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I recently read A Game of Thrones for the first time just to see what all the fuss was about. My reaction was that it's a very well-plotted novel with lots of neat ideas (the whole concept of The Wall and the Night's Watch is just a great set-piece for fantasy of this nature), but the prose is nothing special and is often more than a bit sloppy. GRRM tends to "tell" rather than "show" with his characters, which is partly a symptom of POV and the little internal monologues he's so fond of, but it still comes off as lazy. On the other hand, because the writing is so straightforward the novel is very easy to get through. I found it to be a quick and fun read, and I think it'll probably translate very well into an HBO series. Also, when I signed up for a Wild Cards tag it was just being marketed as a general tag for TBB posters; I later discovered that it was a GRRM related thing, but I don't believe that having a Wild Cards tag necessarily indicates any particular familiarity with GRRM. Or am I way off base on that?
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| # ¿ May 19, 2010 14:51 |
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| # ¿ May 24, 2013 01:57 |
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The quality of the prose is not a "decadent" concern for the discerning reader; it's one of the top concerns. Ideas, plot, characters, and anything else you can name, are expressed only so well as the quality of the prose allows. GRRM's prose, to me, is very straightforward and mostly uninspired. On the bright side, as I've said, his prose doesn't tend to "get in the way" of the story itself which makes the book fun, quick, and accessible. The downside to this is that there's not much beneath the surface, making for a relatively superficial text. There's nothing inherently "wrong" with that, it's just an observation. I take it that most folks feel that GRRM's writing is vastly superior to that of most other fantasy writers; I cannot speak to this type of claim as I don't read any fantasy at all and thus have no points of comparison.
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| # ¿ May 20, 2010 15:22 |
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Anders posted:If I get this right, and perhaps I don't, because I'm not an english native speaker, you say that the way he writes, his sentence constructions, grammar etc makes his whole story less complex? Because I couldn't disagree more. Off course, the writing quality matters up to the point where it stops being irritating, from there on it's only the quality of the story that matters for me. I'm saying that his prose leaves very little subtlety to the work. The characters are not particularly deep or complex in a literary sense because GRRM spells everything out using a combination of factual assertions about a character's mindset/desires/fears/etc. and italicized internal monologue just in case there's any confusion. That's all well and good for pulpy entertainment, but I'd say that Martin is essentially a fantasy version of, say, John Grisham. The book is meant to be a page turner with little substance beyond the plot.
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| # ¿ May 20, 2010 18:26 |
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SaviourX posted:Having read other Martin stories, I can say that his plotting is excellent and trope inversion pretty good; but he's still very on-the-surface. ASoIaF is p much the best tv series I've ever read. Bingo - the best TV series observation is dead-on. I think in my first post I noted that I can definitely see this series turning into a great HBO show. As for the complexity of the characters, when the reader is provided with every detail of every motivation, every competing emotion, every perspective, etc. that's not complexity of character. That's plot. The novel is very well plotted and the things the characters do and say and think and feel are nothing more than pieces of that plot. Depth of character does not come from fulfilling a plot role, no matter how intricate the plot may become. Also, to the guy who stated that Martin is a better writer than Vonnegut, you should probably take that back. That's just an astoundingly stupid thing to say, even in TBB.
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| # ¿ May 21, 2010 15:19 |
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