Politics, loyalty and betrayal in ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ series

This Week’s Winner

Rex Bernard DC Monteverde, 24, is a graduate student at UP Los Baños. His first and true favorite being Star Wars, he says he loves science fiction more than fantasy. He also has a great love for the Catholic Church’s history and theology but not necessarily for the Church herself.

Ijudge a book by its cover and there begins my problems. Publishers hire excellent book cover designers and these artists create great imagery usually not at all present in the book they design and draw for. Publishers also put good synopses on the back cover, which may be better written than the entire book itself. As a consequence, I usually end up with expensive paperweights: Books that I can never truly read because they cannot hold my attention for more than 10 minutes.

At times, though, I get lucky.

Having a limited time to spend on perusing paperbacks (hardbound books are just too expensive), I would pick out nicely packaged books, read their synopses, scan a few pages (I remove the plastic wrap when no one is looking) and then decide whether I will spend what little money I have to buy it or whether I will sleep on it first. The latter option is slightly more expensive as I live far from bookstore branches that have good titles, so I may have to spend on transportation and food just to get one or two books.

Now, the choice is not so hard for books that I really want or those about which I have read or heard good reviews. The choice is especially easy if the store has on its shelf all the books of the anthology (if the book I’m considering is part of it). It is a rather risky thing – buying books that are part of a series. Local bookstores tend to forget that you need the rest of the books to enjoy the one they have on sale. (They seem to most enjoy leaving out the second book in trilogies.) You have to buy a complete book set when it’s there or risk losing the chance to own it forever (or at least for some time).

So for the first two books of A Song of Ice and Fire, I decided not to buy them the first time I saw them. The bookstores had the ones published by Voyager. The covers were gorgeously illustrated and the synopses piqued my interest immediately: the books were on sorcery and nobles. It took me several more weeks when there was only one copy of each book in the store for me to decide to buy them and I am glad I did. I got lucky.

I realized then that George R.R. Martin had yet to finish the third book (I have all three now). Martin said that there would only be six books in the series and he is currently writing the fourth one.

The story is told from the first-person point of view of key characters. The story, loosely based on historical events and figures, has no real heroes. The entire world is mostly presented through gray eyes. Those that see only black and white end up dead or defeated. Every hero (the more-good-than-evil people) makes decisions that skim the lines of nobility; even the villains at times act in ways that can be considered heroic.

The story opens with a political climate no different than the one we are in now. A few years back in Westeros, the lords of the Seven Kingdoms rose in rebellion against their Mad King. The House Targaryen, who conquered the seven kingdoms centuries ago and claimed the entire continent, is removed from power. Members of their families are slaughtered and only two escape to the Free Lands to the East.

Like all victorious forces, the rebels usurp the government and crown their leader Robert Baratheon as the King on the Iron Throne. The great legal minds quickly justify the act by pointing out that some distant ancestor of Robert was in fact a Targaryen, giving him a legitimate claim to the throne. (Like in real life, everything can be explained away so long as you hold the power.) So Robert reigns and later marries Cersei Lannister of the richest house in the land to gain her house’s support.

Robert’s reign begins with the promise to rebuild the land but he turns out to be not unlike someone we had a few years ago. He spends all his years in power drying up the treasury, whoring and feasting. He ends up fat, drunk and unfit to rule. He sires so many bastards that almost every land in the kingdom has some child looking just like him. The strange thing is that all his legitimate children look like their mother.

The first book begins with this mystery: the King’s Hand, Jon Arryn, dies of poisoning while looking into the King’s strange progeny. We later find out that the Queen’s brother Jamie sired all her children.

Jamie, a Kingsguard and the Kingslayer, swears an oath to defend his king with his life but ends it instead. (Not Robert’s but the Mad King’s whom he first served.) In the third book though, I realized that I should not judge Jamie so easily for breaking his oath for he did it to prevent the Mad King from burning the city and murdering thousands. His actions saved many lives but still we could ask, "Should oaths really be discarded when the one they have sworn to serve acts in ways they do not agree with?" Perhaps Jamie’s post-kingslaying experience could help give an answer: He is pardoned by the new king, allowed to keep his rank and position and is ingratiated into the new monarchy, the typical oath breaker’s reward we give out in our country.

Throughout the three books, there are stories that stand out. One particularly interesting and eerily familiar event is when Stannis launches an information campaign against Cersei, revealing her children’s true parentage thus declaring their claim to the Iron Throne illegitimate.

In another instance the Queen’s dwarf (a short person, not the mythical creature) brother Tyrion is forced to tax sexual relations with whores in the capitol in order to keep the treasury afloat. Fortunately, we have yet to adapt this tax scheme. Tyrion, by the way, is one of the "good" ones who tries to make good in his office but is limited by loyalties to his family. Our own president seems to believe all good government people are Tyrions at best – tainted with something.

As for me, well, here I am left waiting for the rest of the books which hopefully will be from the same publisher since I really find it unsightly when books from the same anthology are lined up on my bookshelf but have different cover styles. (It still pains me that my copy of the third book is by another publisher.)

Of the lessons, more than anything, I guess A Song of Ice and Fire taught me that we are defined by how we prepare to act, how we act and how we react. How we choose to do any of the three gets us what we deserve: a good book or an expensive paperweight; a good government or an expensive national debt.

We will not always be lucky. Sometimes we have to pay dearly.

And there begins our problems.