The author of A Game of Thrones eschews the "Disneyland Middle Ages" to describe worlds of inequality and violence.
George RR Martin, photo Karolina Webb
“How many characters? I really don’t know.” George RR Martin is telling me how he avoids getting lost in his own head. I’d imagined he would have a master list somewhere, or a concordance, perhaps, tracking the named characters in his fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire. I’d imagined this because the alternatives – that he relies on memory, or riffles back through all the books checking his facts whenever he wants to reintroduce someone – seemed clearly ridiculous. When I tried making my own list, so I could casually show off my knowledge of his world, I lost track at 237.
“I have charts of all the different houses and character groups, but no, I’ve never numbered or counted them. I do know that Roy Dotrice, who does the audio books, made it into the Guinness World Records for the number of distinctive voices he does. They credit him with something like 242. And Roy, when he told me about this, was laughing, saying they didn’t count nearly all of them … he thinks there are twice that many. And that was just for the first book, before the story gets complicated. So yes, there are a lot of characters.”
That first, not-yet-complicated book is A Game of Thrones, recently shorn of its indefinite article and adapted for TV as the HBO show Game of Thrones. (Dotrice of the many voices was to appear in season one, but had to withdraw for health reasons; he’s been recast as one of the many new characters slated to turn up in season two, which will retain the same series title, but be based on the second Ice and Fire book, A Clash of Kings.) Martin began work on the book series 20 years ago, ironically enough in response to the frustrations of writing for television. He had just spent most of a decade in Hollywood, working on shows like Beauty and the Beast and the short-lived 1980s revival of The Twilight Zone.
“It was 10 years of being told my script was too long and my script was too expensive, and in the end I said, ‘The hell with this, I’m returning to prose and I’m going to write a story that’s just as big as I want to make it, and I’m going to have castles and battles and dragons and as many characters as I like. There will be no budget, there will be no running time. If I can describe it I can have it.’” Part of his deal with HBO is hands-on involvement with scripting; he writes one episode per season. The old skills came back quickly enough – “The screenwriting software’s changed, but apart from that it’s like riding a bicycle, or sex” – as did the old desire to go beyond the possible.
“HBO spares no expense, mind you, they’re a great outfit to work for. But this is television, we don’t have Peter Jackson money. I had this one sequence … a montage where we’d go to seven different castles and see men setting out for war, climbing into their ships or saddling their horses, riding over mountain and dale. It was very dramatic, it would have been a very cool sequence. It would have cost more than our budget for the entire season.”
Martin’s writing career stretches back to the early 1970s, when his short stories first began to appear in American science fiction magazines. His first novel came out in 1977, the same year American editor Lester del Rey founded his imprint, Del Rey Books: a red letter date in the history of genre fiction. Del Rey was the first person of any influence in publishing to believe the success of The Lord of the Rings was not a one-off, unrepeatable event. He set an explicit policy of encouraging writers to take JRR Tolkien as a model; Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara, which reproduces the basic plot of The Lord of the Rings point for point, was the first del Rey bestseller.
So the pallid modern phenomenon of Tolkien imitation dates from the exact time Martin began his career as a novelist, and by the time he began work on A Song of Ice and Fire it had become a dominant feature of a publishing category that had hardly existed 20 years earlier. When he set himself to write the fantasy epic of his no-budget-constraint dreams, one of Martin’s goals was to show the world what was wrong with the Tolkien clone industry.
“I mean, I love Tolkien. I return to his works periodically, every few years. Boromir is one of my favourite characters in fiction.” (Having Sean Bean – Boromir in the Jackson films – play Ned Stark, the first season’s main tent-pole role, was one of Martin’s two bedrock casting requests when he first sat down to discuss the series with HBO. The other was Peter Dinklage, who won an Emmy for playing Tyrion, the brilliant, embittered youngest son of House Lannister, the Starks’ enemies.)
“But a lot of the writers who followed Tolkien, particularly the writers of the 70s and 80s who were working in the Tolkien tradition, imitated his forms, but they lost the power and the truth of his world, because they cleaned it up too much. So many of those books used to be set in the Disneyland Middle Ages. You had the trappings, you had knights and princesses and castles and all of this stuff, but without any real feeling for the class structure, the inequities of such a society, the violence of such a society. I wanted something that had the wonder and strangeness of the best fantasy, but with the solid grounding of the best historical fiction. A hybrid that would be something new and different.”
The historical half of Martin’s hybrid requires sharply reining in the fantasy half, which has the fortuitous side effect of limiting his story’s demands on HBO’s effects budget. “If you want to see what our medieval period looked like to the people who were living in it, you have to keep the magic relatively subtle, relatively unreliable, and then you get a situation that is to my mind realistic. I mean, we know that there was no magic in our ancestors’ world. But they sure didn’t.”
Its uncommon blend of romanticism and harsh realism won A Game of Thrones a modest but enthusiastic initial following, which swelled when A Clash of Kings came out two years later, and swelled again with A Storm of Swords two years after that. The books had swelled as well; A Storm of Swords had to be published in two volumes, subtitled Steel and Snow and Blood and Gold respectively, to accommodate its 1200-plus pages.
Peter Dinklage in Game of Thrones
Gargantuan page counts and correspondingly sprawling stories are the norm in this genre, as you might gather from the name; if you want a sophisticated discussion of the upper limits of book-binding technology, get a few epic fantasy writers together. But Martin’s story was not just getting long, it was also gaining fractal depth, as minor characters from the first volume grew into major characters and acquired their own attendant minor characters, who in turn grew into major characters, bringing whole tribes of new minor characters with them. This was a feature, not a bug; part of his plan from the start had been for readers not necessarily to know which characters would be important in the long run, or even which of the seemingly pivotal characters would survive. His plan was also not to have too much of a plan. This was beginning to present difficulties.
“I’ve never been a writer who outlines everything in the beginning and then just follows the outline. Some writers can work that way. I’ve never worked that way. I know my general destination, but there’s a certain act of discovery in the actual writing of the chapters, and sometimes it leads you in unexpected directions. To my mind, that’s where a story comes alive, where you get the richness. You don’t just follow a preprogrammed dance. But there is a level of complexity where feeling your way does become more of a challenge.”
He found himself doing more and more rewriting. He would rip finished chapters apart and reconfigure them into two chapters; he would decide a scene might work better from the viewpoint of a different character; he would rewrite it that way and then change his mind and restore the original version. The fourth book, A Feast for Crows, was not ready in time for his usual two-years-from-the-last-one publication date. Meanwhile, the increasing popularity of the series was translating into more and more work answering fan letters, talking to media, fielding adaptation offers and so forth.
“I guess like many writers who reach a certain level of success I had to realise that I couldn’t do it all myself any more. It was difficult to let go. I’d run my business myself for decades.” He eventually hired an assistant, but A Feast for Crows was delayed another year, and then another. The page count kept growing. He decided to split the book in two so that it only followed half the characters, and to devote the next volume to the other half. It appeared in 2005, three years late, accompanied by an apologetic author’s note and an afterword announcing that “all the rest of the characters you love or love to hate will be along next year (I devoutly hope)”. This afterword, Martin ruefully concedes, was not well judged.
A Dance with Dragons, the promised fifth volume, was finally published earlier this year, after several false-dawn announcements in the intervening years to the effect that it was very nearly finished. In the meantime, the George RR Martin fan wars had got under way. A small but vocal splinter group of the by-now enormous online Martin fandom had redefined itself as Martin sceptics, and taken to excoriating him and his more numerous defenders for the perceived weaknesses of A Feast for Crows and the continued non-appearance of A Dance with Dragons.
“It took me aback at first. By now, it’s been going on for years, so I’m kind of used to it. But in the beginning it was like, ‘They say they’re my fans! They’re writing me these nasty letters and these ugly messages on my blog!’ It’s been an illustration to me of that old cliché that there’s a thin line between love and hate.” A few years before A Dance with Dragons appeared, Neil Gaiman, having been urged by one of his own fans to chivvy his embattled colleague towards the earliest possible publication date, famously defended Martin with the words, “George RR Martin is not your bitch.”
A Dance with Dragons is not, it should be noted, the last book in the series. It ends, as the books tend to, on multiple cliffhangers. So Martin is now in the position of writing the next and penultimate volume, The Winds of Winter (probably penultimate: “If I can finish in seven books, there’ll be a certain elegance to it, and that’s my current plan; but the story makes its own demands.”) while HBO chews its way through the earlier books towards him.
A few things will slow them down, he points out. “I think the third book they’re going to have to divide into two seasons, there’s no way they get it into 10 hours; and Dance is a monster, that’s two seasons as well, assuming we get that far. I mean we’ll cross those bridges when we get to them; right now they’re still wrapping the second season, the cast’s on their way to Reykjavik as I talk to you.
“But if it all goes well and we get to go all the way, I think I’ll finish before they catch me. I’ve got a considerable lead right now. I’m writing as fast as I can.”
A DANCE WITH DRAGONS, by George RR Martin (Harper Voyager, $49.99); GAME OF THRONES screens Monday night on Sky’s SoHo channel.