Fire & Blood by George R.R. Martin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Myriad Historical Sources, People, and Events, but-- Set long before A Song of Ice and Fire, George R. R. Martin’s Fire & Blood (2018) is an Old Town maester’s history of the first 150 years of Targaryen rule in Westeros. He starts with Aegon I’s speedy conquest of the Seven Kingdoms and precarious unification of them into a single realm and then works through the reigns of Aegon the Conqueror’s immediate successors, climaxing with the ferocious Dance of the Dragons civil war between different branches of the Targaryen house, and then cooling down in its aftermath. As in A Song of Ice and Fire, here, too, “All men are sinners… we are as the gods made us… strong and weak, good and bad, cruel and kind, heroic and selfish. Know that, if you would rule over the kingdoms of men.” Good guys do bad things (especially if they get angry or cocky), and bad guys do good things or at least human things (especially if they love someone), etc. So you’ll be rooting for the Blacks and then for the Greens and then for no one at all. It is interesting to read Martin posing as an Old Town maester evaluating and synthesizing a variety of “historical” sources (e.g., Grand Maester Runciter’s chronicles, Septon Eustace’s writings, court fool Mushroom’s salacious accounts, official proclamations, and third-hand contradictory recollections of events), including his reasons for accepting or rejecting certain explanations or theories about certain fraught actions and events and historical figures. He’s up front about limitations on his knowledge: “Her letter has been lost,” “Such songs make poor history,” or “The truth of the matter we can never know.” And he tries to choose the most likely version of events: “Scholars have debated ever since why Jaehaerys didn’t announce his marriage. To this writer it seems clear Jaehaerys had not repented and was thinking how to make it known.” This all gives the illusion that we’re reading a real history book. At times it becomes too much. Do we need all the different rumors about Jaehaera’s death, different motives for her suicide, different possible murderers, etc., especially when it comes down to one obvious behind the scenes mover? Do we need to get three only slightly conflicting accounts of Prince Daeron’s death? Sometimes I’d like Martin to do a wee bit fewer postmodern historian antics. The fertility and conviction of Martin’s imagination are impressive--but the names! He reels off series of names that are often similar to each other, often for figures who quickly come and go. Names of castles and holdings, potential heirs and marriage partners, attendees at coronations and weddings, participants of tournaments and combats, opposing sides at battles and council members, maesters and septons, and foreign friends and enemies, etc. Once our maester says, “We do not know the names of her handmaids,” and I think, Thank the gods! The problem is, I rarely found myself really caring for any of the historical figures, unlike with the fictional characters in A Song of Ice and Fire, where I couldn’t stop reading to find out what would happen to Arya or Tyrion or Jon or Brienne etc. There are some vile people here to hate, to be sure, and I do root for women in leadership positions (like Rhaenyra until she starts losing sons) and for youngsters in key roles at key times (when they’re not sadistic proto-Joffrey Lannisters), like Addam and Alyn Hull and Aegon III. But this is a fantastic history, not a fantasy novel. I also found dragons strangely underused and overused. Underused because they never speak or evince much personality or motivation and overused because they can be flown out of the sky to reduce an entire castle to cinders and an entire army to ashes. We do glimpse interesting features of dragons, like the Targaryen practice of putting unhatched eggs into babies’ cradles in hopes they’ll hatch and bond and the practical info that dragon riders chained their belts to their saddles. But too often our Maester says lame things like, “Dragons are not horses.” Or “But who can presume to know the heart of a dragon?” Or “We shall not pretend to any understanding of the bond between dragons and dragon riders.” Please, Martin, presume! Pretend! Although the book lacks most of A Song of Ice and Fire’s character development and spicy dialogue and vivid descriptions, Martin writes some nice lines in the voice of his maester, like “Largess draws men to leaders as a corpse draws flies.” And he writes some fine descriptions, as when Aegon the Conqueror launches a solo dragon attack on the formidable Harrenhall at night, starting from HIGH up in the sky so his dragon was as small as a fly on the moon, and then plummeting down and torching the place and its inhabitants. I got a kick out of his introduction of a throwaway character called Racallio Ryndoon, a high-born Tyroshi adventurer-captain from the gutter, purple haired, ambitious, generous, anti-slavery, loving kittens but hating cats, loving pregnant women but hating children, wielding swords in both hands, dressing up now and then as a (bearded) woman, fickle in the extreme, and so on. A colorful character on stage too briefly. I liked the gender issues in the book. Jaehaerys made a law preventing the surviving family from kicking second wife widows out after their husbands die, and his wife succeeded in stopping the awful practice of the Lord’s Right of the First Night, but she failed to make the maesters admit girls into the Tower for study, and the appalling Dance of the Dragons broke out because half the kingdom didn’t want a girl to inherit the Iron Throne. Simon Vance does his usual distinctive and professional reading of the audiobook. If you like his manner and voice, you’ll like his reading of this. But I was relieved when the 26-hour audiobook finally but abruptly ended after about 150 years with the regency of Aegon III. The book doesn’t have an overall dramatic movement or thematic closure. Who succeeded Aegon III? Do we need to know? Not really, but then we didn’t really need to know all the details about Aegon III’s regency either. Is it because Martin’s planning to publish a second volume? Where/when will his maester finally stop writing his history? View all my reviews
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