And here we are, at the end of our discussion of the first
book in George RR Martin’s fantastic Song of Ice and Fire series. Along with my
cohort,
Christopher Lockett, I will be
discussing the final section of the book,
pp. 652-end mass market;
544-end trade paperback (starting with JON "Are you well, Snow?)
Christopher:
Well, here we are at the end of A Game of
Thrones, and if the way GRRM leaves it doesn’t make everyone who’s made it
through want to run out and buy A Clash
of Kings … well, I just don’t understand you. Of course, Nikki, I know you’ve already ordered book number two,
so I guess my first question to you is: did you find the conclusion of the
novel as satisfying as the series?
Say what you will about GRRM, he’s a dab hand at keeping us
turning the page and running out to the bookstore for the next book. The
admixture of triumph and despair, of shock and confusion that we encounter here
is genuinely impressive. Here at the end, the war that everyone has feared has
finally broken out, and first blood goes to the Starks. Well … first blood on
the battlefield, at any rate. The Shot Heard Around Westeros was of course the
shocking execution of Ned Stark; and like the assassination of Franz Ferdinand,
it collapsed all the shaky structures of diplomacy that had been hastily built
and made a grinding, bloody war inevitable. Had everything worked out as it was
supposed to, with Ned taking the black, the Starks might have been brought back
into line—certainly, with Ned “confessing” his crime and naming himself
traitor, there would be nothing for the North to stand on in terms of casus belli. Even with the Lannisters
and the Starks clashing on the field of battle, peace could have been brokered.
If not for the Little Shit. Joffrey. Who decided all on his
own that he would not suffer traitors and nicked off Ned’s head before anyone
could do anything. Isn’t he just adorable.
What I love about Joffrey’s capricious assertion of royal
fiat is how it asserts a similar caprice in the movement of history. Fantasy as
a genre is frequently invested in the idea of prophecy and fate and destiny;
what happens is meant to happen, and
it all unfolds according to a larger, transcendent logic. Not that that sort of
logic isn’t on display in A Game of
Thrones—after all, the broader story arc entails a great cosmic showdown
between the forces of implacably cold anti-life in the form of the Others, and,
well, everything in Westeros with a warm body.
But here at the moment of Joffrey’s petulant sentence, he
throws everything into disarray (and reminds us that he’s a total sociopath).
History is capricious, and GRRM does a really subtle job of playing that basic
fact off against the broader sense of social and political (and magical and
mythical) moving in mysterious but often implacable ways.
Speaking of the battlefield that Westeros is to become, we
get our first glimpse of that common fantasy setpiece: the large-scale clash of
armed forces. GRRM does not disappoint on this front: the battle as experienced
by Tyrion is wonderfully rendered, with enough detail to communicate how it
proceeds and give the reader a sense of the disposition of forces; but falling
short of a Bernard-Cornwell-style history lecture (though I do love those,
too—for anyone who craves specific historical detail, check out any one of his
many, many works of historical fiction). And here, the novel is vastly superior
to the series: I remember being quite put out by the way in which the show
cheated, giving us a glimpse of the camp and Tyrion’s rousing little speech to
his troops … but then Tyrion is knocked unconscious as his men trample him in
their eagerness to get to the battle, and he comes to after everything is done.
I understand the need to keep things on budget—large-scale battles are
expensive to film—but it felt a lot like a cop-out at the time.
Some day we’ll have to have a discussion of battle sequences
on TV versus on film. What did you think of the first actual clash of arms,
Nikki?
Nikki: It was
wonderful, and I’m glad you reminded us that Tyrion gets knocked unconscious in
the show. Even though I hadn’t yet read the book, I remember being put out at
the time that that’s all we get from the battle. So put out… I apparently put
it out of my mind. So when the battle happens from Tyrion’s POV in the book, I
kept thinking, Why don’t I remember
this?! I’m glad it’s because the show didn’t bother showing it, and not
because my memory is terribly faulty. As I read it, I thought it felt so
visual, like GRRM was actually writing the script for the series and not just
the scene in the book. I loved it; it was on-the-edge-of-your-seat tense, and
even knowing how it was going to pan out, I thought it was still full of
suspense.
As was the actual beheading scene. On the series, we see the
sword come down on Ned’s head, and Arya’s head turned away by Yoren, who grabs
her because Ned pleads with him to not let her see it. And yet… we know the
sword connects with Ned’s neck. We know he’s dead. (I still remember the
chatter after, and the few people who thought he was NOT dead, despite it being
pretty darn clear on the episode.) And yet… how shocking to get to that part
and discover that you see even less
of the execution in the pages of GRRM’s book than you did on the show! We see
Ilyn Payne come out, and then Arya’s wrenched away, and the moment that Ice
makes contact with Ned’s neck is overshadowed by Arya’s distress, and trying to
remember the name of the man who has her. I kept thinking they were coming back
to it, that time had been suspended for this moment of Arya trying to get her
bearings, when the story continues… “The plaza was beginning to empty. The
press dissolved around them as people drifted back to their lives.” Wait, what?
I had to go back and reread that page about three times before I realized the
decapitation happens entirely within our minds, with no description. It’s as if
GRRM came to a point in his book where he had to kill off his hero, and then
couldn’t bring himself to actually do it. So he just left the execution out and
put us directly in Arya’s perspective, being jostled about on the streets and
confused and trying to put her mind on something else. It’s one of the most
brilliant scenes I’ve ever read in a book.
And then there’s how the word travels. From that point on we
see the others find out… Bran gets a raven; Sansa throws herself on the bed and
hides from the world; Tyrion finds out from an offhand remark made at a council
meeting, and nearly chokes on his food… and then we get to Jon Snow and
Catelyn, and their stories continue after
they’ve found out. Again, like with the beheading, we don’t read how they find
out, just what they do when they know. Jon jumps on his horse and races
southward, thinking he’ll join Robb’s battle and help him. And Catelyn is
grief-stricken and in shock, trying to focus on her son’s battle, but she can’t
help but thinking of her husband, followed by, “Oh Ned…” or “Oh, poor Ned…”
as the memory suddenly hits her anew once more. I loved how GRRM has this
ability to unfold the story by showing the consequences and reactions, not
necessarily the Big Moments themselves.
Do you remember your reaction when you first read the scene
of Ned’s execution?
Christopher: I
remember being baffled more than shocked. Your description of how GRRM handles
the moment of execution is spot-on—you don’t see the actual downstroke of Ice,
and with Arya our gaze is forcefully turned aside. The first time I read it I
didn’t gasp or throw the book down, as it seemed entirely likely Ned might
still be alive, that I’d just been subjected to some cruel misdirection. But as
you astutely point out, all doubt about Ned’s death is erased in the subsequent
chapters.
I’m also struck by your observation that GRRM quite artfully
emphasizes not the shock of Ned’s death in the moment but the reverberations
through Westeros. For the assembled crowd, it’s an afternoon’s entertainment.
The real sturm und drang in King’s
Landing, we assume, happens offstage as Cersei et al panic over Joffrey’s
peremptory action. Elsewhere, we see how irrevocably things have shifted. When
one of Tywin’s more craven knights suggests suing the Starks for peace,
Tyrion’s answer is apt: throwing his wine goblet to shatter on the floor, he
declares, “There’s your peace … My sweet nephew broke it for good and all when
he decided to ornament the Red Keep with Lord Eddard’s head. You’ll have an
easier time drinking wine from that cup than you will convincing Robb Stark to
make peace now. He’s winning … or hadn’t you noticed?”
It really is such a GRRM flourish to hand the Starks a great
victory simultaneously with unspeakable loss. Robb’s first victory shows the
Lannisters that they had underestimated him drastically, and in capturing Jaime
he has taken that which is most precious to Tywin. Had Ned not been killed,
trading Jaime for him would have been the obvious move, one that might even
have established peace—a wary, unstable peace to be certain, but one in which
the statesmen would have had some breathing room.
Jon Snow’s reaction to his father’s death is one of my
favourite parts of this novel. His headlong flight down the Kingsroad is a
poignant reminder of just how much he loved his father, and his friends’
refusal to let him go signals that he now in fact has a new family. Lord
Commander Mormont is wonderful here: gruff, sensible, wise. When Jon grudgingly
admits that his desertion would not bring his father back to life, Mormont
turns that fact around on him rhetorically and reminds him of the stakes the
Watch are now playing for: “We’ve seen the dead come back, you and me, and it’s
not something I care to see again.” There is so much laded in that brief
statement, not the least of which is that death is irrevocable, and where Jon’s
ultimate responsibility lies when it proves otherwise.
The last four chapters set us up for A Clash of Kings, each ending with a suggestion of what is to come.
Jon Snow’s last chapter has him accepting his new identity as a Brother of the
Night’s Watch, and Mormont’s declaration that, for the first time in centuries,
the Watch will ride in force. Mormont’s
resolve on this point is both literally and figuratively chilling—something the
series translated well by having his speech play over images of the assembled
Watch marching through the tunnel at the base of the Wall into the wilderness
beyond.
Here at the end, we see several characters transformed. Jon
embraces his new identity, while to the south his half-brother is acclaimed
King in the North. What did you think of how GRRM brings each of these
narrative threads to a provisional close?
Nikki: It’s so
beautifully done, and I can’t believe initial readers such as you were forced
to wait for the next book. No wonder new installments are snatched up quicker
than new Harry Potter novels. GRRM has a masterful touch with knowing just how
much to reveal, and how much to hold onto. I’m not sure if he’s able to
maintain that throughout the series, but certainly in this first book, he knows
what to show and what to suggest; to whom he can give a perspective chapter and
who should remain more of a mystery; and in these final chapters, how much of the
story to give us here to make it feel like it’s the first major stage in the
game of thrones. The entirety of the King’s Landing material leads up to
Joffrey becoming king, but he knows you can’t leave it there… you need to go
one step further, showing what a nasty and thoughtless (and reckless) king he
is. Not only is he a sociopath, but the little shit has just wreaked major
havoc throughout the kingdom. In that incredible earlier scene in the Eyrie,
with Bronn fighting the champion chosen by Lysa, it’s clear that there’s
something not quite right with
Robert, Lysa’s young son. (And on the series they cast him perfectly.) And this
odd child who’s a little touched in the head continually claps his hands,
stomps his feet, and shouts, “Make him fly!!” because his mind wants nothing
more than watching a dwarf fly through the Moon Door.
And now, here we are at King’s Landing, where Joffrey is
older, more mature, and should know
better than to act rashly with so much going on around him, but he’s
essentially the same impetuous child that Robert is. He practically hops up and
down squeeing and clapping his hands for Ilyn Payne to make Ned’s head fly in
much the same way Robert had earlier, and he clearly takes much pleasure and
glee in the execution while everyone around him looks horror-stricken. Sansa
and Arya because it’s their father losing his head, and Cersei because she’s
cunning enough to know this is a VERY grave error. Joffrey is nothing more than
a child, and a psychotic one at that. He believes that with Ned Stark dead, the
Starks are out of play, and everyone else will claim fealty to him.
He’s forgetting about the mother of dragons.
The scene at the end of the book is as powerful and moving
as it was in the series. The death of Khal Drogo was even more devastating on
the page than it was on the show. Once again, I was gobsmacked to see just how
faithful to the book the show was when it came to the entire thing, from the
mage and Khal’s men refusing to listen to Dany, to the death of her baby and her
ultimate sacrificing of the zombified Khal that she’s left with. It made me cry
in the book, something that it didn’t do on the show. And Ser Jorah stands by
her side the entire time, never wavering in his loyalty to her. (Another
character that was perfectly cast on the show; I can’t imagine anyone else in
the role.) Did you think Daenerys was going to become as powerful a character
at the end of this book as she did? Were you surprised when her sun-and-stars
died?
Christopher: I
wasn’t surprised by Drogo’s death as much, if for no other reason than it was
obvious Daenerys was destined to be the one with power, something that couldn’t
happen if Drogo lived (which I guess answers your other question—yes, I did
expect Dany to become a powerful character. Any doubts I had on that front
evaporated when she ate the horse’s heart). But the khal’s death was extremely affecting: much more so than if he’d
died in battle. One imagines a Boromir-esque death for Drogo, in which he is
impossibly outnumbered and only gives up his last breath atop a mountain of his
enemies’ corpses. But again … GRRM doesn’t play to expectations. Drogo suffers
a double humiliation: weakened by an infection to the point where he falls off
his horse, and then reduced to a vegetative state. There is a certain brutal
poetry to his actual death: Daenerys’ act of euthanasia is a mercy but not, in
either her or Drogo’s mind (if he could still think), a killing—the Drogo she
knew was gone, and she has learned enough about him to love him and know how
much he would hate being left like that.
If the other characters like Robb and Jon and Arya take on
new identities at the end of A Game of
Thrones (and Sansa too, in a somewhat different way), Daenerys is the one
to experience a genuine rebirth. The final chapter is one of the most emphatically
mythic sequences we find in A Song of Ice and Fire: with Drogo’s humiliation
and death, all of those who might have been Daenerys’s power base desert her.
She is only left with a few hundred, mostly women, elderly, and infirm—and her
would-be bloodriders, all of whom inform her that being bloodrider to a woman
would shame them, and their last remaining task is to escort her to Vaes
Dothrak to live among the other widowed khaleesis.
Ser Jorah implores her to flee with him and sell the dragon eggs—and is
horrified when she consigns them to the fire. All of which is a classic moment
of divestment, when the mythic hero finds himself shorn of all worldly goods,
wealth, and power.
But here the mythic hero is a her. Having lost nearly everything, Daenerys makes a leap of faith.
Had she been docile, she would have gone to Vaes Dothrak; had she been
pragmatic, she would have fled with Jorah, sold the dragon eggs, and lived in
comfortable exile. But no: looking out at her sparse followers, she wonders
“How many had Aegon started with?” However little she has, she knows, it is not
nothing.
She has next to nothing. She is quite literally in the desert. The setting is frankly biblical.
She walks into the conflagration of Drogo’s funeral pyre, glorying in the heat,
and Jorah finds her afterward—rising phoenix-like from the ashes, dragons
clinging to her. It’s actually a scene done so well in the series that I can’t
let it pass without showing it (warning: NSFW):
And as it appears in the novel:
“As Daenerys Targaryen rose to her feet, her black hissed, pale smoke venting from its
mouth and nostrils. The other two pulled away from her breasts and added their
voices to the call, translucent wings unfolding and stirring the air, and for
the first time in hundreds of years, the night came alive with the music of
dragons.”
This moment is a rebirth for the world as well: the magic
that had gone out of it with the Fall of Valyria and the decline in Targaryen
fortunes is reborn in the three dragons. GRRM does not pull any symbolic
punches here: Daenerys literally
becomes the Mother of Dragons, having figured out how to hatch the eggs; that
two of the three dragons are nursing at her breasts sort of drives that point
home.
In all, a pretty spectacular way to end the novel. It’s
worth noting that A Game of Thrones
is the only novel in the series (so far) to not have an epilogue. Generally,
the books begin and end with chapters from the perspective of characters other
than those featured in the standard POVs. But here, we end with
Daenerys—anything less would subtract from the power of this conclusion.
What did you think, Nikki? How did you feel the novel’s end
compared with that of the series?
Nikki: That’s so
funny that you posted that YouTube clip, because I had it banked and all ready
to post myself! J
Perfect. I thought the ending was near perfect, and again, almost shot-for-shot
the way it was on the show. The main differences were the two dragons suckling
at her breasts (I’m kind of glad they removed that for the series, to be
honest, although there’s certainly a suggestion of it, the way she has the one
positioned on her lap) and the fact that all her hair is singed off so she’s
bald when she stands up in the book. I didn’t know about the epilogues (I’m not
a huge fan of epilogues) but I’m really glad this one ends like this. It gives
the novel a sense of an ending of this first wave of the game of thrones, but
every ending also stands as the beginning of the next stage.
As you said at the outset, it was during this final section
that I jumped online and ordered A Clash
of Kings. And here I said I would be able to stop at the end of the first
book… (Now you see why I neither smoke nor drink; I have an addictive personality,
apparently.) I couldn’t stop there. Even though I’ve seen so much of it played
out on the TV series, reading these books adds a new dimension to the story
that you simply can’t get from the series. Despite the astounding fidelity to
the books that the series offers, the books put us in their minds, reminding us
that Sansa is just a little girl; that Catelyn is a harder woman than I thought
she was; that Littlefinger has a difficult past and is worthy of some sympathy;
that Viserys was a little boy once who lost his family; that Daenerys might be
14 but she never betrays her youth, not even in her thoughts; that Ned Stark
regretted what he did right before he died, and that he lost his head thinking
of his children. The show can hint at all of these things, but you only really
get a sense of the interior workings of each of these characters’ minds when we
get the books from their perspective. I’m very excited to see which voices we’ll
hear in the future (presuming he’ll branch out and offer some new ones) and I
can’t wait to get started on Book 2. Incidentally, I received the package
containing Book 2 just two days ago… on a Sunday. I have never, ever received a package from Canada Post
(delivered right to the door, no less) on a Sunday. Methinks there is some
magic afoot.
So stay tuned everyone… we will be covering A Clash of Kings next, so make sure you
get your second books and we’ll reconvene in the new year, after Chris and I
have read the book in advance so we’re not rushing to do these things every
week!! I’ll post the schedule in January. And until then, thanks to everyone
for reading along with us, and thanks to Christopher, as always, for offering
his perspective and being my better half in all of these installments. Prepare
for winter… it’s coming.
