bane of tomes

I have rediscovered reading! thank heavens, I was beginning to be afraid this job doomed me to fluffy comfort reading for the rest of my existence. I shall anon tell you all about Moxyland and Tooth and Claw, both of which I read recently, but for now, I need input. I am, for the second time, attempting to flog myself through A Song of Ice and Fire, which I tried a couple of years ago and gave up on in disgust. I'm about a third of the way through the first book for the second time, and I'm making extremely heavy weather of it - I have to read it in short bursts between distractions. I know it's an extremely well-loved, highly celebrated series which a number of people whose taste I esteem have embraced with fervour; the recent announcement of the latest book's publication date has caused frenzies of delight all over the internet. The miniseries version has a kick-butt cast and the trailers seem to promise well. All this being the case, why the hell can't I enjoy the damned thing?

I'm going to vaguely rant about the things which annoy me, and hopefully fans of the series can offer counter-arguments which may give me fresh insight. For a start, it's gritty fantasy, as real-world and political as possible. Politics in fantasy for me somehow always runs the danger of invoking the Le Guin article "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie", in which she surgically deconstructs the failure of tone and language in fantasy; I can't read about political machinations without imagining senators clattering down the stairs into the garden. But, while I don't by and large enjoy gritty political fantasy, this is not invariable; I really loved the darkness and nastiness of Richard Morgan's The Steel Remains, for example, and something like Tamora Pierce or the Furies of Calderon series offers large-scale politics, venality and warfare without alienating me one whit. I can't simply say "aargh political fantasy not for me" and have done with it, and I cannot in any way accuse GRRM of a failure of tone, the writing is admirably incisive and atmospheric - there's more going on here.

I suspect that, bearing in mind I'm still slogging through the first third of the first book and am thus not responding to the series as a whole, my lack of enjoyment stems from two things. On the one hand the whole thing takes itself too damned seriously, which is problematical for me for actually quite complicated reasons. The lack of humour is wearying after a while; these are Serious! People! in a Serious! Demanding! Brutal! World! and I want them to damned well lighten up, already, but it's really not just that I prefer some fluff to my fantasy.

The thing is, to me if you're writing Gritty Realistic Fantasy you're trying to treat fantasy like the real world, and it's not. It's a symbolic genre. Its operation is emblematic. If you are writing a brutal political story in a world which happens to have dragons and mysterious icy undead, this says to me that you want to be in a world which has dragons and mysterious icy undead, which no-one in their right mind wants. What they want to be in is a story which has dragons and mysterious icy undead. Ice and Fire is so busy being grittily political that it's lost sight of story shape, quest, heroism, all the narrative aspects of fantasy which even something like The Steel Remains is aware of, if only because it's gleefully kicking the conventions in the nads. GRRM doesn't seem to be trying to do much which allows him to engage self-consciously with the conventions, he's instead trying to write dragons like War and Peace. I don't think dragons should be written like War and Peace. I don't think you can write fantasy without being aware of its generic structures and expectations, at least not without making me throw the book across the room and mutter about political realism and how I'd go and look for it if I wanted to read it, which I don't. Phooey.

But again, this isn't enough. There's some pretty darned nasty fantasy out there which conforms bloodily and bloody-mindedly to realist tropes, and a lot of it I read with a great deal more pleasure than I'm getting from Ice and Fire. I suspect that at base my problems are quite simple - ye gods and scary dire-wolves, these are horrible people. The Lannisters are unrelieved psychopaths, the Starks are tough and grim and honourable and sadly naive and are busy being horribly rolled over. Children die, innocents die, most of the leaders, current or deposed, are narcissistic or sociopathic or both, and I really can't imagine GRRM pulling any sort of final upbeat resolution out of the whole mess without things getting very much worse first. It's unpleasant to watch. I'm not identifying with anyone - they don't inspire empathy or anything other than a wincing fascination with their eventual fates. It's all so doomed.

So I suppose what I'm asking for, oh ye fans of Ice and Fire, is for reasons to keep on reading. Does it keep up this tone throughout? Am I right in thinking that there's going to be a lot more blood and despair and loss before we see any of these complete bastards get theirs? Do we ever see these complete bastards get theirs? Does GRRM have something up his sleeve that justifies all this bleak? I don't want to google for spoilers in case I decide to carry on reading, but I want reassurance that there's some actual reason to do so. Meep!