Whatever it is I think I see, or, Some resemblances from the weekend

Let's start with the one that seems least likely to be intentional. From George R. R. Martin's A Dance with Dragons:

The cheesemnonger laughed so hard that Tyrion feared he was about to rupture. "All the gold in Casterly Rock, why not?"

"The gold I grant you," the dwarf said, relieved that he was not about to drown in a gout of half-digested eels and sweetmeats, "but the Rock is mine."

I'm surely not the only one who immediately thinks of Mr. Creosote, right?



Okay, fine: that's just a case of me seeing what I want to see, like when I mistake a windblown plastic bag in a vacant lot for a cute bunny hopping happily along. (Still, the Pythons did have a thing for cheesemongers and dwarves, no?) But what about this one, also from A Dance with Dragons:

His fellow drinkers were talking about dragons now. . . . "Wasn't there some princess, too?" asked a whore. She was the same one who'd said the meat was grey.

"Daena," said the riverman. "That was the sister. Daena of Dragonstone. Or was is Daera?"

"Daena was old King Baelor's wife," ssid the oarsman. "I rowed on a ship named for her once. The Princess Daena."

"If she was a king's wife, she'd be a queen."

"Baelor never had a queen. He was holy."

"Don't mean he never wed his sister," said the whore. "He just never bedded her, is all. When they made him king, he locked her up in a tower. His other sisters, too. There was three."

"Daenela," the proprietor said loudly. "That was her name. The Mad King's daughter, I mean, not Baelor's bloody wife."

Now, for all his overuse of the word "jape," Martin isn't much of a one for jokes--but that said, doesn't this exchange call to mind the perpetual, booze-clouded, fact-free discussions overheard at the O. J. in the Dortmunder novels? A deliberate allusion? Perhaps not, but I do find it comforting to think that drunken discourse never changes much, across centuries or imaginary continents.

Finally, an allusion that I do think is surely deliberate. Penelope Lively's new novel, How It All Began, a gently comic and unassuming look at the ramifications of one small change in the lives of a number of contemporary Londoners, features as its most fun character a self-regarding retired historian, Lord Peters. He is of course writing his memoirs; they are of course little more than the lightly fleshed-out contents of his Rolodex. After lost lecture notes lead to a debacle that leaves him feeling old and out of touch, he happens across a Simon Schama program and is inspired. "One has vastly underestimated television, I've come to realize," he tells his assistant. Then he turns to his niece, who is an interior decorator, and tells her of his plans for a series of half a dozen hour-long programs about the Augustan age:

"So where you come in, my dear, is to sort out some key person I should be getting in touch with. I'm not particularly au fait with that world, and you have so many contacts all over the place, don't you? You are always telling me about your prominent clients."

Marion stared across the table at him. Challenged, it would seem. Hoist with one's own petard, is that it? Trust Uncle Henry to put you on the spot when it suits him.

"Well . . . actually, I'm not at all sure that I . . . "

"Someone well established at the BBC, or the other outfit--whatever it's called." He waved a deprecating hand. "One of those in charge of program making. I wondered initially about going straight to the top chap at the BBC, the . . the . . ."

"Director-General, I think."

"Quite. Find out who he is and put the proposal to him--but, on second thought, it makes more sense to deal with the people who're going to actually do the program, don't you think? So--who do you suggest?"

It won't surprise you to learn that getting a TV show made involves a bit more than calling up the right man. In the process of being turned down, Henry makes the acquaintance of a recently minted PhD in history named Mark, who decides that Henry could be his meal ticket for a while. On seeing Henry's study, Mark says, wholly without irony, "Books do furnish a room, don't they?" Anthony Powell fans will of course recognize the reference, and if the name Mark hasn't already brought to mind Powell's character Mark Members, Mark's next step surely will: he insinuates himself as Lord Peters's archivist, a sinecure that will secretly leave him plenty of time to turn his dissertation into a book. "It's Henry now, no more Lord P.," notes Lord Peters's personal assistant, whom Members has elbowed aside a bit. "Got his feet properly under the table, he has."

Which, Powell fans will surely agree, is a very Mark Members thing to do. And that makes me, scoring generously, one for three in the allusion department for the weekend. Given all the nonsense floating around the brain at any given point, that doesn't seem like too bad a score.

Just one more book . . .

One more book . . .

One more book, he had told himself, then I'll stop. One more folio, just one more. One more page, then I'll go up and rest and get a bite to eat. But there was always another page after that one, and another after that, and another book waiting underneath the pile. I'll just take a quick peek to see what this one is about, he'd think, and before he knew he would be halfway through it.

That's Samwell Tarly, speaking, a bookish boy stuck in a warrior's world in George R. R. Martin's A Feast for Crows, the fourth book in his ongoing Song of Ice and Fire series. After several years of avoiding the series--primarily because rocketlass thought Martin's prose would likely bother me--I dove in just after New Year's. And now, like Samwell, I find I finish one book and think, well, I'll just take a look at the next one before I pick up something else . . .

They're far from perfect novels. They're too long, Martin's technique of shifting the narrative viewpoint among more than a dozen characters brings nearly as many frustrations as it does pleasures, and rocketlass is right: Martin's sentences aren't mustering a challenge to the likes of Nabokov. If I never read the word "jape" again, or read another description of a festering sword wound, I'll be happy. But they are compelling: Martin's muddy, bloody, vicious medieval world is more convincing than Tolkien's, his characterizations are much richer, as are his battle scenes, and his plotting is spectacular. I often say that one of the things I like best about sports is that you truly don't know how things are going to turn out, a pleasure that even the best literature, the most thrilling of novels or films, doesn't often afford. Narrative arcs are too familiar, and they're broken too rarely, to offer the pleasures of real uncertainty. But that's what Martin delivers: his world is actually dangerous, and by the end of a book or two, you start believing that any character really could die at any time.

On top of that, Martin does retain some of Tolkien's Norse-borrowed sense of the long march of history and the tales that accompany it. This passage, from A Storm of Swords, isn't typical, but it's a nicely compact example of the way his characters are constantly thinking about, and living in a world inflected by, the tales of past heroism:

The Nightfort had figured in some of Old Nan's scariest stories. It was here that Night's King had reigned, before his name was wiped from the memory of man. This was where the Rat Cook had served the Andal king his prince-and-bacon pie, where the seventy-nine sentinels stood their watch, where brave young Danny Flint had been raped and murdered. This was the castle where King Sherrit had called down his curse on the Andals of old, where the 'prentice boys had faced the thing that came in the night, where blind Symeon Star-Eyes had seen the hellhounds fighting. Mad Axe had once walked these yards and climbed these towers, butchering his brothers in the dark.

If that doesn't stir some remnant of the fantasy-loving twelve-year-old in you, then these books aren't for you. It reads like a flight of authorial fancy, like Martin started in on that paragraph and was having so much fun he just kept going--"the thing that came in the night" and "butchering his brothers in the dark." But it's better than that: many of these stories are ones we've heard, in whole or in part, already; of others we'll hear later. Martin has created a world, written its history, and peopled its present. It's quite an achievement.

So now I have not quite two novels to go before I find myself in the position of the readers Neil Gaiman chided on his blog and the New Yorker raised a puzzled eyebrow at last year: waiting and waiting and waiting for the sixth novel in order to find out what happens next.

Which does set A Song of Ice and Fire apart from the book that finally drives poor Samwell Tarly to get up and see to his duties: Septon Jorquen's Annals of the Black Centaur, an "exhaustively detailed account of the nine years that Orbert Caswell had served as Lord Commander of the Night's Watch":

There was a page for each day of his term, every one of which seemed to begin, "Lord Orbert rose at dawn and moved his bowels," except for the last, which said, "Lord Orbert was found to have died during the night."

If you're interested in reading more about Lord Orbert and his bowels, Jorquen's history can be found, alongside a number of other books from Martin's world, available for checkout in the Invisible Library.