Feuer und Blut - Erstes Buch

Christian_alternakid am 31.08.2022 um 16:20 Uhr:

Da ich jetzt eine halbe Stunde nach der vollständigen Kritik aus der Times (nicht hinter der Paywall) zur Veröffentlichung von "Fire & Blood" gesucht habe, lasse ich die mal in voller Länge hier, immerhin beginnt sie mit Noel Gallagher und hat mehrere Stellen, bei denen ich laut auflachen musste. Daraus bastel ich noch eine schöne Schmähkritik:

The words of two cultural lodestars lurked in my mind while I was struggling through Fire and Blood, the new book by the multimillion-selling George RR Martin. First, “history is just one damn thing after another”, attributed to Henry Ford (and others). Second, the explanation given by Noel Gallagher, of Oasis, about why he gave up reading fiction. “Novels are just a waste of fing time,” he said. “I just end up thinking, ‘This isn’t fing true.’ ”

Fire and Blood is not a novel, but rather a history of the royal Targaryen line that once held the Iron Throne of Westeros. These words may mean nothing to you, but they mean plenty to many. As a history, though, it lacks plot or theme, and really is just a long list of one damn thing after another. Yet also — and this does not make for a winning combination — it isn’t f***ing true.

Martin is the author, of course, of the sequence of novels called A Song of Ice and Fire, better known as the TV series Game of Thrones. Theoretically a heptalogy, it is now only five books long, meaning that the TV series has overtaken the novels and is about to end. Instead of finishing the novels, though, he has been working on Fire and Blood. To understand what his fans think about this, I refer you to their anticipatory comments on this book’s Goodreads page, which include, “Does anyone actually want this?” and “What the hell is George thinking?” and, my personal favourite, “Well done, GRRM. You may be a lazy sack of shit.”

Believe it or not — and by the end of this review I suspect you’ll be tilting hard towards the “not” option — I’m a fan. I have enthused often enough in my TV column about the HBO series, but I adored the novels too. I took the first on a solo work trip to Glastonbury about a decade ago, and lost half the festival to its heroic mix of horror, history and swords with names.

In a way, it was like coming home. I was never a complete fantasy nut, but I knew my way around JRR Tolkien and his various imitators (David Eddings, Terry Brooks) and indeed around Dungeons & Dragons — Warhammer too. With all this, but added blood, gore and shagging, Martin rekindles those teen obsessions for grown-ups. Think of it as anglosphere manga, but written down.

Most of all, his books reminded me of the Legend series by David Gemmell. Like Martin’s books of Westeros, Gemmell’s novels were full of fearsome men with axes in leather jerkins, who spoke like real ale enthusiasts. Also like Martin’s books, more importantly, these were stories about what happened after greatness; about flawed people trying to live up to the memory of a more wondrous, dramatic, mythic past.

In a way, Martin’s big error with Fire and Blood is not unlike George Lucas’s, with his three godawful prequels to Star Wars. Both had originals to which fans would return, obsessively, precisely because their huge operatic backstories could only be imagined. And both men, eventually, appear to have been struck by a beard-stroking, mansplaining horror that these fans might be imagining them ever so slightly wrong.

So. Deep breath. The story here, for want of a better word, begins with Aegon’s Conquest, when the Targaryens arrived in Westeros from across the sea. For those unfamiliar with what any of this means, a good starting point would be to think of medieval Britain being suddenly invaded by a single family of people who looked like the Milky Bar kid and rode dragons.

What with nobody else riding dragons, the Targaryens fairly swiftly conquered almost all of it. As well as being distinctively pale — “flaxen of hair and violet of eye” as Martin puts it here, not infrequently — the Targaryens are wildly fond of incest. “Prince Baelon was a lusty lad,” he tells us, at one point, approvingly, “for those same shrieks of pleasure that had echoed through the halls of the Red Keep on the night of their bedding were heard many another night in the years that followed.” The shrieker is Baelon’s big sister, Alyssa. For Martin, I fear, incest is sort of like normal sex, but sexier.

Unhappily, all 700 pages of this is written in the voice of Archmaester Gyldayn, a Westerossian historian. It is not a stretch to imagine how a pretend fantasy world historian might write, and Martin has not stretched himself in doing so. “It was said,” is often said. Nothing happens three times when it could happen “thrice”, and there’s no end of mayhapping. At some points, this gets frankly impenetrable. For example, reading that “the Kingsguard arrived from Dragonstone in the nonce,” I found myself powerless not to imagine an army of knights turning up in some sort of giant, paedophile-shaped Trojan Horse.

Even this would be forgivable if the story drew you in, but it does not, because there isn’t one. Martin enjoys himself with endless digressions about rival imaginary historical sources, one of which is inexplicably a dwarf called Mushroom. He also keeps throwing new flaxen-haired relatives into the mix, just when you’re almost getting the hang of the last lot. “Mayhap this would be a good place to add a few additional words about his sire, Corlys of House Velaryon,” he writes, at one point. Yeah, mayhap, mate. Mayhap not.

An awful lot of people are called Aegon or Aemon, and when they aren’t they’re invariably called something even more annoying. Martin has always enjoyed giving familiar names a twist (Joffrey, Eddard) but when I came across my first “Androw”, I did feel he was scraping the barrel. There are many, many Targaryen children, most of whom are shagging each other, but they all somehow come out rather samey, with an awful lot of partnerships seeming to involve the greatest swordsman in the land and a peerless beauty. Then there are the dragons, whose own sprawling dynasties hardly help matters. When I read that Viserys had become king because he was the last person to ride Balerion, I was genuinely unclear as to whether this was his dragon or his uncle.

On and on it goes. Siblings marry, rapists are gelded, dragons fly around burning things. Wars between people with basically the same name start and end. Occasionally the narrative shows signs of flaring up into what could have been a proper story if Martin could have been bothered to write it properly. Essentially, it is all one long synopsis for about 50 books that he will never get around to writing, which itself has only been written because he can’t get around to writing the other two Game of Thrones books that his fans are waiting for.

Worse still, after a doorstop of a thing, we’re still a century and a half short of GoT even beginning, which means there’s another volume of this interminable, self-indulgent crap to come. Will his fans buy it? Probably. Some might even read it. Rarely thrice, though. Mayhap, not even once.


https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/review-fire-and-blood-by-george-rr-martin-a-dire-prequel-to-game-of-thrones-g92frxmgx