I recently finished reading George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, seven books to the five parts, comfortably longer than War and Peace, and still not completed. I'm not a great reader of fantasy. A dalliance with Gene Wolfe's Torturer series about twenty years ago was my last. I started on Martin after seeing the TV series A Game of Thrones. I'd never heard of the books, but decided to read the first one to see how it compared with the film version. I got hooked and went on reading. Now like the rest of the fans, I'm waiting for the Winds of Winter.

There are plenty of reviews of these books on Goodreads and I'm not going to add to them. Instead, I'm going to raise a general question which I've always found interesting, which is how one assesses the type of writing of which these books are an example. How does one even classify them? Though fiction, I would argue that ASOIAF is not a novel. It's structurally and thematically far too diffuse. There's no central character or theme to unite the action, and even the group of characters with which the story starts to whom one builds a kind of attachment are either killed off or disappear for considerable stretches of the narrative. It's not quite clear either what the story is actually about. The book is quite different in this respect from what might regarded as its closest predecessor, the Lord of the Rings.

I'm not sure that any fiction set in an invented world can ever be described as a novel. The primary themes of a novel, love, death and money, are classically situated in the real world, amongst a restricted group of persons and thus have universal appeal. Invented worlds give rise to issues which are outside the scope of the novel: geopolitics and war, which are more the concern of narrative histories, but which being invented, can have only a parodic or satiric connection with actual human history.

Obviously novels, particularly War and Peace, touch on such matters, but even Tolstoy doesn't make them the primary interest, rather the impact they have on already established characters.

So, it seems to me that Martin's books are a kind of fictional history, which dips from time to time into novel territory, but without any dramatic resolution of the issues.

This for me, is the weakness of this kind of fiction. As there is no dramatic point at which the story aims - a marriage, say, as in Jane Austen, or the resolution of the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, as in Dickens's Bleak House - we read on because we want to know what happens next. What happens next is therefore the point of the exercise. I've no idea how many more volumes of ASOIAF there are to come, but there's seems no reason why it shouldn't go on and on, like a TV soap opera into which people are born, get married and die, without there ever being a conclusion, unless the ratings fall.

So although I'm hungry for the next course, I'm almost sure my hunger is not going to be satisfied. There'll always be another conflict brewing in Westeros and another generation of characters to fight it. Impressive as Martin's achievement is, and while there are many good, literary moments in it, it simply doesn't have the power of a genuine literary work, and therefore isn't a contribution to literature. Great works of literature conclude, tragically or happily. Anna Karenina dies. Emma marries. We find out what we want to know. We do not feel compelled to read on and on.

This necessity of ending is inherent in all works of art. Reading Martin reminds one that to write well is not enough. There must be some point at which one is aiming, a resolution which will satisfy, borne on a structure which will support it.