Book: Fire and Blood
Author: George R.R. Martin
Grade: B-
Falling in love with a fictional society is pretty easy - lots of people have done it. But it takes a very specific kind of personality to become truly fascinated by the history and backstory of that society. These are the kinds of people who don't just care about Kings X, Y and Z who show up on screen or on the page - no, they want to know all about Kings A-W, their wives, their wars, their evil ministers and even the non-royal lords and ladies who populated their courts.
Which is to say there's undeniably an audience for Fire and Blood, George R.R. Martin's history of the Targaryen dynasty, which ruled Westeros for about 300 years before the events of A Song of Ice and Fire, Martin's justly popular series of fantasy novels that spawned the HBO mega-hit Game of Thrones. For those readers or viewers who just enjoy Daenerys and her dragons or Jaime's redemption arc or Tyrion's wit, however, Fire and Blood might have limited appeal.
Martin always took a somewhat patchwork approach to sketching in the backstory of his universe - he would occasionally joke that he'd likely lose a trivia contest to particularly devoted fans. Westeros had lore, but it always felt more instrumental than comprehensive - it existed to provide context for the story being told. The Targaryens had a history so Daenerys could have a history. There was a story behind Robert's Rebellion so that the relationship between Ned Stark and Robert Baratheon could have weight and texture. And so on and so on. There was no sense that Martin's universe had a carefully written history dating back thousands of years, and that was fine - the story he was telling was compelling enough as it was.
Fire and Blood isn't Martin's first attempt to fill in the details of his universe - The World of Ice and Fire, written in collaboration with super fans Elio Garcia Jr. and Linda Antonsson, takes a more comprehensive approach to the whole of Martin's world, while Fire and Blood is a more detailed narrative focused specifically on the reign of the Targaryens. Fire and Blood begins with Aegon Targaryen and his two sister-wives bringing their dragons to the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros and conquering the land with...well, you know the title of the book.
There's a framing device here: Fire and Blood purports to be the first volume in a chronicle written by one Archmaeter Gyldayn, with Martin a mere transcriber (in typical Martin fashion, the book got a bit out of hand, and what was supposed to be one volume became two, with the second yet to be written and presumably years away from release). It's a bit of an affectation, but it gives Martin a chance to have a little fun - the "author's" commentary makes him a bit of a character (albeit a prissy, judgmental one), and there are some genuinely interesting passages where Gyldayn wrestles with the necessity of synthesizing multiple unreliable narratives into a single, comprehensible account. This is the kind of thing - bringing realistic questions of history and governance to a fantasy narrative - that Martin has always excelled at, though the conceit of the Maester's chronicle does render some of the long passages of dialogue a little out of character.
Anyone who has read through histories of European dynastic struggles can tell you just how tangled and confused they quickly become, and Martin's fictional history of the Targaryen dynasty is no exception. Things become muddled almost immediately after Aegon the Conqueror dies. There are surely readers who can easily differentiate in their minds between Queens Alicent and Alysanne and between Rhaenyra Targaryen and Rhaenys Targaryen. And there are surely readers who can remember the hopelessly intertwined family relationships that run through the narrative. The rest of us, however, have to flip back and forth from the family tree in the back of the book, and even that is only so helpful.
The fact that Fire and Blood has loads of characters with complicated relationships to each other isn't necessarily fatal. "Loads of Characters With Complicated Relationships to Each Other" is basically the subtitle to Game of Thrones.
But Fire and Blood lacks the key ingredient that made A Song of Ice and Fire so compelling: a sense of character.
A Song of Ice and Fire is, essentially, an attempt to complicate the basic narrative of both history and fantasy. The easy story is, "And so Robert the Brave overthrew the Mad King Aerys Targaryen with the aid of his loyal and honorable friend Eddard Stark and all in Westeros lived happily ever after under the new king's just rule." But what if Robert the Brave is a good soldier and a crummy king? What if Ned Stark is so loyal and so honorable that it ends up getting him killed?
Martin's novels succeed because he writes characters, not just names in a family tree. They're complicated and they're compelling, and so they're easy to remember even when the sheer number of them can get a little overwhelming.
Fire and Blood, by contrast, throws a staggering number of names at the reader without ever really bothering to build characters around them. Kings and queens, princes and princesses, old men and children who die in their cradle - they're introduced, their basic personalities are conveyed in a sentence or two and then they just become another set of names that occasionally show up every few pages.
As a result, there's no real drama in the book's story, and not just because the outcome of the Targaryen squabbles is foreordained. It's hard to care who wins The Dance of Dragons - the cutesy name given to the brutal civil war between rival Targaryen claimants, over Archmaester Gyldayn's amusingly fussy objections - when the two principal characters, Aegon II and his half-sister Rhaenyra, are so flatly drawn and unmemorable.
And this dynamic is even more noticeable when the book turns away from the royal family and starts naming other lords and ladies. It's essentially impossible to keep track of which house is on which side of the Dance, for example, and scenes set at the royal court lack any real personalities. Tywin Lannister is one of A Song of Ice and Fire's best characters, a brilliant, ruthless, relentlessly competent individual who is the best kind of villain - the kind who could make for a compelling protagonist in a point of view-flipped version of the story. There's no one like him in Fire and Blood, no endlessly fascinating character to keep the audience's attention when the focus turns away from the Iron Throne.
Much of Fire and Blood, then, reads like an (admittedly erudite) college student's term paper on The Wars of the Roses - a chronological record written with no real passion or verve that manages to successfully name all of the participants without making a case for why the reader should care.
None of this is helped by the competent - but uninspired - illustrations from Doug Wheatley, who mainly serves up a series of generic blond Targaryens and indistinguishable dragons.
There are, to be sure, some exceptions. Mushroom the Fool, one of the sources from whom Archmaester Gyldayn draws his information, comes off well, eventually earning the Archmaester's grudging respect. And Corlys Velaryon, lord of a house that's essentially a side branch of the Targaryen family tree, is drawn well enough that the reader comes to respect his dignity and honor, though this is perhaps a reflection of the character's age and the fact that he hangs around for five monarchs and a few hundred pages.
And Martin has not lost his eye for grand tragedy. The most compelling material in Fire and Blood is a long, detailed account of a massive, days-long riot that consumed King's Landing, culminating in a mob storming the Targaryens' beloved Dragonpit and, in a fit of religious frenzy, killing all five of the dragons housed there. It's a beautiful piece of writing, one that manages to capture both the epic scale of the rioting and the intensity of the dragons' final moments.
Still, though it checks in at 736 pages, Fire and Blood ultimately feels like a profoundly lightweight experience, a curiosity of interest to only the most devoted Song of Ice and Fire completionists. There are real charms here - Martin is too good to write a book without a few. But in removing the human element from this story, and turning it into a mostly dry chronicle of names and events, Martin has drained much of the fire and blood from Fire and Blood.
