A Clash of Kings: A Crown Cannot Hold a Kingdom Together

A review of A Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin

By H.R. Zimmerer

Spoiler warning: This review discusses the complete novel and earlier books in A Song of Ice and Fire.

Content notes: The novel contains graphic violence, sexual violence, abuse and harm to children.

An abundance of kings proves to be remarkably poor news for the kingdom. In Martin’s second novel, competing claims to legitimacy produce armies, banners and persuasive accounts of entitlement. None of these can harvest a field after soldiers have burned it.

A Clash of Kings expands the consequences of Ned Stark’s death beyond the family that mourns him. The struggle over succession becomes a dispersed war in which almost everybody can explain why their cause is necessary, while the people living along the marching routes have considerably less opportunity to explain anything.

THE BOOK

A Clash of Kings

Author
George R. R. Martin

First U.S. publication
February 2, 1999

Series
A Song of Ice and Fire · Book 2

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Tyrion’s appointment as acting Hand gives the novel its sharpest political centre. He is clever enough to identify several immediate dangers to King’s Landing, and sufficiently familiar with his family to know that official enemies are only part of the problem. His contest with Cersei is entertaining because neither sibling can resist turning practical government into a struggle over which of them is being humiliated.

Yet Tyrion does real work. He plans, bargains, investigates and prepares the city for attack. The defence of the Blackwater depends on decisions made before its most dramatic moments, including the chain across the river and the use of wildfire.

The victory does not distribute recognition according to effort. Tyrion wakes wounded and diminished while Tywin occupies the position from which the family’s achievement will be explained. Martin makes public reputation feel like another resource controlled by those already equipped to command it.

That does not turn Tyrion into an uncomplicated champion of ordinary people. He can see through another nobleman’s vanity while remaining capable of treating less powerful lives as expendable. His intelligence is engaging precisely because it does not relieve the reader of the need to judge his conduct.

Theon’s attempt to capture Winterfell is a more desperate performance of authority. Returning to the Iron Islands exposes how little security his years among the Starks have purchased. He wants his father’s recognition and cannot bear the possibility that the household which raised him has become the more substantial claim on his identity.

At Winterfell, his need to appear decisive helps make him monstrous. When Bran and Rickon escape, the murdered miller’s boys become substitutes in the story Theon needs other people to believe. His humiliation matters enormously to him; the children’s lives become a means of managing it.

This is one of the novel’s clearest demonstrations that wounded pride is not harmless simply because its origins are understandable. Theon’s divided loyalties explain his vulnerability without excusing what he chooses to do with power.

Arya supplies a harsher view of the war’s daily administration. Her journey and captivity at Harrenhal bring her among prisoners, servants, soldiers and people whose survival depends on being overlooked. The great houses remain important, but their names offer no adequate explanation of what is happening to the bodies beneath their banners.

Her relationship with violence also becomes more troubling. The list of people she wants dead gives fear an order she can remember. The availability of Jaqen H’ghar’s help tests how a child uses an extraordinary means of revenge while still trying to get through an ordinary day alive.

Sansa’s captivity turns courtly knowledge into a survival skill. Courtesy no longer requires belief. She learns to speak within the expectations of people who can hurt her, and the difference between an outward response and an inward judgement becomes part of the novel’s emotional intelligence.

Meanwhile, Stannis’s claim is strong in the language of succession and much less secure in the lives of the people he expects to follow him. Renly possesses the attractive confidence of a man whose popularity has rarely been seriously tested. The supernatural means used against him expose how little the contest resembles the orderly resolution promised by either brother’s account of legitimacy.

The magical elements are no longer distant possibilities. Daenerys’s experience in the House of the Undying and the increasingly disturbing events around the Wall widen the story beyond the war’s immediate calculations.

The expansion has drawbacks. Some strands feel like arrivals at the edge of a future book rather than fully developed movements within this one, and the succession of journeys can make the novel’s length conspicuous. Its force comes from accumulation more often than elegance.

Still, the Blackwater brings its central concerns together with extraordinary clarity. Strategy, courage, terror and accident share the same river. Afterwards, the survivors begin arranging the account of what happened.

The crown remains the object of nearly everybody’s attention. The novel is most convincing when it directs ours towards what their pursuit is doing to the country.