Games of Thrones by George Martin - Book Review

A bit like the curate’s egg really. However the good parts don’t excuse the bad in my opinion.

What I liked about it was the fact that it was a good political/dynastic story and that we saw things from many different character points of view. This is sufficiently unusual in the fantasy (and in fact in most fiction) genre that it should really get a lot of praise, and I think that might be what made it so popular.

However I didn’t like the blatantly misogynist viewpoints of some of the characters (at first I thought it was the whole tone of the story, but I realised on persevering with it that it was simply a majority of the male characters). While I can see that this is probably a realistic viewpoint for the characters in that setting, I didn’t think it was necessary to make the story work, nor did it need to be so pervasive in the text. For me it got in the way of the story, and stopped me simply enjoying it.

The other thing that I found lacking with it was a lack of dramatic pacing. The whole story seemed to be at a constant pace, with no speeding up for the more dramatic events. Also, quite a lot of the text was pretty boring, developing characters for what seemed to be the sake of developing them and not obviously progressing the plot. Perhaps if I were to read the remaining several thousand pages it might make a lot more sense, but there are so many other books out there I haven’t yet read that I may well enjoy more than slogging through the rest of the series. So I’m unlikely to bother.

That said, I may well watch the series if someone can re-assure me that the editing has made it more interesting.