the page and live inside your head.
This is going to seem a bit strange, but Matterhorn is the best war novel I’ve read since Joe Haldeman’s science fiction classic, The Forever War. He makes the action exciting, but never gives the pathos of death the short shift. As we get to know these characters and how they live, we also see them in their last moments as they face death. Though there’s an impressive cast of characters and it’s sometimes hard to keep track of them all, one really feels the loss as each man falls in combat.
Much time is spent focused on military politics, as well as the racial and class divisions of the Vietnam era. And although some of the racial monologues can seem forced, Marlantes handles the issue of racism in the Marine corps with deft precision, providing a balanced look at the black soldiers caught up in the struggle for civil rights, the white non-commissioned officers who have seen their corps transformed since they were enlisted men in the Second World War and Korea, and the soldiers caught in the middle. Mellas himself wrestles with race, just as the country did, never quite finding the right answer to the issue.
In the end, though, it’s the futility of war that drives the central message of Matterhorn. Human lives are discarded casually by ambitious officers looking to pad body counts, and positions that were fought for on one day are abandoned the next, only to be fought for again. The question Marlantes asks is: “Was this war worth the loss of so many lives?” And the answer — that it wasn’t — is at the heart of what still divides the country on Vietnam. It’s a hard thing to accept that so many people died for nothing, so it’s easier to attack those who say it than to accept the truth. The same question is being asked of Iraq and Afghanistan, and sadly, I think the answer might still be the same. Wars based on political ideology, rather than a clear and concrete territorial objective, can never be successful.
Review: American Rust by Philipp Meyer
01 year ago
I really wanted to like American Rust. The author, Philipp Meyer, is much like me — a guy who grew up in a working class community, who went to college, but still holds a deep sense of connection with where he comes from. Since the 1980′s, the death of the American working class has been a major crisis that economic elites have claimed is good for the country. The decline of American communities outside the major metropolitan areas is viewed as necessary for progress, while the victims of that progress are largely ignored by the media. It’s clear that Meyer wants to educate a broader middle class audience about the problems facing working class whites — there’s a lot of sincerity behind the book, but that doesn’t change the fact that it simply isn’t very good.
Great social fiction works by having the characters carry the author’s message in an elegant and subtle way. Bad social fiction takes two-dimensional characters and has them act out the message, hammering the social problems into the reader’s head. American Rust falls in to the second camp.
From the title, it’s clear that Meyer wants his novel to tell not just its characters story, but the story of the American working class living in the rust belt. He does this by taking two unlikely friends — ex-high school football star, Billy Poe, and ex-high school nerd, Issac English — and places them in a terrible situation. After the situation goes down, the book acts as a travelogue, using the disjointed and often bafflingly irrational situations as a means to show the reader different facets of American decline. Through a series of stream-of-consciousness internal monologues and actual speeches made by various characters, we get the history of the U.S. steel industry, its decline and death, and the impact it has on Western Pennsylvania. The other point-of-view characters, including the local police chief, Poe’s mother, Issac’s Yale-educated sister and Issac’s father are thinly painted and exist to show different aspects of the issue (strain on law enforcement, the working poor, the guilt of working class kids who go to college, the plight of the elderly, etc.).
Meyer’s heart is definitely in the right place, but that’s not enough to make a great book, or even a competent one. Language, description and conviction are only part of the equation — a novel needs compelling characters and story to be truly great. Sadly, American Rust fails in this regard.
Review: City of Thieves by David Benioff
01 year ago
David Benioff’s superlative novel, City of Thieves, centers around the siege of Leningrad (née St. Petersburg) and two misfits — Lev, a Jewish youth caught looting the corpse of a German solider, and Kolya, a deserter from the Red Army — who under threat of execution are tasked by an NKVD colonel with finding a dozen eggs for his daughter’s wedding cake. The pair embark on an odyssey through the starving city and behind enemy lines in the surrounding countryside, hunting for what may turn out to be an unattainable prize.
Benioff, best known for the novel, The 25th Hour, and as showrunner of the upcoming HBO series, Game of Thrones, melds the comic with the macabre, neither trivializing the siege nor crushing the reader with despair. Lev, a pessimist, narrates the story in the company of the blonde and upbeat, Kolya, who is a self-styled ladies man and rogue. Though disparate in personality, the two become comrades and later friends through the course of their quest, and the dynamic between the two is one of the book’s many appealing qualities. The eastern front of World War II is often forgotten in U.S. accounts of the war, and rarely finds attention in American literature. But Benioff brings the scale and savagery home to the reader in the form of an entertaining adventure yarn.
As is often the case with my favorite books, I finished the last page sad to be losing touch with characters to whom I had grown incredibly attached. I didn’t want City of Thieves to end, and that’s high praise, indeed.
Review: The Sandbox by David Zimmerman
01 year ago
Nearly everything written about David Zimmerman’s debut novel, The Sandbox, is wrong — from the marketing to the title to the Amazon description. It seems the publisher has decided that this is a war novel, when in reality it is a noir set during the late days of the Iraq war. This may lead to some confused readers — yes, it takes place in a warzone, and yes its narrator is a soldier, but the crux of the story rests on a central mystery that consumes the protagonist as he tries to unravel it.
The book centers around Toby Durrant, a U.S. private stationed at Forward Operating Base (FOB) Cornucopia, a remote American outpost in Iraq that has recently seen much of its strength reduced in the gradual draw down of U.S. forces. Manned by a skeleton crew, a seemingly random IED attack on the base’s commanding officer, leads Durrant down a twisting path that includes his fellow soldiers, the remaining lieutenant, a spooky captain from military intelligence who doesn’t seem to have a name, and the Iraqi insurgents.
An entertaining mystery set in a war zone, some of the characters and situations in The Sandbox are on the nose, but overall the book is a brisk and enjoyable read. It may not be the book its publisher sold it as, but it offers an interesting spin on the noir genre.
Review: The Passage by Justin Cronin
01 year ago
Justin Cronin's road to nowhere.
There’s a terrible secret that fans of “serious” literature can’t bring themselves to grasp — that the science fiction, fantasy and horror genres are all a legitimate part of the universe of literature. And some of the writers in the genre are actually good — not just “skilled craftsman” churning out formulaic juvenile adventure stories, but artists in their own right, using genre as a way of expressing something important about the human condition that can’t be conveyed in serious or realistic fiction. Others are master builders of alternate worlds with believable cultures, histories, topographies, etc. Either way, there’s real intelligence and talent working in speculative fiction.
Justin Cronin, author of the much hyped novel, The Passage, is a “serious” author. He normally writes and teaches realistic fiction, and to Cronin’s amused and delighted followers, his venture into post-apocalyptic vampire territory is divine brilliance. But here’s the rub: speculative fiction fans know better. Cronin is a carpetbagger, and the ideas and concepts he plays with are hardly new and original, but recycled from better novels, television series, video games and films. If anything, he is taking those ideas and exposing them to an audience unfamiliar with them, while taking credit for bringing innovation to a field that doesn’t need it.
The Passage begins in the near future, telling the story of the U.S. military’s attempt to bioengineer super soldiers from a virus found in Chilean bats. As these things usually go, the infected test subjects don’t turn out the way the military scientists expect and ultimately escape from captivity, leading to a vast vampire plague that destroys the United States and leaves only a handful of survivors behind. The story then abruptly jumps 100 years into the future, where we’re introduced to a vampire-besieged colony on the edge of destruction. Wind-powered generators begin to fail, society again teeters on the edge of collapse, and a desperate band (or … uhm, fellowship) sets out on a quest to save their colony and perhaps the human race, itself.
What follows is a pastiche of post-apocalyptic genre tropes lifted from Richard Matheson, Harlan Ellison, Stephen King, George Romero, Mad Max, Fallout 3, Ronald Moore’s re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, the Bible, Lost and even L. Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth. Of course, the target audience isn’t familiar with any of those sources, so it probably all comes off as refreshingly new and original. The trouble is, it isn’t. It’s been done before and done better.
I’m always open to “real” writers playing in the science fiction sandbox — Cormac McCarthy did it with The Road, which was one of the best books published in recent years, period. But outside of the excellent opening chapters, which are set in near-future America, and Cronin leaves familiar territory to engage in a little world building, the novel collapses. The poorly-defined characters who go beyond archetypes and into the realm of stereotypes, the inconsistent and baffling explanations for supernatural events (uhm, god did it?), the obvious Biblical allegory and way in which Michael can fix just about everything is all a bit too much to accept. This is a stark contrast with McCarthy’s ash-strewn wasteland, which is frighteningly real. A shallow world, despite the level of craft used to describe it, remains unsatisfying and ultimately a hindrance to the story.
Ignore the media hype — The Passage is a beautifully-rendered bore of a novel. Cronin would be better served returning to realistic family relationship novels and leaving the vampire apocalypse to the professionals.
Review: A Crown of Swords by Robert Jordan
01 year ago
My Kindle re-read of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time continues with A Crown of Swords.
This was the termination of my initial read-through of the series — at this point Path of Daggers wasn’t out yet, and I was in for a long wait for the next volume in the series. I remember being particularly bored and disillusioned with the Wheel of Time by this point, particularly with the Ebou Dar storyline. I’ve found that on my second reading of the book some 13 years later that I enjoyed it a great deal more than during my original reading — particularly (and ironically), the arc centered around Ebou Dar and the hunt for the Bowl of Winds. Mat Cauthon is increasingly becoming my favorite character in the series and seeing him finally getting treated with the respect he deserves by the Aes Sedai was satisfying, as was Elayne and Nynaeve’s dealings with the “real” sisters and the Kin.
Although more significant events take place in Lord of Chaos, A Crown of Swords is shorter and therefore unburdened by its predecessor’s many filler chapters. Not to say that there isn’t filler here — the central storyline of A Crown of Swords is a bit of a cul-de-sac for the series, as the struggle to fix the world’s broken weather is nothing more than a distraction from the Last Battle. I found it to be a relatively brief read, and although it doesn’t further the story significantly, the character movement was satisfying, and Mat’s cliffhanger is still as strong as I remembered. Tangential though the story may be, it comes down to whether or not you like the characters — I happen to be fond of them, so spending some time with Mat, Elayne and Nynaeve in Ebou Dar wasn’t a bad way to spend a week and a half of reading.
However, on the negative side, the pacing of Rand’s arc was especially uneven. The showdown at the end seemed to come out of nowhere, given that the chief antagonist was barely mentioned in A Crown of Swords before the climax. It does show that Jordan was able to move the story when he wanted to and could have resolved many of his story lines within a few chapters. However, in this case the lack of any kind of build-up to the fight left me a bit bewildered. The ending itself is incredibly rushed, the payoff seemingly unearned given the similar ending (and better set-up) featured in The Dragon Reborn. This is something I remembered from my first read-through, and my opinion has changed little on the second.
At this point, readers know whether or not they’re invested in the series — if you like Mat, Elayne and Nynaeve, then A Crown of Swords will be a worthy read. But if you’re plowing through the series eager for the start of Tarmon Gaidon, you are setting yourself up for disappointment.
Review: The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson
01 year ago
Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy has been a surprisingly good read, and the final volume, Hero of Ages, ends the series in a way I never quite expected. The edge hard science fiction has always had over the other speculative genres has been its ability to comment on contemporary life through a high concept setting. Epic fantasy tends to be a simpler affair, focusing on the black and white battle between good and evil over examining the human condition. Generally, it’s Joseph Campbell recycled, but not so with Hero of Ages. In the final volume of the series, Sanderson deals with issues of faith and atheism, the inconsistencies of organized religion and how normal people can made into martyrs, messiahs and gods.
Picking up a year after Well of Ascension, Hero of Ages opens on the cusp of the apocalypse. The mists, once confined to the night, are staying out longer and longer through the daytime. People exposed to them are struck down by a mysterious illness or killed, and the ash mounts are throwing a near-constant spray of ash into the atmosphere. As Vin and Elend seek out clues left behind by the Lord Ruler that may hold the secret for saving the world, Spook, Sazed and TenSoon all have trials of their own to overcome.
The various character arcs converge on an endpoint that is moving, haunting and ultimately satisfying. The action sequences are as exhilarating as in previous volumes, and although some of the characterization can come off a bit flat at times, the greater subtext of the series, as well as the revelations regarding the nature of the mists, allomancy and the world itself have real resonance.
I fear saying anything more would give too much away, but the Mistborn trilogy isn’t just a great series, it also heralds the arrival of a massive (and prolific) talent. Brandon Sanderson is the real deal — I can’t wait to read his contributions to the Wheel of Time, as well as his upcoming novel, the Way of Kings. Once you get to the end of Mistborn you’ll understand just how serious he is as a writer — this is a man who walks shoulder to shoulder with George R.R. Martin. No mean feat, given how many authors have failed to live up to the comparison.