A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms by George R.R. Martin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars "Do you want a clout on the ear?" George R. R. Martin’s A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (2015) collects three entertaining novellas about the odd knight and squire couple Dunk and Egg. The stories take place about 100 years prior to the events of The Game of Thrones and add texture and pleasure to the rich, long history of Martin’s famous secondary world. In the start of “The Hedge Knight” (1998) teenage Dunk, already closer to seven feet tall than to six, buries Ser Arlan of Pennytree, the man who rescued him from life as a street urchin in Flea Bottom and made him his squire, teaching him how to ride and fight and be an honorable hedge knight, loyally serving whatever lord he chooses to work for, protecting the weak, and keeping himself clean (which means bathing once per month). Before dying, Ser Arlan knighted Dunk. The new knight goes to participate in a tourney at Ashford Mead, where he gets a new suit of armor, a new name (Ser Duncan the Tall), a new sigil (shooting star over an elm tree), a new unattainable love interest (the Dornish puppetress Tanzel Too Tall), and best of all a new squire, a bald boy with violet eyes and the odd name Egg. “Dunk the lunk, thick as a castle wall” finally learns that his new squire is more than he seems. Egg is a superb companion: intelligent, knowledgeable about heraldry and history, loyal, and mouthy. Dunk is always warning him, “Do you want a clout on the ear,” a comical refrain because he (almost) never hits the boy. “The Sworn Sword” (2003) finds Dunk and Egg during a drought in the service of Ser Eustace Osgrey, a sad, lonely, aging, almost senile landed knight who, due to his having fought on the losing side in a Targaryen civil war between half-brothers (one legitimate, one bastard) about fifteen years earlier, has been reduced to living in a broken down tower fort while his neighbor, Lady Rohanne Webber, nicknamed the Red Widow because all four of her husbands have died, thrives in a castle with dozens of men-at-arms and knights and crossbowmen and a maester clever at building dams. Ser Eustace has only one other knight in his service besides Dunk, the sour-leaf chewing, insult spewing, bad-cheese smelling, peasant bullying Ser Bennis of the Brown Shield. The role Dunk and Egg play in the feud between Ser Eustace and Lady Rohanne is comical, cool, and moving. In “The Mystery Knight” (2010) Dunk ignores Egg’s advice to not participate in a wedding tourney at White Walls castle, an event attended by a handful of colorful hedge knights and lord knights, many of the latter veterans of the now sixteen-years-old failed rebellion. Just who is that Ser John the Fiddler, a handsome young hedge knight who seems too wealthy and cocky to belong to Dunk’s calling? The story shows Dunk learning lessons in drinking, jousting, betting, scheming, and wedding as well as Dunk and Egg’s relationship being suspensefully threatened and movingly affirmed. No one does the pageantry, paraphernalia, and violence of knights--costumes, sigils, armor, weapons, rituals, betrayals, triumphs, tournaments, melees, etc.--better than Martin. Each story features violent action, humorous conversation, and sensual pleasure (bath, feast, wine, etc.). Each story features vivid descriptions, of things like a warhorse charging (“Spatters of mud spraying back”), a burnt woods (“fiery islands in a sea of ashes”), a fight to the death in a river (“The fish flashed past his face”), and a giant wedding pie (“brown and crusty and immense and there were noises coming from inside it”). Each story has a turning point that hinges on honor, a temptation for Dunk to take an easy way (say, to become a lord’s knight in a castle instead of a hedge knight on the road) that he with varying degrees of regret and pride refuses. Each also features unsentimental life wisdom, like “Gods have a taste for cruel japes,” “They all look the same after a few days on a spike,” and “Some old dead king gave his sword to one son instead of the other, and that was the start of it. And now I’m standing here.” The audiobook reader Harry Lloyd has perfect pacing and an appealing manner, but whenever he reads Dunk’s internal thoughts, he makes his voice too low and soft, so if you don’t turn up the volume you might miss some cool self-deprecatory musings. The three novellas are unpredictable, suspenseful, funny, and neat. They are The Game of Thrones with a protagonist who has no interest in the game of thrones and prefers to wander about Westeros with his squire, trying to become a good knight. They are The Game of Thrones without supernatural elements (no white walkers, revenants, red priestesses, and dragons--apart from their eggs). Readers who like realistic medieval stories of knightly adventures from a modern perspective should like this collection. It ends with Martin saying that the adventures of Dunk and Egg continue in as yet unrecorded tales, and I am looking forward to going out on the road with them again. View all my reviews
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Jefferson Peters
This blog is for book reviews. Please feel free to comment on any of the reviews! Categories
All
Archives
May 2024
Jefferson's books
by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
|
My Fukuoka University