If long Fantasy stories have fundamental rules, they probably go like this: 1) create a rich world, 2) put interesting characters in it, and 3) mix up some sequence of interesting things happening around them, happening to them, and being done by them. Martin’s first novel in this series, A Game of Thrones, fulfilled all three swimmingly. He forged one of the deepest Fantasy realms since Tolkien, with a mythology, culture and history. He spun characters of a few key families and then scattering them throughout that world and by the mid-point getting nearly all of them into some form of political, romantic or military intrigue. Active scenes illustrated the world and put it into motion, largely through political intrigue and the build to war.

This second book takes a mallet to what the first set up, dulling and dumbing down the world and putting the majority of the characters into boring or redundant situations where they do not escape the inertia of wasted prose until the final third of the book. Where the slow build to great promise was acceptable in the first, the sharp drop into bleak and sluggish chapters here is deeply disheartening.

Martin’s prose drops off noticeably. Fewer scenes generate atmosphere, and often it seems downright immature with sub-JK Rowling lines like, “The shame of that hurt worse than the pain, and the pain hurt a lot.” There is no language in this volume that rivals the blacksmith’s metallurgy or the dragon eggs in the first, leaving the thousand-page trek much less worthwhile.

Plotting and pacing have suffered similar fates. The first book took a few hundred pages to get off the ground but then flew into character development and action divvied up between a dozen (or so) lives, giving us a sense of a full and cohesive world. The narrative is divvied up again here, but with different results. A couple of characters are in intense situations: one girl poses as a boy, heading to an army garrison with a questionable guide and the possibility of being attacked by the enemy at any time on her attempt to get home; and a young soldier has gone to the other side of “the wall” and is risking facing creatures and perils never written about in the span of his homeland’s culture. They should have this volume to themselves, but instead we spend the first half waiting to hear more about them while we watch other characters sneaking into whorehouses and chatting about freshman-level theology. It’s especially annoying to leave someone hiding from enemy troops so you can read about some guy we haven’t thought about for hundreds of pages is getting a blowjob (Martin’s approach to sex is perhaps more adolescent than in the first book, and definitely has less appealing placement). While the last third expands the number of useful and interesting roles, the book has far too many chapters that serve as dull blockades to worthwhile narrative. These low-action chapters are not artistic or particularly expressive of original opinions (The Song of Ice and Fire seems like a prime franchise to expand into semi-literary fiction), but rather fumbles over clichés of sadness, lust and nonsense that are all strikingly less immediate than the situations we leave to read about them. We do not need another conversation about how some form of magic or divinity can’t possibly be real. Five or six of them will suffice.

It ties into a troubling sluggishness about this book. The first book ended on the verge of war with one major battle having ended. The second book ends on the very beginning of war, with a whole bunch of people arriving. It ends essentially on the same promise of future progress that the first did, and has so much unnecessary material that I couldn't help looking at my copy of A Storm of Swords, the 1,200-page third book, and wonder if it wasn’t bloated by the same problems. UPDATE: Storms of Swords conquered all expectations and was the best start-to-finish entry in the series so far. To read about what changed you can click here.

It stings worse because the first book ended with so many promises – NEW READERS MAY WANT TO SKIP THIS PARAGRAPH. We ended on the revelation that dragons are real, and three fell into the hands of one of the most tragic characters. In this volume they spend 1,000 pages doing little more than eat as we’re informed that they’re weak and helpless, and serve only as an excuse for their owner to go to a couple of fancy places. The revelation of the undead in the first book is even more underdeveloped here. Even the other side of “the wall” turns out to not by a realm of nightmares or perils, but more barbarians and sad people – a nice literary point, but severely underwhelming in delivery. There were so many things to look forward to, but they don’t manifest.

In short: Clash of Kings doesn't have much clashing and the kings do little of value. It would have been more aptly titled The Sadness of the People Who Aren’t Kings, but that wouldn’t have sold as well.