Clara’s Verdict
Thirty-three hours and forty-five minutes with a single narrator and a cast of hundreds is an extraordinary feat of endurance on both sides of the microphone, and the A Game of Thrones audiobook remains the definitive way to take on George R.R. Martin’s first volume. The Times placed it among its twenty-five best audiobooks, and while I am generally sceptical of such lists, in this instance the placement is thoroughly defensible. Roy Dotrice’s reading is the reason for it.
I returned to this recording expecting to find it dated, since it has been available in one form or another for a very long time now. It is not. What struck me on this listen is how completely Dotrice calibrates his delivery to the point-of-view structure. Martin rotates his chapters between characters, and Dotrice does not simply change voices for the dialogue. He changes the temperature of the narration itself depending on whose head we are currently inside, which is a much rarer and considerably more sophisticated thing to attempt.
About the Audiobook
The premise scarcely needs restating, but the framing on the listing is worth repeating for how efficiently it sets the terms. Summers span decades. Winter can last a lifetime. And the struggle for the Iron Throne has begun. Eddard Stark, Warden of the North, counts it a curse when King Robert bestows on him the office of the Hand. His honour weighs him down at a court where a true man does what he will rather than what he must, and where a dead enemy is a thing of beauty.
That last phrase tells you everything about the moral world Martin is constructing. The old gods have no power in the south. Stark’s family is split. Treachery runs through the court. And in exile in the Free Cities, the vengeance-mad heir of the deposed Dragon King has grown to maturity and is claiming the throne for himself. What made this novel reorganise fantasy publishing was never the invention so much as the consequence: Martin allows choices to cost what they would genuinely cost.
This is volume one of A Song of Ice and Fire and the correct place to begin. HarperCollins issued this edition on 3 November 2015 and it is a permanent resident of the Audible UK charts, which after a decade tells you a great deal about its durability. One honest caution concerning the series rather than this book: A Song of Ice and Fire is not complete, so you are beginning something that does not yet have an ending. Thirty-three hours is a substantial investment in an unfinished project and you should know that going in.
The Narration
Dotrice’s range is the headline and it deserves the attention it gets. The number of distinct characters he has to establish in this volume alone is punishing, and he differentiates them by considerably more than pitch. Age, class, region and temperament are all audible, and characters who appear only briefly in book one still arrive with a fully formed voice rather than a placeholder to be developed later.
The point-of-view calibration is the subtler achievement. Arya’s chapters move faster than Sansa’s. Tyrion’s carry a dry undertow that is present nowhere else in the book. Bran’s early chapters have a childlike openness in the narration itself and not merely in his dialogue. Dotrice is reading the prose as though the viewpoint character were colouring it, which is exactly right for a novel constructed the way this one is, and it makes the rotation between chapters feel like a change in the weather rather than an administrative shift.
Two fair criticisms. His delivery is theatrical in a manner that will strike listeners raised on the flatter contemporary house style as old-fashioned, and if declamation puts you off you will notice it inside the first ten minutes. And the age of the recording is occasionally audible in the mastering. Neither of those outweighs what he achieves across thirty-three hours, but the theatricality in particular is a genuine matter of taste rather than a defect, and a sample will settle the question faster than any description of mine.
What Readers Say
A 4.7 average from more than 78,000 ratings is about as settled as reader opinion ever gets, and what is striking in the written reviews is that even the enthusiasts qualify their praise in ways that are actually useful to a prospective listener.
The writing style is not to everyone’s taste, but I found it accessible and the language was beautiful.
The reviewer writing as The Fantasy Review makes the most valuable point in the entire pile, observing that it is rare in fantasy for the magic system to take such a backseat, and that this is a story about people, rather than magic. That is exactly right, and it is the single best guide to whether you will get on with the book. Readers who come to fantasy for elaborate magical systems will find this one frustratingly grounded in political manoeuvring and family obligation.
JRC Salter, who arrived after the television series and assumed the adaptation had exaggerated the sex and violence, reported being wrong about that, and summarised the book as adult fantasy at its finest, adding that Martin does not hold back. That is a content warning quite as much as a compliment. J. Ang, at four stars rather than five, acknowledged Martin’s ambitious world-building and complex plotting while admitting to arriving very late to the party, and the four is instructive: this is a novel with real friction in it, particularly across its opening chapters.
Who Should Listen?
Anyone who watched the television series and never read the books should take this route rather than the printed one. The audiobook handles Martin’s enormous cast better than the page does, because Dotrice supplies an instant identifier for every character and you stop having to consult the appendices in your head every few pages. At thirty-three hours it is also superb value measured in hours of attention held.
Hold off if you want a completed series, for the reason set out above. Hold off if graphic violence and sexual content in fantasy are not for you, because the reviewers describing this as unflinching are being accurate rather than squeamish. And if you have bounced off Martin’s prose before, this recording will not alter the prose, though it may well alter your relationship with it, since several readers who found the book heavy going in print have found that it flows in performance. Try the sample and discover which camp you belong to.
