Quote from: Nightmare Asylum on Feb 28, 2024, 12:53:36 PMI haven't seen the original series or read the novel, but if I end up liking this new series in full as much as I did the first two episodes yesterday, I'm almost certainly going to end up going back to check out both.
The novel is
really really good. Some folks are put off by its sheer mass, at over 1100 pages long. But when you actually get down to read it, you don't feel it's length. Its a thrilling page-turner that keeps you wanting to go on and see what happens next. There is a reason it was a best-seller when it was first published despite the length of the novel.
Many have compared Shogun to another epic tome, Game of Thrones. And there are certainly some shared similarities in terms of the political intrigue, machinations and backstabbing as most characters in the story aren't out-right "good" or "bad" but have shades of grey, scheming to enlarge their power or just to survive. Toranaga also face a somewhat similar predicament as Ned Stark did after the ruler of the kingdom dies. Although obviously there aren't any dragons, ice zombies or magic in Shogun. And while there is also a fair amount of sex in Shogun the novel, its not as gratuitously described as in Game of Thrones.
But more than Game of Thrones, Shogun is also about meeting of different cultures, how each see the other as the savage outsider, in this Clavell was quite perceptive in portraying the Japanese, the English Blackthrone and the Portugese as each having their own motives dealing with the other and struggling to communicate across a gaping cultural divide.
