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This year (2011) has been rough for those of us who count ourselves Minnesota Twins fans. A few weeks ago, however, I watched Francisco Liriano nearly pitch a perfect game. Earlier in the season, Liriano pitched a no-hitter, which was a bright spot in an otherwise unremitting series of losses, injuries, and disappointment. But this was different. This meant more. This was a perfect game (and you can’t get better than perfect).

The announcers, with no regard for karma, started talking about the possibility in the fifth inning. I didn't start to get excited until the seventh. I thought to myself: I might be watching something for the history books. Then, in the eighth, the third baseman made an error, and the perfect game was over (the following inning, he lost his no-hit bid as well). The game went down as a victory for the Twins, and for Liriano, but it will be lost in the eddies of baseball history. It was a very good game; but it was not a masterpiece.

Back in May 2007, I watched the season finale of the third season of Lost. The series, which focused on a group of airplane crash survivors on a mysterious island, became a pop cultural phenomenon with its intriguing present-day storyline intercut with meaningful flashbacks to the off-island lives of the passengers.

The third season was up-and-down, but after a strong homestretch, Lost gave us a finale for the ages. In the final moments, the show revealed that the flashbacks we thought we’d been watching for the previous two hours were actually flash-forwards, and that some of the passengers had gotten off the island. After picking up the pieces of my brain, I thought to myself, I might be watching the greatest television show of all time. Flash forward to 2010, when Lost concluded with a melodramatically satisfying but substantively hollow conclusion. It ended as a very good series, with individual episodes as strong as anything that ever aired on television, but it was not a masterpiece.

I just finished George R.R. Martin’s A Storm of Swords, and I’m getting the same feeling I did watching Liriano in the 7th inning, or watching the third season finale of Lost: the thought that I might be in the midst of something special. Something that might linger and last. Something that be be considered a classic. Not classic fantasy. But a bona fide literary monument. I have grave doubts that Martin can finish this series, or that he can finish it with the same strength with which he started (reviews of the next book, A Feast for the Crows are not encouraging), but when I finished the last page, I certainly sensed the possibility of greatness. If Martin can finish this � if � then he will have accomplished a feat that will demand attention (including from those snotty New York Times Book reviewers who won’t read “fantasy�).

Swords is Book Three in Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire cycle. It begins where Book Two, A Clash of Kings left off. At the end of Kings, we were treated to the epic battle of the Blackwater; Winterfell was razed; the Night’s Watch was north of the Wall; and it appeared that the Lannisters, including the young, sociopathic King Joffrey, were ascendant.

My main critique of Kings was that it started slowly and maintained that agonizing pace right up until a blistering third act that completely reshaped my feelings. Storm doesn’t bother with a slow build-up. It gets into things from the first page. From front to back, this is the best of the series so far, and a stunning novel in any light.

The ever-expanding plot of A Song of Ice and Fire is impossible to summarize neatly. In Storm, as in the other books of this series, the story is told from the alternating viewpoints of various characters. The selected viewpoints are: Jaime Lannister, Tyrion Lannister, Jon Snow, Catelyn Stark, Arya Stark, Sansa Stark, Bran Stark, Samwell Tarly, Davos Seaworth, and Daenerys Targaryen.

I sometimes criticized the point-of-view choices in the first two books, for the reason that Martin’s decisions often led to viewpoint redundancies and glaring blind spots. That is, Martin would often have several characters in one place, talking about one thing, while huge swaths of the storyline lacked a single witness. As a consequence, big chunks of exposition, central to the plot, were fed to the reader as secondhand hearsay, rather than experienced by a beloved character.

For the most part, this problem does not arise with Storm. The viewpoint characters are well chosen and spread out across Westeros, doing things rather than talking about them. Sam is with the Night’s Watch beyond the Wall, being chased by the Others (they’re a kind of cold-weather mash-up of vampires and zombies). Jon is riding with Mance Ryder’s free-folk in a sort of Dances With Wildings subplot that allows us some insight into the wildlings lifestyle (and occasions any number of hastily-scrawled sex scenes). Catelyn is with her son Robb, the King of the North, who blunders badly by breaking his oath to marry a Frey daughter. Jaime Lannister embarks on a perilous journey back to King’s Landing, guarded by the female knight Brienne of Tarth. Meanwhile, back in King’s Landing, a wounded Tyrion awakens to find that his good deeds have not helped his standing. The presence of his father, Tywin Lannister (a great peripheral character), and the scheming of his sister, Cersei, threatens his position at court. Across the sea, Daenerys gathers an army she hopes will allow her to retake Westeros.

Of course, not all the viewpoint characters are created equally. Sansa Stark finally has things to do (and finally rejoins the plot; she has basically stood mute since betraying her father Eddard in A Game of Thrones), but she is still dumber than a garden gnome. Martin finally convinced me that Davos Seaworth, loyal to royal pretender Stannis Baratheon, is an important character; unfortunately, his importance does not make him interesting. Like Eddard Stark before him, Seaworth’s square, dogged sense of honor � shorn of wit or pragmatism � makes him an uninspired character.

These criticisms are only half hearted, though. The overall quality of Martin’s plotting choices easily cover up the fact that, in a game of chess between Sansa and a sack of unpeeled potatoes, I would wager on the potatoes. Even an otherwise tiresome character such as Samwell Tarly, who is the sniveling heir of Tolkien’s Samwise Gamgee, is given things to do. Heck, I even grew to like Daenerys. In the first two books, I was wholly underwhelmed by her subplot. Though I fully understand (or think I understand) Martin’s endgame with respect to Daenerys, I didn't like how he kept cutting away from the main story to heap page after page upon this unconnected plot thread. In Storm, Daenerys does not get much closer to joining the rest of the book, but she does get to kick some ass. I never figured I’d be a person to get much enjoyment from a dragon unleashing fire on an unassuming victim. I was wrong.

Many of the highlights of this book I will not touch, even vaguely. Things happen that are surprising, shocking, and heart-wrenching. If at all possible, you should attempt to finish this book before accidentally stumbling across a massive spoiler.

Surprises aside, many of Storm’s highlights stem from four characters in particular: Jaime the Kingslayer; Jon Snow of the Night’s Watch; Arya Stark; and Tyrion the Imp.

Storm is the first book in which Jaime becomes a viewpoint character. In the past, we knew him as the sister-f***ing, child-defenestrating, king-killing sword master. He appeared a cruel, golden-haired villain, one who inspired terror in the heart of our putative heroes, the Starks (the further you get into A Song of Ice and Fire, the less sure you become about who the heroes and villains really are). In Storm, Jaime spends much of his time on the dangerous, outlaw-infested roads back to King’s Landing. Though his chapters are hampered by his unfortunate, almost Tourette Syndrome-like use of the word wench, we learn a lot from Jamie about his time guarding Mad King Aerys. What we learn causes us to seriously reevaluate our earlier judgments, and begins nudging him along the villain-hero spectrum.

Jon’s story is where the bulk of the action happens. And by action, I mean fighting and sex. Without giving away too much, I think it’s appropriate to say that Jon is at the center of a battle on the scale of Return of the Kings� Pelennor Fields. This battle really tilts A Song of Ice and Fire away from the realistic-fantasy from A Game of Thrones and into the fantasy-fantasy of The Lord of the Rings. There are mammoths and giants and spying eagles, but I didn't care, because there were also catapults and trebuchets and murder holes and burning oil. In other words, cool stuff.

Arya was one of those characters I initially didn't like. For some reason, thematically or otherwise, Martin has chosen for viewpoint characters a high number of children, persons with disabilities, and children with disabilities (I’m not including Sansa’s low-functioning, though I could). This means that a lot of our protagonists are a bit atypical; furthermore, many of them haven’t had a lot to do till now. In Storm, the kids finally start to grow up. Bran, the crippled boy, takes some huge strides in terms of reader-interest, as he begins to harness his shape-shifting abilities. However, I was more impressed with Arya’s storyline. She falls in with a gang of outlaws, joins forces with Sandor “the Hound� Clegane, and generally blurs the moral dividing line between good and bad. It’s a bold authorial choice when you take a relatively innocent child character and slowly turn her into a cold, steel-eyed killer.

Finally, Tyrion remains the transcendent character he was in the first two installments. I expected his droll wit and smartass remarks to start wearing thin, but Martin’s choice to put Tyrion on the defensive, hemmed in by his father and sister, was an act of genius. It kept him evolving, which is no small feat after we’ve spent so much time with him.

What I’ve just mentioned is just a smattering of the pleasures within A Storm of Swords, a novel that is overstuffed with awesome. This is a big book, and there is room for everything a fiction fan � not just a fantasy fan � could want: swordfights, torture, poison, beheadings, betrayals, shocking deaths, shocking fake-deaths, terrifying beasts, chuckle-inducing sex scenes, large scale battles, miracles.

As I’ve already mentioned, there are a lot more supernatural and fantastical aspects than before. These are things that might have been off-putting for the old me, the me who never read fantasy. It’s even possible that I never would’ve started A Game of Thrones if these things has existed at the start. Well, too late; I’ve been sucked in. Besides, Martin does a really good job of grounding these aspects with his no nonsense, matter-of-fact descriptions. It was easy for me to accept the prospect of dragons because Martin describes them with such biological precision. And it was easy for me to accept the storyline of Lord Beric Dondarrion, who is repeatedly killed and brought back to life by the Red Priest Thoros, because Martin’s portrayal of Beric is so gruesomely detailed (Beric is given life, but he is not healed; he walks around with a crushed skull and a missing eye).

For those of you who prefer Tolkien’s wordy, action-light style to numerous beheadings, maimings, and juvenile descriptions of oral sex, Storm should satisfy those cravings as well. Amid all the slayings and treachery, Martin still finds time for his characters to tell lengthy stories about the old days, and the long, violent, exciting history of Westeros. There are even songs!

This is a great novel. Not great fantasy; great literature. Martin’s prose is not elegant. Rather, it is detailed. He writes descriptively but clearly. His style is to create visual images with words. Accordingly, he goes to great lengths telling you about architecture, physical features, clothing, colors, and smells. Even minor castles or minor characters are imbued with depth. It can sometimes be overwhelming, trying to keep all this detail straight. Mostly, though, the result is a novel that is immersive and tactile. You feel surrounded by Martin’s world. You feel like you can gauge the reactions of Martin’s characters. There may be dragons and sorceresses and the walking dead, but it feels real.

That is not the extent of Martin’s talent. He has a marvelous sense of humor, and a nice, organic wit threads its way through novel, leavening the dour proceedings. Martin also has a nicely-tuned sense of dialogue. There are enough crisp one-liners and bon mots to put one in mind of The Godfather.

Storm is the midpoint of what Martin has said will be a seven-book cycle. I would be lying if I said I didn't have grave concerns (grave being relative, of course) about the rest of the series. There are so many variables as to make a prediction impossible. Can Martin sustain this dense style? Does he have any idea where all his plotlines are heading? Will success, riches, and fame blunt his skills? Does he have enough years left in his life to finish this grand project?

It’d be nice to say these questions don’t matter, that A Storm of Swords and the other completed novels can stand on their own. They can’t. Ultimately, Storm will be judged upon the entirety of A Song of Ice and Fire. If the cycle falters, or is left unfinished, then Storm will be reevaluated along with the rest.

There is no denying Storm’s essential qualities. It remains to be seen, however, whether it is part of a masterpiece, or something a bit less.