George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire

If George Martin were a beautiful person – he isn’t – we might liken him to Milton’s Lucifer/Satan in Paradise Lost: Satan creates a world of woe.

Martin has created a divinely scatological saga that mimics, in “similar” ways, the works of Charles Dickens and the Marquis de Sade; Dickens for Martin’s panoply of disgusting characters and their denouement(s) and de Sade for Martin’s obsession with perverse sexual desires and befouled body parts on his characters.

Martin is brilliant with his cliff-hanging plots, which continue now, for another thousand pages with his most recent offering, A Dance With Dragons, a fleshing out of his fourth book, A Feast of Crows, which was more of a prelude to a finale in the series than a real exposition of what has gone before and what is to come.

Feast is a cacophony of confusing and non-satisfying episodes that take readers nowhere, except to bookstores or the internet to buy the Dragons installment.

Martin is nothing if not commercial.

That HBO has bought into his oeuvre with its A Game of Thrones series makes the point.

Martin has infuriated his readers by dragging his feet with ensuing books in his epic effort. (See Laura Miller’s “Just Write It” in the April 11th 2011 issue of The New Yorker.)

But now that he’s picked up the pace, he’s just gotten crazier and crazier with his world.

Martin has killed off or maimed any character who had a decent, civilized demeanor. But he has also provided retribution upon those who’ve wreaked havoc upon characters who didn’t deserve the afflictions that were beset upon them by, what can only be called, malevolent beings from the sordid backwaters of Martin’s fevered brain.

This reviewer hasn’t read A Dance With Dragons – its on its way from Amazon as this is being input here.

And I’m hoping it stitches together the shards of character elaboration and plot that got lost along the way, between A Storm of Swords (the third book in the series) and A Feast of Crows.

George Martin keeps me and others glued to his strange world, by literary machinations that lesser writers haven’t come close to mastering.

Now if he would only insert an element of beauty – real esthetic beauty – now and then, I and others would not have to take breathers to recoup our humanity, which Martin puts on shaky grounds with his obsessive forays into the underbelly of fictional creation.

That aside, the series is addictive, not redemptive, but habit-forming, and one can only wish that it ends better than its middle section(s) have ended.

The books are printed and published by Bantam, and can be had from a number of book sellers: Powells, Amazon, Buy.com et cetera.