"All men must die."
The Game of Thrones
The bad news is that I think I was wrong. All evidence seems to indicate that the adaptation is a complete success, a success which I think can be attributed primarily to the casting. Peter Dinklage has become the most noteworthy breakout star from TGOT – the role of Tyrion Lannister might almost have been written with him in mind, and I have to wonder how he feels about the opportunity to play a character who opens the book (no pun intended) into the difficulties of life as a dwarf.
The good news is that thanks to Blu-ray and the Internet, it will be fairly easy to catch up with the episodes to date, although I doubt that I’ll be doing a four season marathon. After all, the adaptation has stayed fairly close to the books, so I won’t have that desperate desire to find out what happens next that a new viewer would usually have.
However, I gather that viewers who had not read the books have been shocked, if not horrified, by the twists and turns of Martin’s plotline. When the TV series began and people were telling me that they were watching and enjoying it, I gave the same advice to everyone: “Don’t get really fond of anybody.”
The body count in Game of Thrones is astonishing: Martin sets the stage with an extensive cast of players, but no one – NO ONE – is safe. The plethora of characters presents a target-rich environment, and Martin ruthlessly removes pieces from the board as he sees fit.
This is a deliberate strategy on his part. Martin makes it clear that the conflict in Westeros is merciless, and those who do not win will die. The heroes are not invulnerable, nor are the villains, and simply because a character has been an active participant for four of the novels in no way guarantees that they’ll survive the fifth book.
On one hand, this is a brilliant approach. The reader (or viewer) can never be complacent. In the majority of fiction, the hero may be placed in harm’s way, but everyone realizes that ultimately they will triumph over adversity. In The Game of Thrones, you are constantly on the edge of your seat because there are no guarantees that anyone will survive.
On the other hand, the down side of this approach is that it makes it a bit of a struggle to follow the story. Generally in fiction, one observes a protagonist experiencing conflict (generally referred to as plot). I have no idea who the protagonist is in The Game of Thrones, and as such, reading the books feels like reading a sequence of disconnected vignettes. A character will be dealt with in excruciating detail for two hundred pages and then get their head cut off. As a reader, you end up feeling sort of lost, and perhaps a little bitter that you had invested so much in a character who turned out to be disposable.*
And ultimately, this may be the downfall of both the books and the adaptation. Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time series is a similar sort of epic fantasy tale, albeit with a higher survival rate on the part of the cast. The series spans a daunting 14 books, but after the sixth or seventh novel, Jordan's treatment of the characters was such that he began to lose my interest, to the extent that I no longer cared as to their ultimate fates. I stopped buying the books, and put the ones that I did own down in the laundry room of my building in hopes that they would end up in a good home.
I don't think that George R. R. Martin will lose my interest in the same way, but he's only five novels in with apparently another three to go, and quite frankly there were a couple of times in the fifth book where my reaction was, "What, are you kidding me? Him too? And her as well?" Careful, George. After all, it's a two-way street. You're certainly allowed to treat your characters in whatever fashion you choose - and we're allowed to stop reading about it. Or watching.
- Sid
