Martin's Prose

[Lautrec]

I've seen opinions of all kinds on this topic, and I thought it would be interesting to see what the general consensus might be.

So, what do you think of his prose? His descriptions, flow, voice, style. Amazing, mediocre, bad?
 

[Good Guy Garlan]

Serviceable, but nothing to write home about, IMO. The characters' voices were generally distinct up until Feast, where people like Victarion, Aeron, Arys and Hotah have basically the same bland, monotone narrative voice. His descriptions are out of control most of the time, especially in the last two books. His strength is on the dialogue, but the prose, like I said, is basically functional. And I do know several people who couldn't get into the books because of his writing style. 

[Esa1996]

Nothing wrong with it IMO. He might describe stuff a lot, but Robert Jordan did it even more and even he doesn't over do it IMO. Martin doesn't over philosophize which bugs me quite a bit in the later Malazan books. He stays in 3rd person limited all the time, the lack of which prevented me from ever finishing the first book in The Wars of Light and Shadow, a series I really wanted to like.

[Butterfreak]

I love it.  Feast and Dance in particular have amazing prose IMO.

[Philokles]

I would say it is good but not his selling point. I actually quite like the amount of description, but can understand why others dislike it. That said I'd rather have completed books without the description than be waiting for ones with.

[Yevah]

I find myself skimming over parts of the book that lack dialogue sometimes. I'll never understand how a plate of food can get a full paragraph worth of detail. For example, in asos at joff and marg's wedding feast. Martin describes like 7 of the 77 dishes. In great detail. I absolutely loved the chapter, but found myself skimming any part that was related to food.

 

now that I think about it though, that may not have been the best chapter to use for an example. I think he may have went overboard with the food details in that chapter to get the reader speculating. Since that is when joff dies.

 

anywho, aside drom the over descriptions of some parts, I think GRRM's writing is spot on.

[aryagonnakill#2]

I think a lot of times that Martin describes things that might be useless he is really just building your anticipation, knowing that something is coming.

[FuzzyJAM]

Good.  

In general, it succeeds in being unobtrusive and allowing the strengths to shine through.

[Lord Varys]

I really don't get the criticism about descriptions. Yes, there is food and all, but so what? George refuses to give very detailed descriptions of his main characters. Ned Stark's beard is only mentioned once, if I remember correctly - aside from eye and hair color we are not getting any details. Only especially ugly people like Sandor, Tyrion, Brienne are described in detail.

You really can have difficulties forming a mental image of the characters on the basis of the descriptions in the books.

And compared to many authors George has a very bleak prose. Pretty much everything is relevant to the plot, on occasion even the dishes and the wardrobe (which are the only non plot relevant details George usually describes). Pretty much no detail George spends much time on is unimportant. Especially not in the later books. That actually can hurt the books because it makes it too easy to figure things out if you know that this is the case (you only ignore details if you think they are unimportant - as they are usually in other books).

[Good Guy Garlan]

"The early morning was the best time for seeing turtles. During the day they would swim down deep, or hide in cuts along the banks, but when the sun was newly risen they came to the surface. Some liked to swim beside the boat. Tyrion had glimpsed a dozen different sorts: large turtles and small ones, flatbacks and red-ears, softshells and bonesnappers, brown turtles, green turtles, black turtles, clawed turtles and horned turtles, turtles whose ridged and patterned shells were covered with whorls of gold and jade and cream. Some were so large they could have borne a man upon their backs. Yandry swore the Rhoynar princes used to ride them across the river. He and his wife were Greenblood born, a pair of Dornish orphans come home to Mother Rhoyne."

Unless an actual turtle is going to end up sitting on the Iron Throne, this passage is irrelevant fluff. It's like it was taken from a Dr. Seuss book. 

And there's one that's exactly the same in

one of the Arianne Winds chapters, only with trees instead of turtles

And this happens every time someone eats. 

Good.  

In general, it succeeds in being unobtrusive and allowing the strengths to shine through.

Yeah, that's a good thing, I guess. Many authors bend themselves over backwards trying to come up with the most creative figure of speech ever or a super witty sentence every line and it doesn't look effortless and takes me out of the reading. 

[The Marquis de Leech]

Martin's prose in the early books is both efficient and effective. He's hardly a Mervyn Peake, Lord Dunsany, or Clark Ashton Smith, or even a Patrick Rothfuss, but it gets the job done. It allows his actual strengths (plot and characterisation) to shine, while giving us the occasional memorable line like "Rhaegar fought honourably..."

The later books? The prose succumbs to repetition ("words are wind", anyone?), or worse ("her cunt became the world"), and as mentioned above, the narrative voice of the different characters loses distinctiveness. Victarion may be interesting as a character, but it's dull inside his head.  

[Yevah]

"The early morning was the best time for seeing turtles. During the day they would swim down deep, or hide in cuts along the banks, but when the sun was newly risen they came to the surface. Some liked to swim beside the boat. Tyrion had glimpsed a dozen different sorts: large turtles and small ones, flatbacks and red-ears, softshells and bonesnappers, brown turtles, green turtles, black turtles, clawed turtles and horned turtles, turtles whose ridged and patterned shells were covered with whorls of gold and jade and cream. Some were so large they could have borne a man upon their backs. Yandry swore the Rhoynar princes used to ride them across the river. He and his wife were Greenblood born, a pair of Dornish orphans come home to Mother Rhoyne."

Unless an actual turtle is going to end up sitting on the Iron Throne, this passage is irrelevant fluff. It's like it was taken from a Dr. Seuss book. 

is it bad that I zoned out and was skimming while reading that passage. Maybe it's just a problem with my attention span.

[Good Guy Garlan]

is it bad that I zoned out and was skimming while reading that passage. Maybe it's just a problem with my intention span.

I can assure you that there's absolutely nothing wrong with your attention span. 

[The Knight of Night]

He makes the first read tough, but by the third read i could see it all fairly clear. Honestly, I'll probably end up reading this series a dozen times and I suspect his vivid and intricate descriptions will continue to keep it fresh.

[The Marquis de Leech]

Funny thing is, when threads about "the worst line in ASOIAF" come up, there are vanishingly few examples from the first three books. It's not until you hit the Fat Pink Mast and the Myrish Swamp that you start to get sniggers. Martin is also not a linguist, and the faux archaic tone (nuncle, leal, and so on) grates as the series goes on - not least because such words suddenly appear out of nowhere half-way through the series. 

[Dark Syster]

I think that the descriptions did increase in Feast and Winds, but mostly due to the fact that he was trying really hard to describe Essos and Dorne. These are two HUGE areas that need to have distinct atmospheres established for them. Non-Dorne Westeros can get by without ridiculous description because a lot of western fantasy readers will already be bringing that sort of fantasy imagery with them. The look of a pseudo-Medieval England Hollywoodized is an established part of the Western fantasy reader Zeitgeist.

And I liked the food descriptions because a cookbook was inspired by them. lol

 

[Daendrew]

Gorgeous. Especially when read by Roy Dotrice.

[kimim]

I think that the descriptions did increase in Feast and Winds, but mostly due to the fact that he was trying really hard to describe Essos and Dorne. These are two HUGE areas that need to have distinct atmospheres established for them. Non-Dorne Westeros can get by without ridiculous description because a lot of western fantasy readers will already be bringing that sort of fantasy imagery with them. The look of a pseudo-Medieval England Hollywoodized is an established part of the Western fantasy reader Zeitgeist.

...

 

My avi is the Martell sigil, not because I was overcome by the Dorne described in the last two books, but because of the short bits involving Oberyn and his paramour in Storm. The Dornish bits in Feast did literally nothing for me; if anything they detracted.

idk what "prose" means in this context, and I'd like to pretend that the last two novels never happened. If I had to identify Martin's strengths, I'd say plot, pacing and characterization.

[Winter Blues]

When I first read GoT back in 2003, I was a sophomore in high school and had already fallen in love with literature. I didn't have any particular feelings for the book, I just read it so one of my buddies could shut the hell up about it. I was into Victorian and Modern American Literature, at the time, however. This series is the only fantasy I've ever read, so it's difficult for me to say if it's superb or subpar. But as a person who's studied the poetry of Tennyson, I really do like the writing in these books. To build a world and try to make it as vivid for readers as it is in the head of the writer is terribly difficult, and I think he's done a terrific job. (That's probably why Essos was difficult for him to write.)

[WhitewolfStark]

Martin has his moments when he achieves great prose, but they are few and far between a desert of simply serviceable prose at best and tediously long-winded prose at worst. I wouldn't suggest reading him to study prose and say that finding the rare gems sometimes make the slog through the long-winded parts worth it.

The parts that are great are usually quoted by everyone--and by that I mean the last line of AGOT, etc. I was actually inspired to continue reading the books after growing rather bored with AGOT because of one of those moments when Martin for a brief instance managed to create dialogue that not only sounded Medieval but was actually rather pretty in its own right (when Catelyn is convincing Ned to go south and she tells him that the cup has passed to him and now he must drink it). Those were the only two instances of me being taken out of the story in AGOT to admire Martin's craft as a writer--which should tell you just how often those gems pop up.