George R. R. Martin- A Clash of Kings, chronique

More emotionally mature than A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings is also noticeably better written, more credible, more intense, and displays a closer, tighter grip on characters. The emphasis on the impact of the war on characters’ journeys, rather than on the political nest of dramas, renders a simply stronger book; finally in touch with the things of life that truly matter (emotions, fights, causes, the Others), A Clash of Kings ironically gets the reader a little away from the pettiness of the game of thrones (with the noted fall from prominence of Varys and Littlefinger), and comes out all the better. It promised, and it delivered. 

But that’s where the paradox comes in. I’m locked between two opposite feelings generated by my reading experience: 

• One: that this was a very good book, not the best to come out of ASOIAF, I think, but one of them at the very least.

•  The other: that its main subject was not handled as it could have been. An irony, seeing how if the main plot of a book is not doing the trick, the book itself shouldn’t work. But weirdly enough, it did work for me, and this because I consistently set the main theme of ACOK aside. The war, pff! I decided early on that I did not care, that I would not for the sake of my sanity, and I still managed to get hooked in, in spite of the main intrigue. I don’t know that this is necessarily a positive commentary on the book and the strength of its main theme.

Downing the book: yes, its main subject is its downer. The war is often handled as a B movie might handle horror: a gore vulgarization. All the strategy, theory, schemes and technicalities are in there but in the background, while the human side often fails to reach. This may be due to the fact that the characters living this war (all but Arya) are not that emotionally developed, three-dimensional humans_ or even that interesting to begin with: Stannis’ men (except Davos) are flat and too numerous in the end to even sum up any mental image of them, Renly and all his suite are downright laughable (which is made on purpose); all of Tywin’s men, and I mean all, are twisted. Not one Lannister, except Podrick and Tyrion, is actually good_ not even their soldiers who are their soldiers by chance of birth, not their sellswords (they must be a particular kind of sellswords), not Bronn, not the Clansmen, nor the bannermen. “Lannisterness” is a disease, apparently. It soils everything it touches. Maybe the causes are geographic, it’s the area… Come on! I can dig that Tywin would employ only those useful to him, and it’s useful now to wreak havoc in the Riverlands, but isn’t it also the mark of a bad tactician? He’s turning the people against him instead of making use of them. How does he expect the Lannister reign to endure? Plus, where does he find all these monsters? Must they pass an evil-evaluation test before becoming his?

Unfortunately, we start seeing the war the way they do, so much we hear about it through their mouths, and the same issue that pervaded AGOT finds its way in A Clash of Kings: Martin wants to show the downsides of the human heart and soul so badly that these end up downing the book almost as badly. Lesson learnt: by offering a complete picture of the depth of nastiness which humans can reach, you will more often than not end up showing a nasty picture. The very thing that Martin sets out to explore_ the negative impact of warfare_ becomes the very thing he delivers: negativity. Which may or may not be in line with his own personal intention, but which effectively plays against the book in the mind of the reader. This is not the sort of negativity that emotionally crushes you and takes you to a place of deep intimacy with the book and yourself (I’m thinking of The Farseer Trilogy or The Lord of the Flies); I’m talking about a negativity that makes you wish this bad reading moment was just over. And guess what? It is going to last the whole book.

A feast of rapes and a failed impact: there is so much torture, so many rapes, that you don’t even register them (with children and pre-teens in particular; almost as if every time Martin wanted to make us cry, he’d put a child under the menace of physical or sexual abuse. But for a writer to strike hard, there are other ways). You read through the empty telling of it all, turning the pages until it’s done. They become trivia, random and useless. Unlikely, even, at times. It’s telling that that many rapes in a book do not bring the slightest water to your eyes_ a real credit to the writing there. Hum. One could argue it’s because we never see them, we only hear about them. But then, why hearing about them at all in the first place? They don’t inscribe themselves within the plot (which might have been worse), they don’t change anything to the story, they don’t make the characters eviler (since Martin already took care of that), and, as rape happens mostly to extras and background characters, the aftermath is rarely dealt with. All the war horror is brought up to hammer the point in: war is awful. Why, thank you, I hadn’t the slightest idea!
I’ve got a feeling that if any such horror had occurred to one of the main characters, Martin would never have allowed for that much cruelty in his book. It would have had an emotional impact on him, having to live through it while writing it, that would have effectively prevented him from lavishing the pages with abuse on abuse on abuse_ physical, sexual, moral; name it and you’ll find it.
Some of the chapters (Arya’s) aim so evidently at pouring out cruelty on cruelty over you that they utterly fail to touch you and, thereby, achieve the exact opposite of their objective: they turn you away from the war. You protect yourself, shield your emotions, and come to care less and less for the very substance of the book. All throughout my reading, I was not so much interested in the war as I was in how the characters felt and got by, even as the war is a definitive player in how they feel and get by.

Characters_ you win some, you lose some: then comes a comment I’m probably going to repeat with every installment of ASOIAF (sorry!):  less characters, but more of them better developed, would have prevented certain chapters from suffering from their presence_ or lack thereof. So far, Renly, Theon, Cersei, Loras, all lack the strength to carry the weight of their storylines and their places in the book.
Then, Shae. Shae, Shae, Shae. I hate the book version: she’s like a dagger whose tip comes dangerously close to Tyrion’s throat, like a noose hovering above his head. You can feel the danger coming 600 pages before it even comes, and every time he mentions Shae, you just cringe: “That’s gonna be your downfall, Tyrion!” Come on, it’s so obvious that among the mist of little things he does well and efficiently, Shae is the one big thing he is completely and utterly failing. This particular storyline is way too predictable. Now, the outcome of that, in A Clash of Kings, at least, is a wonderfully powerful speech of Tyrion’s to Cersei: his “One day, …”. That’s about the only good thing coming out of this storyline. The TV version, in comparison, brings so much more personality to the Shae character, so much more utility_ beyond giving us easy sex scenes. She’s also got witty dialogues, perhaps because she doesn’t spend all her screen time sleeping or being talked about instead of seen in live action. Shae in the book is a mere foil to show Tyrion’s weakness (love or craving for love and the tendency to misjudge the receptacle of that love) and the scheming, down right mean and immoral, side of Cersei. The queen doesn’t mind hurting people if that ensures (in her twisted mind) the protection of her own (who would not be in danger to begin with if she wasn’t actually hurting people in order to protect them. The irony!). Ok, right, we get it. Then comes the Shae issue, to really hammer the point in. But if Shae is just a tool, what the hell do we care about her relationship with Tyrion? In fact, what happens to Alayaya_ because of Shae-Tyrion_ concerns us much more, seeing how we seem to have spent almost as much, if not more, time with Alayaya than with her counterpart.
One constant issue further estranges the reader from Tyrion’s storyline, which I found less easy to care for than I did in the first book, and than expected (I loved the TV scenes showing his Hand office in KL): why doesn’t Tyrion try to understand what happened with the dagger?! He knows Littlefinger is behind it all, why doesn’t he start to look deeper into the “why?” question. Fine, he must tread a careful path, he’s knee-deep in dangerous waters. Ok. But he could simply have him killed insidiously or, at least, be shown investigating Littlefinger’s motives more. As far as he’s concerned, Tyrion, after all, came to KL to investigate that. I think this omission and shoving aside of the “Bran’s fall” plotline is another instance of Martin putting off an important plotline in order to have more occasions to show us how manipulatively cunning Littlefinger is.
And, as usual, Daenerys ends up much more interesting on TV than in the book. Emilia Clarke renders a likeable Dany, in a way that I have yet to feel for the book version. To like her is precisely what is needed for us to root for her, and without us rooting for her (even if not at the expense of other characters we might root for on the Iron Throne), her story becomes totally obsolete. So far, as far as the information on the pages and the feeling while reading are concerned, she’s still a minor character whom you care very little for. She’s supposed to be IT. And she never is. The longer she puts off her coming to Westeros (and actually doing something to the tale), the less she comes to matter.
Much better written, on the other hand, are Catelyn’s chapters_ though she is one dreary character. As for Jon and Bran, their chapters are still perfect and the latter’s benefit even more from the mysterious addition of Meera and Jojen.

Conclusion: needless to say, A Clash of Kings still features most of the “issues” I found in A Game of Thrones, particularly with regards to sex and cruelty. And I don’t say violence because violence is not necessarily a bad thing to partake in. But cruelty is another matter. At the very least, here, Martin has an excuse to splash it across the pages: the war, yes, always the war; whereas A Game of Thrones just offered it generously. Yet, in spite of all that, it was so much a better book, it felt so much more as A Game of Thrones should have felt, that these issues did little to take away the pleasure of reading. Reading A Clash of Kings was definitely a matter of ambiguous pleasure. But pleasure nonetheless.