Like many, I loved HBO’s ground-breaking adaptation of Game Of Thrones. The show very closely follows the events of the books, almost one to one. Each season corresponds to a book; it was no surprise to the readers when the show’s writing sharply fell off a cliff after the 5th season, at which point the TV production had outpaced the timeline of the existing novels. With Martin relegated from primary storyteller to an advisory role, the screenwriters were clearly out of their element. I’ll say this though. Not every book adaptation is good. There are tons of books out there that are just as beautifully written and they don’t become Emmy dominating juggernauts. Let’s give those writers some credit, it takes genuine talent to do what they did. It’s too bad the final season was so awful it made us all collectively forget about GoT. This is the third book A Storm of Swords, in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, or more colloquially known as Game of Thrones. Does anyone else feel like a snob when they refer to A Song of Ice and Fire by its actual name?

I received a boxed set of all 5 currently released books for Christmas about two years ago. They came leather bound on that fancy paper that bibles come on. A little bit of Googling tells me it’s called scritta. Apparently it’s still wood pulp, but with the lignin removed and cotton added as filler. I was asked twice during my reads at a bar if I was reading a bible. The extra cost was definitely worth it, the books have an amazing hand feel. They are thick and bend in such a nice way that they stay open on my current page.

It comes in at an intimidating length, over 1100 pages. His writing is never difficult though and I found it an easy read. He has a direct, no frills style. It’s never flowery, nor adjective heavy. The scenes get their atmosphere and color from the characters and things in them. The chapters are short, usually 10 to 20 pages each, so the pacing is perfect and the pages just bounce from beat to beat.

Each chapter is told from a different character’s perspective, cycling between a small subset of the hundreds that Martin proceeds to introduce in-universe. Jon Snow, Arya and Catelyn Stark, Jaime and Tyrion Lanister, and a few others. You will find that there are no true protagonists or antagonists in these books, only allies and adversaries. Antagonists often come from outside characters and factions like the slavers of Tyroshi. These serve as obstacles for our main cast to overcome. Some allied characters can be antagonistic like the Mountain That Rides. He’s a sadistic, unfeeling, psychopathic knight - often kept on too long of a leash.

One of the most remarkable things is that each chapter is written in each character’s own distinct voice. You can hear Arya’s brash immaturity in the narrator, or Jaime’s cocky over-confidence. Not like a diary entry, but as if they were the authors of the chapter itself.

I had never heard of the series or its author before becoming aware of the show. A couple of my friends had read A Song Of Ice And Fire and they all raved about it. When I finally picked up the first book, it was within the first couple of pages that I knew there was something special about this author. I wondered where he had been before this big hit, because the books have a maturity and a writing confidence that I immediately noticed.

Martin shows us that the monsters aren’t amongst the poor. It’s the rich and the powerful who commit almost all of the book’s most heinous acts. The peasantry are seldom considered. They are cannon fodder for the armies, or massacred in pillaging raids and left to rot. But there’s an entire side plot dedicated to retrieving Ned Stark’s body (spoilers!) and bringing it back to his home for a proper burial. In a far too apt reflection, the poor get fucked over and it’s the nobility who are responsible for it.