Reading alone, watching together

Game of Thrones is based on a series of books-A Song of Ice and Fire-written by George R R Martin

It is generally assumed that one should be happy when others share one’s interests. I too, in simpler and happier times, would have agreed with that supposition. But I no longer do, and the reason is simple: The vast popularity of the HBO television series Game of Thrones. 

This enormously successful show, now in its seventh season, is based on a series of books – A Song of Ice and Fire – written by the New Mexico-based writer, George R R Martin. I first picked one up, purely by chance, in a second-hand bookshop when this millennium was new; I happened to be interested in the Wars of the Roses of the time, and since the blurb informed me that the book was a fantasy re-telling of that period, I thought I would dip into it over lunch. 

This was a bad idea. Not only was it not a re-telling of the Wars of the Roses, but my lunch extended into tea and then dinner; after dinner I dashed out to buy the next few books in the series and sat over them at a coffee shop till it shut at midnight. I didn’t get to sleep that night at all. Mr Martin had created a world that dwarfed medieval England in size, and most histories in complexity; few of his characters were sympathetic, and those that were – because they had trust, or compassion, say – tended to find that those were not strengths but literally fatal flaws at a time of intrigue and open war. 

And although the breadth of Mr Martin’s world astonished me, and the depth of his characters engaged me, what truly enthralled me was his plotting, which seemed to be mapped out in advance, while being as surprising as a thriller and as rigorous as a Christie murder mystery: The vast, shocking plot turns were rarely unfair, but usually signalled in advance for a careful enough reader. Enormously consequential secrets could be hidden in open conversation, or concealed in a quiet and apparently unimportant mental aside. 

But it was the sort of reading that one did in years that began with the number “19”. You did it alone. You turned over the puzzles in your head — alone. You went back and forth through the text vaguely trying to locate a reference, with no assistance other than your imperfect memory. You felt that you and Mr Martin alone had discovered this strange and yet familiar country, and felt all the thrill of the early explorer. 

And then came the internet. By the time Mr Martin’s fourth book in the series was out, in 2005, online forums were dissecting every sentence of his writing for clues. As yet unrevealed plot twists, barely visible to the solo reader, became blindingly obvious when an entire community sat down and read the books together. It was as if a lonely sleuth in an unfamiliar country had been replaced by an invading army, complete with an investigative bureau, mappers and encyclopaedists, and dragons. Mr Martin’s writing began to slow down, and he complained of unforeseen problems with his plotting — he has never said so, but I suspect he is trying to rewrite his ending to retain some of the surprise that the internet has taken away from him. How, after all, could a narrative structure outlined in 1995 survive this massive change in how we read?

And now, things have only got worse. At least, 10 years ago, it was just readers that comprised that invading army. But now, with HBO’s decision to put Mr Martin’s Westeros on screen, it seems almost the entire the world is familiar with the characters and countries that I, for years, had had to myself. The awfulness of the boy King Joffrey is not reduced by the realisation, shared by a reasonable proportion of Twitter sometime in November last year, that he might well grow up to be exactly like Donald Trump; but even so, by the time I had read my fifth “which Congress politician is a Stark, and which a Lannister” feature, I had begun to be a bit exasperated. 

But that is not why I am no longer watching Game of Thrones. It is partly because I prefer reading to watching in general, and in particular I prefer reading books that have as many layers as these do, to watching a series that must perforce gloss over them. Yet this is the seventh season, and there have only been five books. Yes: The television series has advanced beyond Mr Martin’s book-writing, and may well conclude before the next book in the series is out. Given how brilliant Mr Martin’s plotting is, I simply don’t want to know what’s happening on the series. Do you know how difficult that is? You have to avoid all social media, and most of your friends. I may have to visit North Korea just to escape — and even there, I bet Kim Jong-un is a fan. 

There’s a small community of us, I suppose, people worried about what will happen to the experience of reading Mr Martin’s books now that everyone shares in the world and expects it to be put on screen once a year. All I can hope for is that Mr Martin feels somehow that he still has a responsibility to his readers, and surprises us — and that the books take a different, more nuanced, and more surprising direction than the series.