A Distant Mirror and Fire and Blood
I recently read two great books: A Distant Mirror by Barbara W. Tuchman and Fire And Blood by George R.R. Martin.
One is history, the other is a fictional history, but in many ways they are very similar. A Distant Mirror is a history of the hundred years war, plague, schism and other political machinations that took place over a hundred years in Europe. Fire And Blood takes place over a couple centuries following the wars, plague, and political in machinations in Westeros after the Targaryen Conquest. Both are extremely entertaining. For me often the difference in like a book and loving it is that if I really love a book, I look forward to going to bed, even make excuses so I can go to bed early in order to read. I was fortunate enough to have two books over the last couple weeks that I was making excuses to go read.
A Distant Mirror is everything I like about reading history. It’s a reminder of why it is I picked History as my major when I was in college. Reading about all the double dealings, blunders, and catastrophic inhumanity towards one another makes for heavily entertaining storytelling, so long as you’re not so unfortunate to be living through it. I guess tragedy plus time does equal comedy after all, and in A Distant Mirror there is so much tragedy that it adds up to so much entertainment. Much of this reminded me of how much I liked the first season of Black Adder, and indeed there are jokes throughout that series that talk about these same events.
Fire and Blood is brilliantly executed. Taking the form of a history written by one of the Maesters, the book is treated as a serious history. One of the best things is the Maester’s discussion of sources. In various places the Maester will admit that the sources disagree. Like all good historiography he weighs and judges which would have the best understanding. In almost all the cases, the most enjoyable source is Mushroom, one of the fools. While Mushroom rarely is the Maester’s choice for most accurate, he always seems to have the most lurid version of events. In some ways reading this as history is more entertaining than reading Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire. The only point of view characters here are the Maester, maybe his sources. We don’t have to worry about how the Maester is impacted by the history, we just get to read the story. I like reading both, but it’s nice to learn what happened in an overview without having to have it related through the eyes of close third person. I can’t say how much I wish Christopher Tolkien would allow someone to do this for Middle Earth, especially the Second Age.
Anyway, two great histories, even if one is fictional. Are there other similar books I should be checking out?
