Sci Fi Audiobooks: Ongoing column reviewing classics of sci fi and fantasy as well as current works available in audio format.
What Is It?
This book takes place primarily in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, where Lord Eddard “Ned” Stark is summoned south by his old friend King Robert Baratheon to serve as Hand of the King following the mysterious death of his predecessor. Ned reluctantly leaves his ancestral home of Winterfell and soon discovers that the royal court is filled with conspiracies, rivalries, and dangerous secrets, particularly involving Queen Cersei and her powerful Lannister family. His investigation into the previous Hand’s death uncovers a secret that threatens the legitimacy of the throne and ultimately plunges the realm toward civil war. Meanwhile, Ned’s children are scattered by the growing conflict, while his illegitimate son Jon Snow joins the Night’s Watch at the massive Wall protecting the northern frontier, where evidence begins to emerge that the legendary supernatural threat known as the Others has returned.
Across the Narrow Sea, the exiled princess Daenerys Targaryen is married by her ambitious brother Viserys to the Dothraki warlord Khal Drogo in hopes of gaining an army capable of reclaiming the Iron Throne their family lost to Robert Baratheon. Initially frightened and powerless, Daenerys gradually becomes more confident and influential among the Dothraki while beginning to embrace her identity as the heir to the Targaryen dynasty. Her story takes a tragic turn, but while Westeros descends into political warfare and an ancient danger gathers beyond the Wall, Daenerys finds herself in a position that could shift the balance of power in the world.
Bottom Line:
With A Game of Thrones, Martin establishes a fascinating and fully realized fantasy world that comes alive through its well-developed characters, political intrigue, and masterful storytelling, delivering a must-read novel that ranks among the best the genre has to offer.
Historical Context
Published in 1996, A Game of Thrones arrived during a period when epic fantasy remained heavily influenced by J.R.R. Tolkien, with many expansive series from authors such as Robert Jordan, Terry Goodkind, Tad Williams, and Raymond E. Feist. George R.R. Martin, already an established science fiction and fantasy author who had spent several years working in television, began writing the book in 1991 as a project unconstrained by the budgets and practical limitations of the small screen. What he initially envisioned as part of a trilogy eventually expanded into the planned seven-volume A Song of Ice and Fire series.
Martin drew considerable inspiration from medieval history, particularly England’s Wars of the Roses, while rejecting the romanticized view of the Middle Ages common to much fantasy. Instead of a straightforward struggle between good and evil, A Game of Thrones focuses on competing noble families, political maneuvering, shifting alliances, betrayals, and characters whose motivations exist in shades of gray. Magic initially remains largely in the background, allowing political intrigue and family conflict to drive much of the story before the supernatural elements gradually became more prominent.
The novel was well received upon publication, and its audience grew substantially as later volumes appeared, establishing A Song of Ice and Fire as one of the defining epic fantasy series of the past few decades. Its morally ambiguous characters, willingness to kill seemingly indispensable protagonists, and darker approach to traditional fantasy conventions has proven highly influential on the genre. And the property eventually reached a much larger audience when HBO’s Game of Thrones debuted in 2011, turning Martin’s fantasy saga into a worldwide cultural phenomenon.
A Closer Look:
The synopsis provided above for A Game of Thrones just barely covers the tale from Martin’s first A Song of Ice and Fire book, highlighting the main storylines. It is much more involved than that, with any number of characters and subplots intertwining their way through the main saga. But basically, this book delivers a fantasy tale set in the land of Westeros, focusing on the power struggles to sit on the Iron Throne, which rules over the Seven Kingdoms. The main character—at first—is Ned Stark, who is the lord of Winterfell in the North, and he reluctantly travels to King’s Landing with part of his family to serve as adviser to the king. But he quickly finds himself pulled into the court intrigues and politics aimed at controlling the throne. And while we get very attached to this character, who is established as central to the main story, many twists and turns follow, defying the reader’s expectations.
While there is plenty that unfolds throughout the course of the book, things do not happen quickly in this story. There is some travel across the lands and a lot of talking and a few fights, but Martin was definitely not trying to make this an action-packed affair. In fact, it’s not uncommon for the book to introduce a character and then digress for several pages, giving backstory on that person. But while it sounds like this approach would make for a rather dull read, especially considering the length of the book, that’s not the case at all. Not only did I almost never find it boring (except for some of the Sansa chapters), I regularly found myself wanting more.
Personally, the bloated page lengths of books these days are something that has turned me away from many of the newer genre entries on the shelves. So often these are the result of publishers pushing for a higher page count or writers lacking editorial constraints, and the stories end up turning into a slogfest or completely losing focus. Martin maneuvers past these pitfalls with A Game of Thrones, though, as he demonstrates himself to be a master of words who can make even the most mundane details interesting.
And there’s a reason this series is so popular: it gets off to a really good start! One of the most important things Martin does in this book is dump almost all the expected fantasy clichés. It is not packed with elves and orcs and wizards and many of the standard tropes of the genre. Some of that is there in the background, but he doesn’t just give us another spin on the standard Lord of the Rings-type setting, as he builds a fully fleshed-out world of his own with interesting, well-developed characters. In fact, it is the many characters with their varying degrees of moral ambiguity that make this such a fascinating read.
(Warning: Major spoilers follow in the next paragraph.)
The first book sets up the grander tale that Martin planned with his A Song of Ice and Fire series, but in A Game of Thrones, one of the major themes is the place that honor holds in this world of scheming and maneuvering. Ned Stark is, of course, the primary example of that, as he follows the “honorable” path throughout the story as opposed to the moral grays evidenced in many of the other characters around him. He acts as the moral measuring stick, and we make the assumption that he will be our guidepost throughout the entire saga. That’s why his beheading at the end of the book comes as that much more of a shock. Ned is set up as our hero, and then we are left without the moral fiber he represents once he is executed. The story is told (quite effectively) from multiple points of view, with Ned’s representing the closest to the typical fantasy hero. And when he is gone, we have to scramble to determine which point of view will be our guide from that point forward. That’s some powerful yet risky storytelling, but Martin pulls it off perfectly.
A Game of Thrones truly stands out as one of the greatest fantasy novels of all time, and it sets up an epic story to follow, though unfortunately, the path of the series becomes murkier from the second book forward. A Clash of Kings offers a good follow-up, but it lacks the focus of the first volume, and that gets worse as the series continues. The digressions increase, and the mastery of storytelling Martin delivered with the first book becomes less evident. It is not that the subsequent books derail the story Martin is trying to tell; they just veer all too close to the slogfests we have seen from other genre writers (the most recent volume, A Dance with Dragons, is almost 50 hours in audiobook form). And fans are still waiting for the final two books in the series, which do not appear even close to hitting the shelves anytime soon.
A Game of Thrones certainly sets things up quite well and gets you hooked on the story and characters, and it counts as a must-read fantasy book. But beyond that, the A Song of Ice and Fire books turn into somewhat of an endurance test that may never get a final resolution.
Comments on the Audiobook:
The audiobook version runs nearly 34 hours long, providing a rather daunting listening challenge. Fortunately, narrator Roy Dotrice is up to the task voicing the lengthy story, doing an absolutely first-rate job with the material. He makes each character stand out as a distinct presence, and they come alive through his reading. Be warned, though, that if you have watched the television series, you may not like the voices he uses for several characters, particularly Tyrion. With such top-notch performances by the actors on the show, it is hard to accept the different voices Dotrice uses for some of the characters. But I can’t really fault him for not matching the performances of the actors, especially considering that this audiobook came out years before the TV series.
I did eventually accept and even learn to like his Tyrion voice, but I could never quite warm up to his Varys. That’s probably because he played the character closer to the way he is portrayed in the books, which is different from Conleth Hill’s interpretation in the series. But again, I can’t count that as a knock against Dotrice. He delivers an excellent reading of one of the all-time great fantasy books, and I highly recommend this one to anybody who enjoys masterful storytelling, whether they are fantasy fans or not. You can get the audiobook from providers like Audible.com and Audiobooks.com.
