Has fantasy fiction, for decades a thriving literary
genre, finally taken its place in the literary mainstream? It hardly needs bien
pensant “literary” admirers: the most successful fantasy novelists have not
only their sales figures to encourage them, but also the host of companion
volumes, analytical websites, conferences and online commentaries that
characterise fantasy fandom. It is a genre that has always generated critical
expertise, and fantasy novelists have long been in a dialogue with their readers
that other novelists must envy (witness the attention given to every tweet made
by Neil Gaiman to his 2.2 million followers). Fantasy’s devotees must feel
rueful as the critics now rush to declare their addiction to HBO’s Game of Thrones – adapted from George RR Martin’s
multi-volume fantasy saga A
Song of Ice and Fire, and about to enter series five – or record their
admiration of Terry Pratchett, as part of theoverwhelming
response to his recent death. The debt to fantasy fiction of The Buried Giant, the new
novel by one of Britain’s leading literary novelists, Kazuo
Ishiguro, must seem overdue vindication of the genre.
Ishiguro has spoken
in the past few weeks of
how the barrier between this once-disdained brand of fiction and “serious”
novels is breaking down. If this is true, New Jersey-born George RR Martin has
surely led the charge. Martin is the reigning laureate of fantasy fiction. His
ongoing sequence of novels A
Song of Ice and Fire (the
first book of which gives its title to Game
of Thrones) began appearing in 1996 and now comprises five long books
(with two more promised). He has a host of fans who resent the low status
accorded to their favoured genre and some distinguished admirers who rather
agree. One proponent of Martin’s merits, accomplished literary novelist John
Lanchester, has
openly invited literary
snobs to cross that apparently “unbridgeable crevasse” between the readership
of fantasy and “the wider literate public”. Discussing the delights of Martin’s
fantasy roman fleuve, Lanchester has celebrated not only its creation of a
richly imagined world, but the prevailing “sense of unsafety and uncertainty”
of that world.
Any connoisseur of narrative drive who crosses that divide will
surely be caught up by the sheer energy and inventiveness of Martin’s
multi-viewpoint story. His is a peculiarly unidealising variant of AU
(alternate universe) fiction. In the land of Westeros, a chivalric yet brutal
pre-industrial world, warring kinship groups struggle for power. In the
adjacent land of Essos – more primitive, even more thoroughly Hobbesian – a
young woman descended from the ancient rulers of Westeros plots and struggles
to lay claim to the land from which she is exiled. JRR
Tolkien, who may not have invented AU fantasy but certainly was its
most influential exemplar, gave weight to his imagined world with invented
languages, legends, genealogies, poetry. Martin provides some of this, but
devotes most of his energies to convincing the reader of the entirely human
fears and ambitions of his leading characters. Tolkien gave us hobbits, orcs,
elves and dwarves. Martin deals in men and women.
Tolkien himself has not been entirely
cold-shouldered by serious critics. There is by now a substantial secondary
literature on his fiction that finds shelf space in many a university library.
Yet look closer and you will find much of it irritable at the exclusion of
their author from the academic canon. The
Lord of the Rings is
accepted by literary scholars as an important fact of cultural history, rather
than a great book. Or it is a spell you fall under for a while, but then wake
up from. Yet for many who go on to relish sophisticated literary novels, it is
an early, formative experience of fiction’s power to absorb us. No wonder that
when the BBC’s The Big Read conducted its poll of the nation’s
favourite book in 2003, The
Lord of the Rings was the
winner. It is the work that schools readers for later experiences of fiction.
For me, this was certainly the case. I
vividly remember one day, aged 14, climbing like a pilgrim the worn wooden
steps to Tolkien’s room in Merton college, Oxford in the company of his
grandson, who was a school friend. I was clutching my battered paperback copy
of The Lord of the Rings,
much reread. And there was the great man in his beautiful room, crowded
bookshelves up to the ceiling, a vision of lawns beyond. He sucked his pipe and
chatted benignly. I was encountering the most important writer in the world, as
it then seemed, though I was struck by the mismatch of this tweedy English
grandfather and his lofty Wagnerian creation. He was telling me of the physical
pleasure of writing. “Did I enjoy the sensation of using a really good ink
pen?” I could see why he might be asking this when he signed my copy of his
magnum opus: runic is the only word for the style of the inscription. Seeing
Professor Tolkien in situ suddenly made it obvious how bookish an endeavour it
was, this business of creating of an alternative world.
If The Lord of
the Rings satisfies the
other-world dreams of youth, A
Song of Ice and Fire is
emphatically fantasy for grownups, and not only because the sex and violence
are explicit. Martin’s leading characters mostly act on Machiavellian
principles. A Game of Thrones gets its title from a phrase the
characters sometimes apply to their amoral power struggles. “When you play the
game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground,” the vicious
Queen Cersei tells Eddard Stark, the nearest thing we have to a hero. “Why is
it always the innocents who suffer most, when you high lords play your game of
thrones?” asks the viperous courtier Varys in mock-distress. No narrative
providence protects the good. Indeed, no one is safe. Lanchester rightly revels
in what one might call Martin’s narrative audacity – that “sense of
instability” that comes when we do not know “who’s going to survive and who’s
going to be the next apparently principal character to be killed”. There is a
satisfying sense of design, yet you somehow cannot know what is going to
happen.
Martin is a reliably cold-eyed writer,
immune to sentimentality. Though narrative sympathy is recruited for one of the
warring aristocratic families, the gloomy Starks, the struggle itself is
political and military, rather than moral. Martin knows his Wars of the Roses
(and his Shakespeare history plays) and keeps slipping in fragments of a
backstory of usurpation that undermines even the status of the man who is
“rightful” monarch at the opening of the sequence. Regal power is just what
someone has taken. Fantasy often
has some aspect of idyll. Not Martin’s. For the lower orders in all the lands
he describes, there is mainly dirt, hunger and fear. For their rulers, the
solace of a few material comforts, but always the fear that these will be taken
forcibly from them.
Compared to The
Lord of the Rings, A
Song of Ice and Fire is morally complex and undecideable.
“No character is without moral ambiguity,” observes the critic and Martin
admirer Amanda Craig. There are no Aragorns or Gandalfs, with their
uncompromised nobility. Even the best of Martin’s characters can be ruthless or
vengeful or simply wrong. Tolkien’s Mordor was the home of all evil; orcs
embodied mere malice. Martin is more interested in the kinds of viciousness,
ambition and vengefulness that we recognise from human history. Human actions
are capricious; luck seems to play more of a part than any authorial desire to
fashion just conclusions. As in real history, outcomes are not foreordained.
Martin has said that he was influenced most in the composition of his saga by
Maurice Druon’s Les Rois Maudits, a
seven-volume fictional chronicle of the French dynastic wars of the middle
ages. Martin could, of course, write ripping historical fiction if he wished,
but by escaping real history he denies the reader any privilege of knowing what
is destined to take place.
The escape into a world that we are invited to dream up with the
novelist’s assistance is, of course, inherent to fantasy. The main assistance
is provided by the maps that preface every book in the series. This is how you
know you are beginning a work of fantasy fiction: you open the book to find an
apparently hand-drawn map of lands unknown to any previous atlas-maker. There
are rich materials for a fantasy-fiction quiz night. Who, the devotee might be
asked, offers a diagram of the city of Imardin and the land of Kyralia? A
country called the Land, featuring the plains of Ra, the forest of Salva
Gildenbourne and the Sunbirth sea? The lands of Midkemia and Kelewan? Or a
continent containing Arad Doman, Andor and Tarabon, girded by the Aryth ocean?
(See the end of this piece for answers.)
These novelistic cartographers are all
following Tolkien’s lead. Tolkien (a more talented draughtsman than most of his
imitators) provided the beautiful hand-inked maps that folded out of the
original three hardback volumes of The
Lord of the Rings – made
more pleasing still by the place names, inscribed in his own strange, archaic
handwriting. He was on to something. How many children have invented worlds by
making maps of them? Fantasy should interest us because it enacts in some
fundamental way the dream of all fiction: the creation of a new and singular
world in the telling of a story. Thus those maps. And thus, too, the
extraordinary length of most fantasy novels (which are often sequences). A Song of Ice and Fire dwarfs anything managed by Marcel
Proust or Anthony Powell. Does a fan also have time for Robert
Jordan’s 14-volume fantasy sequence The Wheel of Time? And
Stephen R Donaldson’s 10-book Chronicles
of Thomas Covenant? Yes, of course. Copiousness is the desired effect. We
are being taken to whole new worlds, and the books and the readers have to
stretch to this.
Fantasy is also distinguished by the presence of magic, the
ingredient that gets it sent off to a special room in large bookshops, away
from normal novels. Yet, since the 1960s, serious literary fiction has supped
full from the magic cup. In Gabriel García Márquez, it is animistic brilliance;
in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s
Children, a way of making an individual’s story into a historical tale.
Perhaps the difference is that in fantasy fiction, magic is such serious stuff,
and subject to complex rules and rationales. Children schooled on Harry Potter
books, with their minute explanations of Patronuses and horcruxes and deathly
hallows, are well prepared for the modus operandi of most adult fantasy
fiction. In Martin’s novels, magic is much more limited. After a brief,
unsettling prologue, which introduces the threat of the undead Others, hanging
over all that follows, he holds the supernatural back as long as he can. We are
almost 700 pages in before some dubious necromancy seems to bring the mortally
wounded husband of one of the protagonists back from the brink of death – and
even then we cannot quite be sure that a spell has been cast. Magic is a
possibility rather than a fact, necessary simply to mark the difference between
the world of these novels and our world.
In children’s fantasy literature, there
is invariably a route from our world into a magical one – and then a route back
out of it, a way home. The most famous example is that wardrobe in CS Lewis’s
first Narnia book (though there would be other
access points in his later books). Alan Garner’s brilliant Elidor and The
Weirdstone of Brisingamen find
magical worlds via modern-day Manchester and Cheshire. Most familiar of all,
the Harry Potter books imagine a to and fro between the realm of wizardry and a
life more ordinary. The discovery of apertures between our world and some
imagined one is the main business of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Its memorable ending is so
powerful because it at once gratifies and finally denies that childish fantasy
of being able to step into another world.
Neil Gaiman, a leading writer of fantasy for
adults, specialises in stories that do not so much take us to other worlds as
admit the deities and demons of different mythologies to this one. The AU is in
our midst. Neverwhere takes an inhabitant of modern-day
London into “London Below”, an alternative world of terrifying trials and
magic. In American Gods,
the time-honoured narrative of a road trip across the USA (parallel to a
journey undertaken by Gaiman himself) is transformed by the active presence of
African, Egyptian and Norse deities, but also a trickster god from Algonquin
myth and some notably threatening Slavic spirits in human guise. Fantasy is
often promiscuous in its blending of mythologies, but Gaiman composes like the
TS Eliot of horror-fantasy, patching together stories and personages from
incongruous sources, amid a flurry of literary allusions, as if all pagan
stories of the supernatural comprised a single compendium of our deepest fears.
Gaiman is a student of mythography; a
reader of his fiction, like a reader of The
Waste Land, is offered all the pleasures of tracking down his sources. His
novels have an encyclopaedic aspect. They also provide adult wit among their
frightening tales. In American
Gods, the deities are mostly
wise-crackers who enjoy complaining about the fast food of this puzzling
country. It is no surprise that he should have collaborated with fantasy’s
licensed jester, Terry
Pratchett, whose career began by recognising and deflating the
genre’s habitual solemnity. Pratchett’s first Discworld book, The Colour of Magic, was, in
effect, an affectionate, Pythonesque send-up of Tolkien and his progeny. The
wizard is a bungler, the gods are silly, and the dialogue is cheerfully
cynical. Yet many of Pratchett’s readers must also be readers of fantasy
fiction, able to relish the irreverent parody as well as the real thing. Later Discworld novels, even if they are housed on the
fantasy shelves, had less and less to do with sending up fantasy conventions
and more with satirising the world we know very well. Most are dedicated to the
mockery of some field of modern human endeavour: journalism, academia,
football. Pratchett’s alternate universe is full of characters we recognise
speaking in colloquial English.
In his fiction, Pratchett is a humorous
commentator on the allure of fantasy conventions. A more serious
commentator is Ishiguro, whose The
Buried Giant has led critics
to wonder aloud whether elements of the fantasy
genre might not be more interesting than they supposed. Ishiguro’s
novel is no more echt fantasy fiction than When
We Were Orphans was a
detective novel or Never Let
Me Go a work of science
fiction. As in those earlier transformations of genre fiction, it declines to
provide much of the superstructure that the genre addict would expect. It is
not clear exactly where or when we are (though it is some part of Britain in
the dark ages, among Roman ruins and recent memories of King Arthur). The
narrative is filtered through the viewpoints and dialogue of characters who
seem not to be able to remember the important events of their own lives, let
alone to know about any larger history. Yet this is certainly not a historical
novel. As its central characters, an elderly couple called Axl and Beatrice,
travel on foot to find their lost son, they hear about ogres and fiends; they
meet an aged and dilapidated Sir Gawain, who talks of his quest to slay a
dragon.
Ishiguro has spoken of the influence on the novel of the wonderful
14th-century narrative poem Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight, whose less-than-heroic hero undertakes a lonely
and memorable journey across a wintry English landscape to encounter the
terrifying Green Knight. One of the many subtleties of the medieval story is
its equivocation about the supernatural. When the huge Green Knight appears to
survive beheading in King Arthur’s court at Christmas, is it by magic or by
dint of a party trick? The reader of The
Buried Giant experiences
similar uncertainty about the supernatural.
What should Axl and Beatrice fear as
they walk? “Every fiend or evil spirit they were likely to encounter was known
to target its prey at the rear of a party – in much the way, I suppose, a big
cat will stalk an antelope at the back of a herd.” The first-person narrator is
a peculiar feature of the novel, occasionally stepping in to distance us from
the main characters (who, after all, can know nothing of antelopes). Is this
onlooking commentator jesting about supernatural beings? Axl and Beatrice keep
meeting people who blame their misadventures on ogres and fiends, but we might
think that all the fearful talk is collective fantasy. They take under their
wing Edwin, a boy whom his fellow villagers wish to kill because he has been
bitten by an ogre. Surely this is just vicious superstition? But then, trying
to travel down a river, Axl encounters actual tiny pixies, hordes of them,
attacking him and his wife. Later, Edwin glimpses three ogres at the edge of a
frozen pond. And near the novel’s conclusion, all the main characters come
together to encounter that favourite inhabitant of fantasy fiction, a dragon.
Dragons are the grandest inhabitants of
the genre. On the very last page of A
Game of Thrones, three dragons are born, as late in the day as the author
could manage, but the promise of things to come. “Here be dragons.” Not all
fantasy novels have dragons, but many do. CS Lewis and Tolkien had dragons and
Ishiguro knows that a dragon is a test of how far he is willing to go down the
fantasy road. His superstitious characters talk of the dragon so fearfully that
it is a surprise for the reader when we actually find her, near the end of the
novel, a matter of reptilean fact. She may be disappointingly undernourished
and lethargic (“In fact it took a moment to ascertain this was a dragon at
all”), but there she is, coiled amid cindered grass. The characters accept her
existence without surprise, as they accept all that is fantastical; they are
much less certain about the natural events of their own lives.
Axl and Beatrice, who cannot quite
remember whether they have a son, or if they have been unfaithful to each
other, or what occupation Axl followed before he became old, do at least
perceive their forgetfulness, and they blame it on the breath of the dragon,
Querig. Collective amnesia is the novel’s founding conceit, and is fitting for
the pre-literate world Ishiguro imagines. Travelling through the highlands of
Scotland in the 18th century, Samuel Johnson, that most literate of men, felt
he was seeing what the world was like without reading and writing. Prevailing
illiteracy, he thought, condemned men and women to live in a kind of permanent
present tense, unable to be sure what had happened in the past. They were the
prey of rumours and tall tales. He would recognise Ishiguro’s misty Britain.
But perhaps forgetting is what makes living possible. Slowly through
the novel we catch hints of terrible events in the not-distant past. Ishiguro
is using some of the conventions of fantasy fiction to produce a fable about
violence – always at the heart of the genre – and about the capacity of
societies to forget the violence of their pasts. Fantasy has enabled him to do
this obliquely, daring us to take seriously a kind of narrative that is often
called childish. Fantasy sometimes deals evasively with violence. Tolkien, like
Walter Scott, specialises in battles that seem almost decorous. Martin’s
novels, in contrast, dwell on the details of violence, as if insisting on
seeing what some of his fantasy forebears managed to ignore. He particularly
likes to insist on the violence done by those characters with whom we might
want to sympathise. Almost the first thing we see Eddard Stark do is execute
(beheading with a big sword) a soldier who has left his post. Just so that we
know there is no turning away, he makes his own young son watch, too. Book one
ends with another central character, Daenerys (“Dany” to the reader), lighting
the funeral pyre of her recently dead husband. As well as his horse and his
sword and other warrior accoutrements, she has decided to add to the blaze a
female captive who failed to heal him. She is duly staked and immolated.
The society into which Dany marries is
one governed by brute force, where sex and violence are pretty
indistinguishable. “It is the right of the strong to take from the weak,” one
of her new attendants explains. At her marriage celebration, warriors watch
women dance until they are suitably aroused, grab one and “mount her right
there, as a stallion mounts a mare”. When two men fancy the same woman, one of
them simply kills the other – and the revels continue. Martin insists on the
connection between sex and violence. Through Dany’s eyes we see the aftermath
of a battle, as her husband’s warriors rape every woman they find and angrily
reject her demands that they show mercy. The HBO series, which in its DVD
version is rated 18, with warnings of “strong bloody violence, strong sex,
sexual violence, very strong language”, is in fact a softened version of the
book.
Any
character who thinks it is all like a Scott novel is dangerously deluded. Young
Sansa Stark looks out at the knights mustering and finds it “all so exciting, a
song come to life; the clatter of swords, the flicker of torchlight, banners
dancing in the wind, horses snorting and whinnying”. She is doomed to be abused
by the young man she is to marry, and to betray her own father. “In life, the
monsters win,” she decides. In Martin’s world, you do best to assume that
people act from the lowest of motives. It is a tough old world and the weak are
more, not less vulnerable. In a frequent narrative pattern, a child or a woman
will be saved from violence by one of the leading characters – only to be
casually slaughtered a few pages later. Near the end of The Buried
Giant, Wistan, the Saxon
warrior, explains the novel’s title. “The giant, once well buried, now stirs
...” Unacted violence brims. Fantasy fiction has an apocalyptic inclination. The Lord of
the Rings foresees, but then
improbably staves off, the triumph of darkness. Martin’s still endless epic
sees bad things in the future (“Winter is coming,” as everyone keeps saying),
but also finds violence entirely ordinary.
Martin
employs a shifting of viewpoints that some critics do not expect from the moral
and narrative conventions of fantasy writing. When one of the central
characters of the first volume is casually executed near its end, the reader is
shocked – not just because of the suddenness of the event but because long
sections of the book have been narrated from his point of view, and now that
centre of consciousness has been extinguished. All the books in Martin’s sequence
are divided into unnumbered chapters under the names of the character whose
viewpoint – often partial or deluded – is being taken. These include the
cunning and amoral Tyrion, scorned misfit son of one of the contenders for
power and a witheringly sardonic commentator on the behaviour of his allies as
well as his enemies. It is no accident that – in the TV adaptation as well as
in the books – he is by far the most interesting character. Sometimes it is as
if he is mocking the genre of fiction in which he finds himself.
Yet
it is not just a matter of psychological variety; Martin also knows all about
creating curiosity and suspense. He keeps shifting the reader’s focus in order
to leave him or her, at the end of each chapter, with a puzzle posed, an apprehension
activated, or a surprise sprung. He has an ability to manipulate narrative
expectation that even Wilkie Collins, the king of cliffhangers, might have
admired. Ingeniously, he satisfies a hunger that all novel readers know,
whether they are willing to enter the fantasy room or not.
- Games
of Thrones returns to Sky Atlantic on Monday 13 April at 9pm.
Answers
•The city of Imardin and the land of Kyralia – The Black Magician Trilogy by Trudi Canavan
•A country called the Land, featuring the plains of Ra, the forest of Salva Gildenbourne and the Sunbirth sea – The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen R Donaldson
•The lands of Midkemia and Kelewan – The Riftwar Saga by Raymond E Feist
•A continent containing Arad Doman, Andor and Tarabon, girded by the Aryth ocean – The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan
•The city of Imardin and the land of Kyralia – The Black Magician Trilogy by Trudi Canavan
•A country called the Land, featuring the plains of Ra, the forest of Salva Gildenbourne and the Sunbirth sea – The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen R Donaldson
•The lands of Midkemia and Kelewan – The Riftwar Saga by Raymond E Feist
•A continent containing Arad Doman, Andor and Tarabon, girded by the Aryth ocean – The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan
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