A Song of Ice and Fire or, as I think they are more commonly known, A Game of Thrones

I have now read the first 4 books of this series and am waiting to get the next one from the library.

Somewhere I read a book critic who compared these books to The Lord of the Rings and, I have to say, I was a little offended. The LOTR world is black and white, good and bad, the heroes are noble and the villains are evil. That is not to say the characters are one-dimensional, that the heroes do not fail in their courage and the villains are devoid of goodness; but you can tell the heroes and the villains apart, you can fall in love with a character and root for them wholeheartedly. The world within A Song of Ice and Fire is made of black and white and gray, splattered with blood and semen. Forgive my imagery, but I think it is a fairly accurate description.

These books are brutal, filled with pillaging in every sense of the word. There is rape, incest, torture, murder, horrible betrayals, language, greed, lust, and crude humor. One of the characters says something along the lines of, after a while, war makes man forget he is human, that is the only way to explain some of the actions of various characters. That, or George R. R. Martin has a lower view of humanity than I. I suppose that's not fair, everything his characters do are things which are done by people in reality, whether in war or not; it just seems the predonerance of his characters do dispicable things. It is hard to know who the heroes are, it is hard to cheer for them; and it is hard to know who the villains are, it is hard to wish them ill.

Yet another reason not to like these books, and this may only bother me, is that there are so many different “main characters” and each chapter follows one character at a time. Potentially there can be a few hunderd pages between meeting up with a character again. This, combined with Martin's tendency to kill off characters, change their name, and continuly introduce new characters, makes it hard to keep up with everything. There were a few times I had to flip back to find out where I had left a character and a few chapters where I had to read a couple pages in order to remember who the character even was.

After all of that you may justly wonder, why do I read them? Well, first I will say, these are not books I ever plan to own and I will probably never read them again. Then why do I read them? I hint at it at the end of the paragraph above my last, Martin has created some of the most complex characters in literature. There are some so seemingly merciless, silly, and sadistic you almost wish to skip the chapters related to them and look forward to a time when they may be killed off. Then there are others you hated but then they grow as a person and so you come to like them, some you pitied but then begin to loathe because of their blind quest for vengence. I will say Martin is like Tolkien in that they both place great importance on character development. They are also alike in their thouroughness, they manage to create very believable worlds, though both have elements of fantasy (this is also to say, Martin is somewhat long-winded, like Tolkien).

I also read them because the author is a great storyteller, he draws you in, even if the world he draws you into is full of shadows, blood, and tears. Perhaps this is just because “winter is coming,” perhaps the world will change into a brighter place with the coming of the spring.

I would without a question rate these books rated “R” and perhaps even suggest an “NC-17.”