New Aunts and Catching Up in Westeros

One of the nice things that wrapping Land Fit for Heroes has given me is a sudden freedom to catch up on a whole lot of other people’s fantasy fiction; now I’m done, I no longer live in terror of involuntarily inflecting my work with traces of Martin, Abercrombie et al – I can actually go and try this stuff with my reader’s hat firmly on.  Or, to be more accurate so far, with my watcher’s eyes in, because my first step in this process has been to slump exhausted on the sofa in front of the first two seasons of A Game of Thrones.  I do actually have A Game of Thrones the novel on my bookshelf, just as I have most of Joe Abercrombie’s stuff (one of the perks of sharing a publisher is gifted access to gifted fellow authors’ work), but I was (still am) just too textually wrung out from eight months nailing down The Dark Defiles to embark on reading anything quite that colossal right now.  And anyway, I’d heard HBO stuck pretty close to the original material, so…..

How was it for me?  Ehm, yeah, good.  Not many of my personal obsessions in there as far as subject matter goes, and how anyone ever thought to compare this stuff with my own is beyond me.  But you’ve got your solid, engaging story-telling, some nice subtle character work, intricate and intriguing world build, some truly powerful moments as knowledge of the contexts deepens.  If the books measure up to this, I can see why Martin has been hailed as such a phenomenon in the fantasy field – especially given that the first book dates from almost twenty years ago.

But for all that, I’m puzzled.

Puzzled why?  Well, puzzled as I try to match up the material I’m watching with the vast, vitriolic storm about it that’s raged across the genre blogosphere the last couple of years, right from the sniffy, dismissive reception the series got from the New York Times when it first surfaced, through to the on-going whinge about G-g-g-grimdark and the charges of creepy! problematic! misogynistic! racist!  Uhh, really?

One way or another, I’m having a hard time seeing this thing as the reprehensible stain on the face of modern fantasy that various commentators have avowed it to be.

Don’t get me wrong, that’s not to say the show doesn’t have its flaws; much though I like looking at the naked female form, I do also like there to be some faint narrative justification for it, and two seasons in I’m seeing a pretty shaky justification-to-breasts ratio.  Likewise, I’m not overfond of the constant use of cliff-hangers to drag me along; you kind of feel that a confident narrative shouldn’t need to keep falling back on that trick.  It’s very American TV of course, with the constant terror that medium has of haemorrhaging audience numbers during a commercial break, and I imagine it’s in his work for TV that Martin acquired his taste for the technique.  But still, less is more, y’all, and anyway HBO doesn’t have commercial breaks.  Oh yeah, and then there’s the Dothraki, who just seem to have lost out a bit where it comes to the world-building – unlike almost every other aspect of Martin’s social and political creation, I’m still unable to get a very clear fix on who the Dothraki are, where they are, what they’re about, how they relate to everyone else they bump up against……  Dunno, maybe it’s clearer in the books.

But still – it takes a peculiar kind of personality disorder to go violently overboard about these flaws (much the same personality disorder, it now occurs to me, as the one that so often manifests itself in shrill, stonewalling fanboy adoration of any given book/game/movie/TV show.  Other side of the same grubby coin, perhaps?).

What I reckon this genre conversation needs is some New aunts.

Coincidentally, you see, I was over at the Song of Ice and Fire message board, going back and forth on the much vexed subject of gender parity in epic fantasy contexts (women as warriors?  how many?  doing what? how likely? so forth) and up popped a regular board contributor with some hands on experience of female warriors (being one; working with others like her) in the IDF.  Asked about that experience and her feelings on the psychology involved, said contributor, name of Datepalm, responded at length and included this little gem:

“in general, my view is…nuanced.”

And you know, that’s the whole thing in a nutshell – nuance.  

Nuance is the beating heart of good critical appreciation.  Nuance allows that a piece of art may have elements with which to take issue, but that those elements need not obliterate a more general validity – and conversely that cool or otherwise delightful elements do not invalidate functional criticism.  Nuance is what you find in film reviews by guys like Peter Bradshaw and Philip French (I’d give rather a lot to read a review of Game of Thrones by either of those two gentlemen, but it appears they don’t do TV).  Nuance is the reason I read broadsheet review sections in general.  Nuance defuses fanshrill and rant.  Nuance enhances rather than tears down, puts under a microscope, not a hammer.  Nuance encourages a plurality of opinion and a complexity of interpretation.  Nuance allows that the world is a complex place, humans complex entities, and that the vast bulk of art that attempts to address the human condition carries that same complexity within it as a matter of course.

With nuance, for example, you can say things like although there’s a fair bit of gratuitous female nudity in Game of Thrones, the show also features a panoply of smart and powerful female characters and an implicit on-going critique of patriarchal power.  Perhaps it reflects – knowingly or not – our own stumbling cultural confusion where female agency is concerned.  The sort of thing, in other words, that opens a debate rather than shuts it down.  Nuance will let you wonder if the Dothraki, though they may seem to stand for an exotic savagery and Otherness, are in fact any more savage than any of the cultures and kingdoms we see in the west? For that matter, are they any more exotic or Other than, say, Winterfell, the Wall and the Night’s Watch, the Eyrie and its Sky Cells, or the Targaryens and their dragons?  Tell the truth, it’s all pretty fucking weird and Other, isn’t it?  Nuance will outclass Ginia Bellafante’s quite stunningly myopic and ill-informed dismissal of the show in the New York Times, not by beating the drums of fan fury and genre ghetto outrage, but by enumerating the ways in which Game offers a perfectly serviceable mirror for general human failings including but not limited to misogyny, infidelity (of various types) and pointless factional squabbling in the face of a larger doom, every bit as effective as more narrowly reality-based shows such as Boardwalk Empire or Rome.   Oh, and is also, like those shows, good, fast-paced, visceral but intelligent entertainment (with a number of flaws).

Nuance, in fact, will be your passport out of the usual wearisome morass of intra-genre back-biting and self-righteous oneupmanship and into a place where you can, like consumers of most other forms of fiction, appreciate a piece of work for what it is, see its strengths and weaknesses, all without feeling the need to either get down on your knees and worship at the shrine or somehow beat it shrilly and triumphantly into submission.

So yeah – who’s for some new aunts?