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The Iron King, for those unacquainted with the title, is the first book in The Accursed Kings series which George R.R. Martin credits as the progenitor for his Song of Ice and Fire (he even writes an introduction to the current edition.) It's a historical series written way back in the 1950's that leads up to the War of the Roses (upon which Martin based his fantasy series.) There's no magic in this book, though there is a curse that does seem to be coming to fruition, though without any clear supernatural forces at work—merely the inevitable consequences of bad decisions and corruption.

I was surprised how easily I slipped into the story given I rarely read historical novels, but Maurice Druon does have some of that enigmatic ability that George R.R. Martin displays in the early books in his series of pulling you along through various characters, making you empathize with them without having to necessarily like or admire them. It's such an interesting way of telling the story: following the underlying thread of these development through various of the players ranging from kings and queens down to lowly merchant's sons.

A lot of the key elements of Game of Thrones can indeed be found here: intrigue, violence, sex, and more than all of those a kind of elevation of social mores of the period as almost immutable laws of nature. I suppose a lot of historical fiction plays on such things, but I noticed it more here perhaps because the book being more than sixty years old, it's less concerned with hand-waving to our modern ideological requirements for fiction. That fact may turn some readers off: Druon casually accepts notions of gender in a way that feels outdated to us now. Women are judged on fidelity while men are punished not for cheating on their own spouses but for exploiting another man's wife. Was this true of the 14th century? Or merely representative of a mid-20th century view of gender roles?

Regardless, The Iron King is a quick read that immerses the reader into a set of historical intrigues and their consequences that is both gripping and informative. I could easily see myself picking up the next book in the series, even if, as seems so representative of that era, the sequel to "The Iron King" is titled, "The Strangled Queen".