Ghost of a flea

The Ice and the Fire

I am not only a fan of Game of Thrones, I am something of a fanatic. With this caveat, I am pleased to direct your attention to Rick McGinnis' assessment, the best negative review of George R.R. Martin's story I have yet to read. It is the latest in what is becoming an increasingly weighty body of criticism directed not only toward the book but toward Martin's read on fantasy.

Several months ago, Leo Brin kicked off a bun fight in the sf&f corners of the blogosphere, attacking the "bankrupt nihilism" of contemporary fantasy writing or, more properly, fantasy writers including George R.R. Martin. Between Brin's critique and a reply by Joe Abercrombie, another of Brin's nihilists, we have two poles of a debate sparked by HBO's television adaptation of Game of Thrones. The show's $45m budget and unprecedented marketing has proven to be as significant for Martin's (ostensibly) nihilistic inclination in the genre as it has been for event television. This is a lot of attention for fantasy; genre fiction is rarely taken quite so seriously.

What McGinnis offers that Brin's argument lacks is a coherent perspective. If you do not find HBO's forays into bare breasts and bad language appealing - are perhaps troubled by them - then Game of Thrones is most probably not for you. If you think this sort of impropriety is symptomatic of the culture, it probably is. And if your idea of fantasy is defined by the Christian teleology of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, two of the the genre's defining masters, you won't find it in Martin's book or HBO's television adaptation. Fair dues.

But if you are Leo Brin, you want to excoriate today's nihilism while holding fast to the family values of Conan the Barbarian. Well, Crom laughs at that. He laughs from his mountain.

McGinnis' critique, by contrast, is leveled against Martin's story for what it is, not for failing to meet an expectation for what it should have been. As such, the review takes the work seriously while doing the job it needs to do for the readers of a "life and family" newspaper.

Most criticism has not met this standard. This last week has been an education as Game of Thrones' TV-only fans, baffled and offended at the prospect of reading a book, have spluttered their indignation at the death of a central character nine episodes into a ten episode season. "That's nine hours of my life wasted!","I will never watch Game of Thrones again!" and the like has cluttered by Facebook wall. Spare these darlings the rigours of Titus Andronicus, it would give them the vapours.

The most important thing to understand about Martin's apparently shocking treatment of his characters - trust me, you do not want to read the third book - is that the death at the end of episode nine in HBO's television adaptation is effectively the end of Act I in A Song of Ice and Fire, the climax of the first volume of a story spanning an anticipated seven volumes. And yet, the outrage. It is as if Gandalf never fell from the Bridge of Khazad-dûm.

We are only 4000 pages into Martin's work so far (ahem), with another 1300 manuscript pages on offer for the fifth volume to be published next month. As incredible as it is to type the following, with 4000 pages in print we don't yet know where George R.R. Martin is taking us.

It may be Martin really is doing something new with fantasy. Not because this is fantasy with bare breasts and bad language, Robert E. Howard offered something along these lines getting on a hundred years ago, but in terms of structure. In a genre rigidly determined by frankly cretinous tropes (the trilogy form being the worst offender) drawn from decades of misreading Tolkien, Martin has gone off the elven reservation. While there are clues we may yet get a standard fantasy genre resolution by midway through book seven my sense is - my hope is - we don't. Martin's take is new to the genre precisely because he does not (appear to) follow conventional character or story arcs. Instead, the more we learn about his characters, the more we learn about his world, the more we come to understand the appalling futility of this "game of thrones" and any moral certainty as to who should win and who should lose.

Is this a Christian sentiment? It is not. Nor should it be.

George R.R. Martin has been called "the American Tolkien". This is a mistake. Writers are told to "kill your darlings" and Martin has taken this advice, applying it in deadly earnest. He is the William Faulkner of fantasy.

Posted by Ghost of a flea at June 21, 2011 07:28 AM