A Year of Ice and Fire: Bran I (A Game of Thrones)

Bran watches beheading, gets puppy. A good day all around.

If the big surprise at the end of A Game of Thrones is that the nominal hero gets his head chopped off, the big surprise at the beginning is that he does some head-chopping of his own. It was only recently that I took note of this, that our first glimpse of the most prominent character in the book shows him killing a man, and not, despite his words about the danger of deserters, a particularly bad man, but one we know to have understandable reasons for the action that led to his death. It's the first sign that this is a cruel setting, one in which even the nice guys operate by rules we wouldn't care for, the kind of place where a father might think it's important for his seven-year-old son to watch a beheading. It's to the series' credit, I think, that even the Northern lords aren't romanticized. They might be more honorable and less duplicitous than Southern lords (Roose Bolton aside), but they're also harsher, with a brutal value system born of life in an unforgiving land. A Dance with Dragons really underlines this, in the conflict between Stannis' Northern and Southern supporters, in the viciousness of Lady Dustin, and in the mention in one of the Reek chapters that houses like the Umbers (of the lovable Greatjon) still practice prima nocte. People go on about how nasty the ironborn are, but the northmen aren't far behind.

A couple moments in this chapter reminded me of one of my issues with Martin's style: the habit of allowing exposition to overwhelm the logic of a character's internal monologue. I don't think Bran would particularly be thinking about how his father's "closely trimmed beard was shot with white, making him look older than his thirty-five years," or about how Snow is "the name that custom decreed be given to all those in the north unlucky enough to be born with no name of their own." Dumping info like that may be a necessity, but at least phrase it within the frame of reference of a seven-year-old.

Other notes:

*I had forgotten that Theon was nineteen, significantly older than Robb and Jon. That has implications for how he relates to them; I'll try to keep it in mind for the Theon chapters in A Clash of Kings.

*"Bran thought it curious that this pup alone would have opened his eyes while the others were still blind." Symbolic, obviously, like the direwolf having been killed by a stag, but of what? Jon being aware of the threat of the threat of the Others before the rest of his siblings?

Tomorrow: Catelyn I