Friday, 25 January 2008
(Books, Sci-fi / Fantasy) Dan Hemmens on George R R Martin, with obligatory allusions to JK Rowling
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As ever, contains spoilers. Just generally.
About four years ago, I was a huge fan of George R R Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series. About three years ago, I was a pretty big fan of George R R Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series. About two years ago A Feast for Crows - the fourth volume in Martin's planned "Trilogy" came out, and I sort of went off him overnight.
What I and a lot of people I know loved about ASoIaF was that it presented a medieval world which genuinely felt like a medieval world. It was hard and violent and really, really horrible. And major characters died all the damned time. This last factor particularly appealed to me, because it was a real wake up call to be casually reading through a series and then to suddenly realise that no, that guy you've been reading about for the past 437 pages really has just been killed with pretty much no warning.
The entire series, then, is shot through with this stinging sense of mortality. You realise that pretty much anybody can get killed at pretty much any time. Neither youth nor skill, age nor treachery present any defence against the cruel edge of Martin's axe.
This is extremely cool, but it leads to two problems.
The first problem with this situation is that it is, of course, an illusion. It's a very good illusion, but it's an illusion none the less. The death of Ned Stark early in the series is genuinely shocking, and it establishes the idea that not even viewpoint characters are safe. Martin pulls a bait and switch - letting you think that Ned will go to the Wall and build on his relationship with Jon Snow, when in fact he's just going to get killed. This initial sacrifice (for want of a better term) convinces the reader that "nobody is safe". In fact they obviously are. If you think about the series as a whole it's fairly obvious that there are some characters - Danaerys, Jon Snow (who - according to the most plausible fan theory - will probably turn out to be the son of Lyanna Stark and Raegar Targaryen and become King of Westeros) actually do have plot protection. Arya, similarly does an awful lot of crap which should by all logic and reason have got her killed, but survives because she blatantly had to live long enough to become a Terrifying Ninja Assassin.
Of course this, in itself isn't a problem. Fiction is, by its nature, illusion and if an author can make the audience believe that Jon Snow has a chance of dying (even if a moment's reason and reflection would tell you that of course he won't) then the book succeeds.
It wasn't until halfway through the "fourth" book in the series (it could be the fifth, depending on whether you count A Storm of Swords as one volume or two) that I realised the second problem with this setup, which is odd because it's really the most obvious one. Between the enormous death rate and Martin's questionable decision to divide his fourth-slash-fifth volume into two separate books, each taking place on different continents, I suddenly came to the realisation that I no longer actually cared about any of the characters I was reading about. I don't mean that I'd shut myself off in an attempt to protect myself from the emotional wrench when they died. I mean I just plain didn't care about them. I cared about Ned Stark's honour and Sandor Clegane's cynicism, I cared about Rob's campaign in the North and about mad king Joffrey's callous whims in the south. I even cared about poor pathetic Theon Greyjoy and his pyrrhic victory against Winterfell. By A Feast for Crows, however, I found that any character I was actually interested in reading about was either (a) dead or (b) not appearing in this volume.
To be fair to the earlier volumes in the series, this is totally not a problem in books 1-3. The sheer weight of events carries you along and as long as you've got the stomach for it, it works really well. The reason it works, however, is because the series has an absolutely huge ensemble cast. The actual arcs of most characters are rather short and quite simple - it's the interaction between them that gives the story its scope.
In my earlier articles on Harry Potter I complained that the "deaths" in the series were essentially meaningless, falling only on pointless minor characters, or else on the sorts of people who always die in that sort of story (wise old mentors, people who the Hero is really, really looking forward to spending time with when This Is All Over). I and others have complained bitterly that Ron, Harry, Hermione and Ginny all make it through the story unharmed. But actually it's sort of inevitable. Martin can get away with killing his major characters because he has millions of the buggers. Other authors really can't kill their protagonists until the end of the story, because if they do ... well that's the end of the story anyway. Of course Rowling doesn't kill any of her main characters, or even particularly inconvenience them, and it's not as if - say - Ron actually does anything useful in the book anyway.
Zooming out for a moment, to some directionless theorising about books in general, I think it might be important to draw the distinction between - for want of a better term - character-based and events-based storytelling. Martin writes events-based books. A Song of Ice and Fire is about Westeros and its kings, far more than it's about the people who live there. His characters are painted in broad strokes - sometimes in more than one set of broad strokes, granted - but they aren't actually particularly complex. This also allows him to casually slaughter them, because when you get right down to it, it isn't their story.
A lot of novels, though, simply aren't like that, and that gives you terrible problems. If you're actually writing about a character, more than a particular time and place, then killing that character off is obviously pointless. It's their story, when they die the story is over.
Of course the problem is that character-based stories are frequently trying to be about grand events (like Potter and the War in the Wizarding World) while even highly events-based stories need some variety of character arc to keep them interesting. Potter fell down for me because its "horrors of war" never felt real, and Martin falls down for me because his "horrors of war" have completely eaten his narrative. Book five of A Song of Ice and Fire contains plenty of historically accurate descriptions of a world in the grips of civil war. It contains very little in the way of interesting arcs, either for characters or for the world.
Compare, for example, the death of Ned Stark and the death of Brienne the Beauty. Now Brienne was actually one of my favourite characters in the series - I like the fact that the one female fighter in the series was in no way hot, and was generally less effective than male knights with a similar level of experience. But her arc in A Feast for Crows was just plain boring. She spends the entire book looking for Sansa, when we already know exactly where she is. She then gets captured by the Lightning Lord, and (ironically) condemned to death by zombie!Catelyn. When Ned Stark died it was shocking, because it actually mattered. If he had survived it would probably have changed the entire course of events in the Seven Kingdoms. Brienne, though, died halfway through a totally pointless quest that we knew was doomed to failure.
As you may be able to tell from the title of this article, I do think that there's a paradox at work here. Characters in fantasy regularly face physical danger. If they face lasting consequences (like getting killed) as a result of this danger, then you have effectively written a character out of your narrative. If they don't, then you are going to progressively dilute the sense of danger.
If you go the Martin route, you essentially wind up falling foul of Theseus' Ship. You fast wind up with a situation where none of the elements of the original story actually remain. A Game of Thrones was, primarily, about Ned Stark coming south to become King's Hand and stumbling upon the conspiracy to hide the fact that Joffrey wasn't actually the son of Robert Baratheon. That story was nicely wrapped up, and it led into a completely different story about a civil war. That story was slightly less nicely wrapped up and led into yet another story about broadly the same civil war, but with more supernatural elements. As the series progresses it becomes less of a story and more of a sequence of events with no resolution in sight.
I'm wondering if this is inevitable. And actually I think it is. The thing about Martin is that he actually does what a lot of writers claim that they do - he portrays the horrors of war in unflinching detail, and shows that death is often cruel, arbitrary and (rarest of all in fiction) inconvenient. It stands up wonderfully against people like JK Rowling and Joss Whedon, who harp on and on about how important it is that people die in their series, but won't kill somebody off if it will compromise a romantic subplot. Of course the reason Martin's decisions are so admirable is that they come with a heavy, heavy price. If you kill the characters who your narrative actually revolves around, you wind up with a story where character is a secondary concern, and that's something I have less and less time for nowadays, particularly in fantasy.
There are a whole lot of good reasons not to write like George R R Martin. If you kill off all your interesting characters, you get left with dull characters. If you show the true horror of war, you wind up being grim and, in places, plain boring. But if you choose not to write like Martin, for the love of God stop pretending that you are. Don't just kill a sympathetic but ultimately unimportant character and tell me that you're confronting the audience with the reality of bereavement.
About four years ago, I was a huge fan of George R R Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series. About three years ago, I was a pretty big fan of George R R Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series. About two years ago A Feast for Crows - the fourth volume in Martin's planned "Trilogy" came out, and I sort of went off him overnight.
What I and a lot of people I know loved about ASoIaF was that it presented a medieval world which genuinely felt like a medieval world. It was hard and violent and really, really horrible. And major characters died all the damned time. This last factor particularly appealed to me, because it was a real wake up call to be casually reading through a series and then to suddenly realise that no, that guy you've been reading about for the past 437 pages really has just been killed with pretty much no warning.
The entire series, then, is shot through with this stinging sense of mortality. You realise that pretty much anybody can get killed at pretty much any time. Neither youth nor skill, age nor treachery present any defence against the cruel edge of Martin's axe.
This is extremely cool, but it leads to two problems.
The first problem with this situation is that it is, of course, an illusion. It's a very good illusion, but it's an illusion none the less. The death of Ned Stark early in the series is genuinely shocking, and it establishes the idea that not even viewpoint characters are safe. Martin pulls a bait and switch - letting you think that Ned will go to the Wall and build on his relationship with Jon Snow, when in fact he's just going to get killed. This initial sacrifice (for want of a better term) convinces the reader that "nobody is safe". In fact they obviously are. If you think about the series as a whole it's fairly obvious that there are some characters - Danaerys, Jon Snow (who - according to the most plausible fan theory - will probably turn out to be the son of Lyanna Stark and Raegar Targaryen and become King of Westeros) actually do have plot protection. Arya, similarly does an awful lot of crap which should by all logic and reason have got her killed, but survives because she blatantly had to live long enough to become a Terrifying Ninja Assassin.
Of course this, in itself isn't a problem. Fiction is, by its nature, illusion and if an author can make the audience believe that Jon Snow has a chance of dying (even if a moment's reason and reflection would tell you that of course he won't) then the book succeeds.
It wasn't until halfway through the "fourth" book in the series (it could be the fifth, depending on whether you count A Storm of Swords as one volume or two) that I realised the second problem with this setup, which is odd because it's really the most obvious one. Between the enormous death rate and Martin's questionable decision to divide his fourth-slash-fifth volume into two separate books, each taking place on different continents, I suddenly came to the realisation that I no longer actually cared about any of the characters I was reading about. I don't mean that I'd shut myself off in an attempt to protect myself from the emotional wrench when they died. I mean I just plain didn't care about them. I cared about Ned Stark's honour and Sandor Clegane's cynicism, I cared about Rob's campaign in the North and about mad king Joffrey's callous whims in the south. I even cared about poor pathetic Theon Greyjoy and his pyrrhic victory against Winterfell. By A Feast for Crows, however, I found that any character I was actually interested in reading about was either (a) dead or (b) not appearing in this volume.
To be fair to the earlier volumes in the series, this is totally not a problem in books 1-3. The sheer weight of events carries you along and as long as you've got the stomach for it, it works really well. The reason it works, however, is because the series has an absolutely huge ensemble cast. The actual arcs of most characters are rather short and quite simple - it's the interaction between them that gives the story its scope.
In my earlier articles on Harry Potter I complained that the "deaths" in the series were essentially meaningless, falling only on pointless minor characters, or else on the sorts of people who always die in that sort of story (wise old mentors, people who the Hero is really, really looking forward to spending time with when This Is All Over). I and others have complained bitterly that Ron, Harry, Hermione and Ginny all make it through the story unharmed. But actually it's sort of inevitable. Martin can get away with killing his major characters because he has millions of the buggers. Other authors really can't kill their protagonists until the end of the story, because if they do ... well that's the end of the story anyway. Of course Rowling doesn't kill any of her main characters, or even particularly inconvenience them, and it's not as if - say - Ron actually does anything useful in the book anyway.
Zooming out for a moment, to some directionless theorising about books in general, I think it might be important to draw the distinction between - for want of a better term - character-based and events-based storytelling. Martin writes events-based books. A Song of Ice and Fire is about Westeros and its kings, far more than it's about the people who live there. His characters are painted in broad strokes - sometimes in more than one set of broad strokes, granted - but they aren't actually particularly complex. This also allows him to casually slaughter them, because when you get right down to it, it isn't their story.
A lot of novels, though, simply aren't like that, and that gives you terrible problems. If you're actually writing about a character, more than a particular time and place, then killing that character off is obviously pointless. It's their story, when they die the story is over.
Of course the problem is that character-based stories are frequently trying to be about grand events (like Potter and the War in the Wizarding World) while even highly events-based stories need some variety of character arc to keep them interesting. Potter fell down for me because its "horrors of war" never felt real, and Martin falls down for me because his "horrors of war" have completely eaten his narrative. Book five of A Song of Ice and Fire contains plenty of historically accurate descriptions of a world in the grips of civil war. It contains very little in the way of interesting arcs, either for characters or for the world.
Compare, for example, the death of Ned Stark and the death of Brienne the Beauty. Now Brienne was actually one of my favourite characters in the series - I like the fact that the one female fighter in the series was in no way hot, and was generally less effective than male knights with a similar level of experience. But her arc in A Feast for Crows was just plain boring. She spends the entire book looking for Sansa, when we already know exactly where she is. She then gets captured by the Lightning Lord, and (ironically) condemned to death by zombie!Catelyn. When Ned Stark died it was shocking, because it actually mattered. If he had survived it would probably have changed the entire course of events in the Seven Kingdoms. Brienne, though, died halfway through a totally pointless quest that we knew was doomed to failure.
As you may be able to tell from the title of this article, I do think that there's a paradox at work here. Characters in fantasy regularly face physical danger. If they face lasting consequences (like getting killed) as a result of this danger, then you have effectively written a character out of your narrative. If they don't, then you are going to progressively dilute the sense of danger.
If you go the Martin route, you essentially wind up falling foul of Theseus' Ship. You fast wind up with a situation where none of the elements of the original story actually remain. A Game of Thrones was, primarily, about Ned Stark coming south to become King's Hand and stumbling upon the conspiracy to hide the fact that Joffrey wasn't actually the son of Robert Baratheon. That story was nicely wrapped up, and it led into a completely different story about a civil war. That story was slightly less nicely wrapped up and led into yet another story about broadly the same civil war, but with more supernatural elements. As the series progresses it becomes less of a story and more of a sequence of events with no resolution in sight.
I'm wondering if this is inevitable. And actually I think it is. The thing about Martin is that he actually does what a lot of writers claim that they do - he portrays the horrors of war in unflinching detail, and shows that death is often cruel, arbitrary and (rarest of all in fiction) inconvenient. It stands up wonderfully against people like JK Rowling and Joss Whedon, who harp on and on about how important it is that people die in their series, but won't kill somebody off if it will compromise a romantic subplot. Of course the reason Martin's decisions are so admirable is that they come with a heavy, heavy price. If you kill the characters who your narrative actually revolves around, you wind up with a story where character is a secondary concern, and that's something I have less and less time for nowadays, particularly in fantasy.
There are a whole lot of good reasons not to write like George R R Martin. If you kill off all your interesting characters, you get left with dull characters. If you show the true horror of war, you wind up being grim and, in places, plain boring. But if you choose not to write like Martin, for the love of God stop pretending that you are. Don't just kill a sympathetic but ultimately unimportant character and tell me that you're confronting the audience with the reality of bereavement.
~
Of course, the problem with writing about a series of events and trying to make them feel like history is that history never stops. Sure, you can write about the Wars of the Roses, but there'll be all sorts of plot strands which won't get tied up for most of the Tudor period, which will throw up problems which don't get sorted until the Civil War, which has interesting ramifications for the Georgian period, which sets the tone for the Victorian era, which...
And yes, it seems to be really hard for authors to find a balance between telling a story about characters and a history about someplace. It seems to me that character stories can't be very long unless they acknowledge that that's what they're about-- I forgive Lois Bujold every time Miles Miraculously Pulls Through because, well, the Vorkosigan series has him at its center, and she's unapologetic about it. And you almost *have* to focus in as an author, because there's nothing more boring than history with no connection to the people experiencing its events. But I think that owning the degree of focus on your characters is the best way to go-- if Martin was like, I'm writing a history, guys, then maybe it would be easier to read the series and take in the deaths of main characters.
And the thing that Stapledon understood was that creating imaginary histories is an intellectual exercise, and an exercise which is almost entirely different from writing a story. (For a start, you're focusing more on societies and nations than individuals and characters). Martin, on the other hand, is writing an imaginary history using the same techniques he uses to write novels, and it only works as long as we're fooled into thinking it actually is a story.
I read the series in paperback, so I read A Storm of Swords in two volumes, and as a result I tend to think of Feast for Crows as book Five.
I've been giving this a lot of thought myself. People keep trotting out the "but death *is* arbitrary" line in response to all the pointless, arbitrary, cheap deaths in things like Buffy, Serenity, Harry Potter and Six Feet Under.
Of course in a sense they're right, but I think it's massively important to distinguish between something that is pointless and arbitrary, and something that explores the ways in which a thing can be pointless and arbitrary.
Something Martin does very *well* is create a sense of the arbitrary, it's something he puts a lot of work into. People seem to think that portraying the essentially arbitrary and unfair nature of death is as easy as killing off random characters, and it isn't. Meaninglessness, I think, needs to be explored just as carefully as meaning. If you want to show that sometimes death is pointless and ignoble and doesn't achieve anything then you actually have to show all the things it doesn't achieve. Rowling is really bad at this, because she presents the battle against Voldemort as something totally worth dying over, but at the same time seems to want to confront the injustice of war, and you can't confront the injustice of a war when said war absolutely just and necessary.
There might be an article in this actually - Meaning in the Meaningless: the Careful Consideration of the Arbitrary.