Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett on A Game of Thrones, the Punishment of Idealism, and an Unfinishable Series

A Game of Thrones, published in August 1996, is the first book of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. Five have appeared. Two more are, as the hosts put it, supposedly still to come. The novel opens on a family of children, each given a direwolf, and invites the reader to wait for them to grow up and come home. Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett treat that invitation as a trap. Sandbrook’s argument is that Martin punishes idealism, writes as a gardener rather than an architect, and has built a series whose goals cannot be reconciled. Syrett reports Martin’s own description of the next book as a dozen novels at once, and thinks he is not wrong. Each gives this first book eight.

Key ideas

1. The Stark children are offered as a children’s book, and the novel then kills it. The family is the device of children’s fiction. Robb is the dutiful eldest son. Sansa is romantic. Arya is the tomboy. Bran carries, as Syrett puts it, ‘A whiff of destiny.’ Rickon is the baby no one remembers. Jon Snow appears to be Ned Stark’s bastard, and Theon Greyjoy laughs at what he ought to take seriously. Sandbrook’s comparison is Little Women: each child is given a flaw and a trial, and the expected ending is a reunion. Syrett adds the direwolves. One for each child, including the bastard, tells the reader these are the heroes. The first puncture is the death of Sansa’s wolf, Lady, about a hundred pages in. Her father is ordered to put the animal down. Sandbrook’s point is that a child would be upset, and that this is the moment the book stops being the one it had pretended to be. By the middle, the question that turns the pages is whether Martin will kill people the reader likes. He does. Ned, the honest man, confesses to a treason he did not commit in order to save his family, and is executed anyway. The scene is not told from inside Ned’s head. Sandbrook’s point is that the angle moves to his daughter Arya, a child in the crowd, which is why it works. Syrett adds that Arya barely understands what she is seeing. Syrett cites Joe Abercrombie, in the introduction to the Folio Society edition, for the claim that the scene changed fantasy forever. That is Abercrombie’s claim, as she reports it.

2. Idealism is punished, and the cruelty that counts is human. Martin told the hosts’ account of himself that he was writing both a homage to Tolkien and an escape from him. Tolkien’s world, as Sandbrook puts it, is heroic, mythic, and moral. ‘Martin’s world is much less idealistic. Idealism is punished.’ There is no providence of the kind that runs through The Lord of the Rings. Syrett adds that it is random and lawless. Sandbrook, who thinks the charge of a simplistic Tolkien is wrong, draws the distinction carefully. Tolkien’s evil is inside people. The Ring is temptation, so that even Frodo is tempted. In Martin the distinction between good and evil does not operate as a system. Each person, from their own side, is trying to survive. The line he quotes from Cersei — ‘when you play the game of thrones, you win or you die’ — is the rule. Mercy is what gets you killed. He thinks some readers feel that Martin relishes the punishment of virtue. Syrett calls that view Sandbrookian: the more ruthless you are, the better you do. Her own summary is that everyone will betray everyone, and that the people who refuse to betray someone end up dead. The supernatural is kept at arm’s length in this first book so that the politics can feel literal. Dragons, when they come, function for Sandbrook as weapons, not as Smaug. Syrett’s name for Martin’s magic is a hard system, against Tolkien’s soft one: two legs and two wings, because a real animal is not six-limbed. For her, the evil in the book is rooted in humans, and the worst of it is always human. Both hosts say Martin’s interest is the human cruelty, not the Others. The Others are the book’s name for the dead things beyond the Wall. He asks her what the white walkers are called, and she gives him that name.

3. He gardens, and that is why the series cannot be finished. Martin does not plot the world and then write it. ‘One thing he doesn’t do is work out the world and the story before he starts writing.’ The contrast Sandbrook draws is with J. K. Rowling, who plots the Harry Potter books before she starts. Martin has a name for the difference. There are architects, who design the world and put you in it, and gardeners, who find the world as they tend it. Tolkien was a gardener in places: the opening still feels like The Hobbit, and Tom Bombadil is a side path. Martin, by the later books, gets bored of the people he began with and opens new cities. Syrett’s image is a game map filling in out of the dark. The first three books were one draft, split, and appeared in the space of four years. The Winds of Winter has been waited on for fifteen years. Martin has said, and Syrett reports this, that it is not so much a novel as a dozen novels, each with its own protagonist. Her turn ends on the difficulty: it is very challenging, and he is not wrong. The next turn is Sandbrook’s. He calls the task impossible. The goals are mutually exclusive. Only one person can take the Iron Throne. ‘The fact is they can’t all win. And the rules of the game that Martin has established are such that if one person wins, other people have to die.’ He does not think Martin can bring himself to kill the characters who carry the story. He has already named Tyrion and Daenerys. A new claimant in A Dance with Dragons, which Sandbrook calls huge, travelling under a false name with mercenaries, is the moment he thought the series had become impossible to wind up. Syrett likes that claimant. Her separate theory is that Martin told the television showrunners the ending, hated the response, and now has to change it. That is her theory.

4. The Wars of the Roses arrive as a soap opera and as Shakespeare, not as a chronicle. Martin has said, and Syrett reports it, that his model was Thomas B. Costain’s four-volume history of the Plantagenets, written in the 1950s. York is the Starks, a northern house. Lancaster is the Lannisters, a rich southern house. Ned is loosely Richard of York, and meets the same end. Robb is a young Edward IV. Robert Baratheon is the older Edward IV: both won the throne as great warriors and then, in the hosts’ joke, turned into Elvis in Las Vegas. Tywin Lannister is Warwick the Kingmaker. Cersei is Elizabeth Woodville, filling the court with her family, and also Margaret of Anjou, fighting to put her son on the throne. Stannis and Renly sit where George, Duke of Clarence, and Richard III sit, and Tyrion might be a Richard III too. They leave open whether that Richard is the historical man or the Shakespearean one. Syrett’s claim is that Martin is using the literary interpretation of the history more than the events, particularly Shakespeare. Maurice Druon’s The Accursed Kings (Les Rois Maudits) is the other precedent Sandbrook brings in. He tried them, found them thin, and notes that Druon himself thought them rubbish and wrote them for money. Syrett respects the motive. He then comes back to Shakespeare: Cersei hangs over the book as Lady Macbeth, and she adds a reign built on violence that cannot be stable. The Night’s Watch has three further precedents, given as a list rather than a proof. Sandbrook names the military orders of the Crusades and the French Foreign Legion’s use of convicts. Syrett adds the Black Watch policing the Highlands. Hadrian’s Wall is the one Martin stood on in the 1980s, imagining a Roman looking north.

Context

How they read it, and the life

Syrett saw the television series before it was the phenomenon, then read the books over lockdown, and liked them more once she could separate them from the screen. Vaes Dothrak, in particular, is a vast city in the book and does not survive the adaptation. The book is not comforting and not easy. Sandbrook saw the first series, decided he would never read ‘these terrible books’, loitered over them in station bookshops, and then read through the night. His interest peaked at about the third book and fell as the cast grew. She had the same experience: you wait through chapters to get back to the people you want. He calls that a lesson in the discipline a writer needs, and parks the question of whether Martin has it.

The life is delivered across both of them. Martin was born on 20 September 1948 in Bayonne, New Jersey. His mother’s family had been rich and lost the money in the Depression. In 1953 the family moved into public housing. The world was a small round of streets, and fantasy was the way out. He sold monster stories to other children for pennies, then wrote superheroes, and came to Tolkien in the mid-1960s, when a pirated American paperback of The Lord of the Rings went round the country and Tolkien got no royalties. It blew his mind. He was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, taught, and by the end of the 1970s was a full-time writer of science fiction and fantasy, known inside that world and not outside it. In the 1980s he worked in television, including a revival of The Twilight Zone. There is a vampire novel, set on the Mississippi, which Syrett wants him to come and talk about. The episode does not give it a title.

The book began as an image, in 1991, which he thought might be a short story: a boy watches a beheading and finds direwolf pups in the snow. Martin’s line, as they report it: ‘When I began, I didn’t know what the hell I had.’ He then had to invent the world that would justify the picture. The map came that summer and kept expanding. In 1996 the novel had a following and good reviews, and some reviewers already said there were too many names. The Daenerys chapters were also published as a novella. Sandbrook calls that strand a portal fantasy: an outsider, sold to the horse lords, through whose eyes the reader sees a country she does not know. He puts the sales at something getting on for a hundred million books, ninety million, something like that. The television series, from 2011, made Martin famous.

The story a stranger needs

Ned Stark, honourable, humourless, and incorruptible, is asked south to be Hand of the King, the king’s chief minister, after Jon Arryn dies. King’s Landing is a court of rumours. His wife, Catelyn, seizes Tyrion. Ned discovers that Cersei’s children are not Robert’s, warns her, and is too slow and too merciful. Bran is thrown from a tower by Jaime after seeing the twins together. The reader knows this. The characters do not. Daenerys, fourteen, is sold to the Dothraki lord Khal Drogo. The book ends with the possibility of dragons returning. Jon is at the Wall, which is where the supernatural is allowed to be real. Westeros on the map resembles Britain. The world is fuller than the television version: more houses, more sigils, a deep past of the First Men and the Children of the Forest, told as rumour rather than as fact.

War, and the 1990s

Syrett thinks the medieval surface is the Horrible Histories version: blood, rape, brutality, and dirt, the most popular telling rather than the economy or the ideas. Sandbrook agrees it is a grim Middle Ages. High ideals are punctured. Economics are missing, which Martin admits. Scholars and philosophers are missing. The same gaps are in Tolkien. The violence is where they argue. She says Martin, who objected to Vietnam, thinks he is showing war as it is, not as the songs have it. Sandbrook thinks it is psychologically odd that Tolkien, who fought on the Somme, wrote the idealistic book, and that Martin, who did not fight, dwells on the violence and especially the sexual violence. She thinks he goes too far, and her reason is generational: the men who had been in the trenches did not lean into the pain. He calls it a voyeurism, not quite a self-indulgence. He ties the burning villages to the years Martin was writing, 1991 to 1996, when Bosnia was on the news every night and Rwanda was happening at the same time: political decisions visited on people who do not understand them. She answers that a man who objects to war would say he is telling the truth, not lingering. The wedding of a fourteen-year-old is a public scene of sex and of killing, and Martin would say that is what conquest looks like.

The prose

The prose is Sandbrook’s subject, and he does not mean the judgement as an insult. It is unremarkable and workmanlike, which is how a popular book lets the plot through. You do not have to write like Dickens or Nabokov. The method, which Syrett names, is limited third person: an outside narrator who can see the thoughts of only one person in a chapter. This book has seven such viewpoints, mostly Starks and mostly nobles, which is why the peasants have no inner life. He calls them NPCs. The prologue, inside a low-born man of the Night’s Watch, is the exception. The same device makes people unreliable. Jorah Mormont, riding with Daenerys, thinks Ned a harsh man. The reader, who has been inside Ned’s head, thinks him decent. Past events acquire more than one telling. Sandbrook says that is how a historian wants political memory to work. The chivalric diction sits in the middle: not modern, and not the fake medieval of a Victorian romance. Sansa’s tournament is the same lesson as Lady. The Mountain drives a lance through a knight’s throat. The Hound then tells her that his brother held his face in a fire. The romance language is what the children have been raised on. The book keeps showing them the thing itself.

The scores, the ending on screen, and the casting

Syrett gives it eight. In this book it is cohesive. She was riveted, including on the reread. She also thinks he has lost the plot, and that the book is undisciplined. Sandbrook gives it eight as well, and says her mark is boring because he is going to match it. It is not high literature, and it does not pretend to be. He could not put it down the first time, and the reread was better than he had feared. He gave it to his son Arthur, who loved the first three books and faded, as he had, when the cast multiplied. That repetition is the case study: an author losing control of his material.

On the television ending they disagree, and the disagreement is the illustration. Sandbrook thinks Daenerys’s turn is consistent with the books. People who hated it had not been watching: the ruthlessness toward the slavers was already there, and what had been done to her would have had an effect. He liked it. Syrett thinks the last season is paced absurdly. The Others are destroyed in a night. Arya kills the Night King, a figure she has no connection to, while Jon was the one built for that meeting. She calls Bran on the throne a madness. Sandbrook adds that no one cares about Bran. He had already told her that he would have had Arya kill Cersei and Jaime, and Jon Snow make that kill instead. She says the risk, for Martin as well, is starting to write for the crowd. He feels sorry for the showrunners.

If Martin could finish, Sandbrook would give the throne to Stannis: a proven soldier and a capable governor, dead or not. She says Stannis is Tiberius, and she does not like Tiberius. She wants Young Griff, a claimant brought in only in the last published book, because she had her heart broken too often to keep betting on the early men. He thinks that introduction was already a sign the series could not be gathered. He casts her as a Tyrell, at home in Highgarden. She casts him as Tyrion.

Related

• Dominic Sandbrook — co-host
• Tabitha Syrett — co-host