The Story of the World Is Not a Story We Control

[womzilla]

Last week, I finished reading A Game of Thrones, despite my loose practice over the last couple of decades of not starting fantasy series until they are complete. I enjoyed it immensely, and because I had watched the television work based on it, it was weirdly like rereading a novel I'd never read--of course, noticing things that I hadn't noticed "the first time" because, in many cases, they weren't *there* the first time. It's amazing how much of the narrative of novel is there on screen, and how much of the emotional impact. (There are brilliant bits in the adaptation that aren't in the novel--I discussed earlier how well one particular sequence unfolded in the adaptation, and the corresponding scene in the novel is staged completely differently and, frankly, not as satisfyingly.)

Anyway, I'm going to make a non-spoilery observation about the course of the narratives of the first novel.

The novel is told in third-person personal in many relatively short chapters, each from the point of view of one of eight characters--six of the Starks (Eddard, Sansa, Arya, Brandon, Catelyn Tully Stark, and Jon Snow), Tyrion Lannister, and Daenerys Targaryan. Of these eight narratives, at least five--Bran, Ned, Jon, Daenerys, and most explicitly Sansa--revolve around how the world fails to conform itself to the narrative expectations that the characters have about how the world should work: Bran around heroism, Sansa around royal romance, Jon around the nobility of the Night's Watch, Ned around personal honor, and Daenerys over prophetic inevitability (twice!). All of the happiest or most triumphant moments of the novel--and there are such--come when the characters manage to adjust their expectations to meet the circumstances, and the worse come when they stick to the narrative model beyond the point where it breaks.

Further, the pending, horrific, return of old stories, safely banished beyond the Wall and to the distant past, appears to be the driving force of the entire story.

(When I was discussing this last night with some gamer friends who have all read at least the first novel, one pointed out that Tyrion's alienation from the world also comes from a pivotal moment when his desire for a story of romantic love was brutally shattered. And as I write this, I note that one of the best small bits in the adaptation that is not from the novel is Bronn's comment when he wins his duel, and fits this model precisely; but saying more would be a spoiler.)

I don't think this was quite a deliberate approach in Martin's story, because it's very hard to see how either Arya or Cat's story arcs could be described usefully in those terms. The question I have, then, is: Does this seem like a reasonable observation that is actually grounded in the work, or is it just my pattern-seeking brain imposing a similarity that is not actually meaningful? That is, is my observation so vague that the workings of Kinbote's Law allow me to slap it willy-nilly on anything remotely similar, or does it actually enhance one's understanding of the novel?

Feel free to make comments like "Oh, yes, that pattern becomes more explicit in the later novels", but please please please try not to spoil the later novels for me. I really enjoy narrative surprises and I prefer to preserve them. If you feel you must make spoilery comments about the first novel, as a courtesy please mark them as such. Note that "this character survives into the later novels" might not be a massive spoiler for other works, but it certainly is for A Song of Ice and Fire!

Finally, I just wanted to mention that I read this entirely on my Palm Pre smartphone, using the freeware pReader application. Based on wordcounts, I estimate that the novel took 2500 screens. This is only the fourth novel I've read on my phone, and I think it was about as long as the other 3 taken together.

Comments

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

"It was brilliant of Edmund Spenser to leave the complex scheme of The Faerie Queene unfulfilled, demonstrating the impossibility of human achievement of all the virtues."

(Actually, that's sort of the form of Coleridge's "Kubla Khan".)