20. Game of Thrones: The Horrifying True Story Behind A Song of Ice and Fire

0:00Dominic Sandbrook: This episode is brought to you by the Folio Society. A Game of Thrones is a story built on kingdoms, banners and bloodlines, where loyalty is fragile and power is always shifting. George R. R. Martin's world feels so immersive because Westeros is governed by history. From Dorne to Castle Black and beyond the Wall, there is no such thing as neutral ground or, of course, harmless hospitality. Folio Society brings that sense of detail into the reading experience, right from the very first pages of A Song of Ice and Fire. So it's beautifully illustrated by Jonathan Burton, and the book has a fold-out map.

0:41Dominic Sandbrook: It's got these amazing illustrations of the house sigils. It's got family trees. And all of this brings the scale of the world and the complexity of its tangled loyalties to life. Folio's A Game of Thrones is available now, with a limited edition launching on the 14th of July. You can order A Game of Thrones and explore the other books we keep coming back to at foliosociety.com slash thebookclub. That's foliosociety.com slash thebookclub. This episode is brought to you by Wise. It's only when you start moving money between currencies that you really think about the exchange rate, the fee, and what might be hidden away in the small print.

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2:47Tell me, my honourable Lord Eddard, how are you any different from Robert or me or Jamie?

2:53Dominic Sandbrook: For a start, I do not kill children. You would do well to listen, my lady. I shall say this only once. When the king returns from his hunt, I intend to lay the truth before him. You must be gone by then. You and your children, all three, eh, and not to Casterly Rock. Exile, she said A bitter cup to drink from A sweeter cup than your father served Rhaegar's children And kinder than you deserve Your father and your brothers would do well to go with you Lord Tywin's gold will buy you comfort And hire swords to keep you safe You shall need them I promise you, no matter where you flee Robert's wrath will follow you To the back of beyond if need be And what of my wrath, Lord Stark?

3:45She asked softly, her eyes searched his face. You should have taken the realm for yourself. It was there for the taking. Jaime told me how you found him on the Iron Throne the day King's Landing fell, and made him yield it up. That was your moment. All you needed to do was climb those steps and sit. Such a sad mistake.

4:06Dominic Sandbrook: I've made more mistakes than you can possibly imagine, but that was not one of them. Oh, but it was my Lord. When you play the Game of Thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground. So hello everybody. Welcome to the book club. That was of course from George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones published in August 1996. It's the first of the five books, well so far five book series that makes up his A Song of Ice and Fire series. There are two more books forthcoming. Supposedly. Supposedly forthcoming, exactly. And we'll be discussing whether or not he will or even can finish this legendary series after the break.

4:49And this book, the book that sets it all off, it's an immense fantasy epic. And it's about these noble houses battling and scheming for ultimate power to sit atop the Iron Throne while an ancient supernatural threat brews in the north and it's based in this kind of medieval world of sex and violence and betrayal kind of loosely based has lots of historical precedence but loosely based on the Wars of the Roses and we'll discuss that too.

5:18Dominic Sandbrook: We will indeed so hi everybody these were books that were celebrated at the time for injecting high fantasy with a dose of gritty realism, weren't they? There's a lot of sex and there's a lot of violence. They are one of the great literary phenomena of the last 20 years or so. I think he's sold something, getting on for 100 million books, 90 million books, something like that. He's become George R.R. Martin, one of the most recognizable novelists in the world. And obviously a lot of that is because of the television series. So there were readers, of course, there were lots of readers beforehand, but it was the television series done by HBO in 2011 that really cemented Game of Thrones as one of the cultural sensations of the 2010s.

6:07Dominic Sandbrook: And it turned all of the books into bestsellers. People started naming their children, didn't they? Daenerys or Arya or whatever. Yeah, I think they came to regret that later on. Yes, exactly. How many Cersei's are there? I don't know. There should be more. Exactly. Well, after that reading, I thought that was chilling, actually. And I mean, one of the fun things about this book and this series, George R. R. Martin, we will obviously talk about how he creates this enormous host, this biblical host of characters. But there's something there for everybody, isn't there? So everybody looks at this and champions a different contender to the throne.

6:43Dominic Sandbrook: And whether you are a Lannister or a Stark or a Bolton or whatever, it's a fun game to play, as it were. And actually, Tabby, we should decide at the end of the show who we most resemble. Oh, we definitely will. I think we should work out which characters we most resemble, which houses we would belong to. And we're also going to make our predictions for who we think, should George R. R. Martin ever finish this series, who we think will win. Well, not least because the TV ending was so controversial. So not everybody will agree with the TV ending who has seen it. and actually I have um strong views as you know Tabby about the ending of the TV series such a poor take which we will we'll get to that supposedly poor take later on so let's talk about uh the experience of reading the book first of all so did you read it before you'd seen the series or after no after I actually stumbled across the series kind of by accident but I think like it wasn't massive massive yet so I'm one of those really annoying people that sort of says that I loved Game of Thrones before it was mainstream.

7:44But I was really, I was captivated by it. And also I was very intrigued by the fact I came across so many people that compared it to Lord of the Rings because the TV series didn't seem very Lord of the Rings-y to me. So I was intrigued by that. And then I went and I read the series over lockdown. And obviously, you know, anyone who loves fantasy, I loved it. And I actually liked it. The more able I was to separate the TV series in my head from the book, the more I liked it because it came alive as, you know, much more medieval in terms of the chivalric romance of it or whether or not that's there at all.

8:17The sigils, the colour, Vey's Dothrak, for instance, the home of the kind of the horse lords, in the book is this remarkable, complex, vast civilisation and doesn't quite translate in the TV series. And so I really, really enjoyed it, but I didn't, it's not comforting and it's not easy,

8:34Dominic Sandbrook: I would say what about you well actually so I saw the tv series first I saw the first series and I really enjoyed it and then um I sort of said to myself well I'll obviously never read these terrible books and then um whenever I was I had this weird thing where whenever I was getting a train and I was waiting for a train the books were everywhere at this point into the wh smiths in station bookstores and I would sort of loiter hoping that my train was delayed looking at the books like standing in the shop and like flicking through the books slipping a different book jacket on top though like yeah crime and punishment pretending i was reading something reading east of eden surely um anyway eventually i cracked and i was just like i'm gonna read this okay i'm gonna read it and then i was absolutely addicted i have no shame in admitting this i was riveted all night i would be reading the books couldn't wait to get the next one the one thing i noticed though was my interest kind of peaked with about book three and then started to decline as to my disbelief george r r martin started to introduce yet more characters i was totally the same and also we'll be discussing the style of these books but the thing is you spend a lot of time in lots of different characters heads and as the books progress there are more and more and more of them and it becomes more and more tedious because you're just hoping to get to the characters that you want to be with and their plot lines that you want to follow i agree we'll talk about this i think it's i think it's an object lesson actually in this is a it's an odd thing to say but if you were teaching creative writing i think this would be an excellent thing to teach because one of the key things that any writer needs is a degree of discipline and focus and whether george rr martin has has those qualities we will discuss later in the episode actually let's talk about george rr martin tabby yeah exactly let's talk about him himself because he's an unusually recognizable figure i would say for a lot of contemporary authors like everyone knows kind of what he looks like.

10:25He's quite distinctive. He has a bit of a reputation for being fairly irascible in interviews and stuff. I think probably in part because people are constantly asking him where the next books are coming. But I've watched a lot of interviews with him now, and he always just seems quite sweet and a massive nerd, essentially. And that might also explain why this world got out of control. He's born on September the 20th, 1948 in Bayon, New Jersey. His mother's family were once very wealthy, but they lost all their money during the Great Depression. And then in 1953, Martin and his family moved into public housing.

11:00And his world at this period during his upbringing was very small and quite confined. The same sites every day, the same routes, the same people. And I think that's important because it meant that he developed a voracious imagination. He read extensively, I guess. If you can't travel and your opportunities are more limited, it allows you to see and experience things that you might not otherwise be able to and so fantasy was his escape and he began writing as well so he would sell monster stories to other children for pennies which i think is charming and then at high school he started writing superhero stories and he fell in love with science fiction and fantasy in part because of comic books and so he said you know rather than dick and jane and sally the suburban family with a dog called spot you know it was magic and fantasy and heroes.

11:49And I kind of get that because, you know, some of the books that you're made to read when you're at prep school, when you're kind of six, seven, eight, you know, Biff and Chip and all those. I know you love those books, but I had no patience for them whatsoever.

12:01Dominic Sandbrook: I'm never here for Biff and Chip, Slander. I think Biff and Chip is brilliant. I know. It's just, it's such a flaw in your personality. Also, Tabby, I mean, you're giving yourself away there. Are you still reading Biff and Chip when you're eight? Really? I mean, when did you learn to read? uh 15 no i i just remember being in year two at my prep school and um my mom actually wrote you know wrote to school and was like please can they be allowed to read you know what they want to read obviously at that time for me it was proust yeah yeah of course anyway so yeah he has this uh he's a reader he's uh he loves writing all of this kind of thing he discovers tolkien so what so he would discover tolkien and actually the point when america discovers tolkien generally which is the mid-1960s that's when there was a very famous kind of pirated paperback edition of the lord of the rings that outraged Tolkien because he didn't get any royalties but anyway this went around America like wildfire precisely the point when George R.

12:59Dominic Sandbrook: R. Martin is what in his late teens early 20s so he reads it he says you know it completely blew my mind I couldn't wait to kind of get into that world and to create worlds of my own he interestingly given that war is such a big theme in his books. He was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. And then he became, he did think, dabbled in teaching and stuff, and then became a full-time writer at the end of the 70s, specializing really in science fiction and in fantasy. And he actually won some awards, I think, for some of his early books and his short stories. Apparently he has this brilliant vampire book about vampires going down the Mississippi, and it sounds great.

13:36I think we should do that on the show sometime.

13:37Dominic Sandbrook: His big thing in the 80s was TV. He worked on a sort of reboot of The Twilight Zone. And all of this time, you know, he wasn't a name. He wasn't a well-known name to people outside the worlds of science fiction and fantasy. Within those worlds, yes, maybe, but not outside. And then he gets the inspiration for what becomes this first book, A Game of Thrones. and I think it started more science fiction than fantasy. He has this idea of a boy. You know, so often these books start with a single image or a single incident. It's insane how often this happens though. I'm so struck by that. It's almost like some kind of strange divine inspiration or something.

14:15This image that floods a person's mind and they get captivated by it and they have to write it down.

14:20Dominic Sandbrook: And then they have to create a world and a narrative to sustain it, I suppose. So in this case, it's the image of the boy who watches somebody being beheaded and then discovers these wolf cubs, sort of pups in the snow. And this is an image that you see right at the beginning of A Game of Thrones. He says, it came out of nowhere in 1991. When I began, I didn't know what the hell I had. I thought it might be a short story. It was just this chapter where they find these dire wolf pups. And then I started exploring these families and the world started coming alive. It was all there in my head. I couldn't not write it.

14:53Dominic Sandbrook: Just one thing about this. He has the idea of the image, the scene, and then he starts to create the world to justify it almost. One thing he doesn't do is work out the world and the story before he starts writing. And that explains, I think, why over time the project becomes larger and larger and larger. And there's a lack of, there's frankly a lack of discipline. Yeah, he didn't plot it. No, he didn't plot it. So very different from a J.K. Rowling, let's say, who does famously plot everything out in the Harry Potter world before she starts writing. She's got it all written down in exercise books or whatever.

15:28Dominic Sandbrook: George R.R. Martin absolutely does not. So he has this idea. He's really into it. So he completes this first chapter, this thing with the boy and the wolves in the snow, in only a matter of days. And then, as with so many of these epic fantasies, comes the map. And he draws this over the summer. And I have to say, it's a magnificent map. I was looking at it just yesterday. But again, it's not like he has it all planned out. It's kind of still expanding as he writes. And you can feel this in the book. You start in Winterfell, the home of the Starks, who I suppose are our protagonists. And it's quite limited.

16:04It's quite bare. You have glimpses of the world beyond. And then the further we travel into the story, even in book one, the more and more and more is going on. Anyway, he had planned it as a trilogy because most epic fantasies during this period were...

16:17Dominic Sandbrook: Copied from the Lord of the Rings. Exactly. Tolkien really is, he's the godfather of fantasy. I mean, he is now, but at this point, he really is the imprint. But then the more he writes, as we've said, the more it expands. And so the initial draft was already just way too big. And so he had to split the initial draft into different volumes right away. And so we have A Song of Ice and Fire. And this is why the first three books were written in the space of four years. so quickly. Oh, they were originally one thing. Yeah, exactly. And then, I don't know, there's a slightly longer hiatus and then a slightly longer hiatus.

16:54And then now, you know, The Winds of Winter, the second last book, we've been waiting for for 15 years.

17:00Dominic Sandbrook: Whether it will ever come, we will discuss. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So when it first comes out, which is 1996, it's not a colossal hit, but it does get a following. I mean, there are a lot of reviews. I was looking at some of the reviews, actually, before we started recording. There are a lot of reviews, generally quite positive, I think. Even at the time, with the first book, with this first book, some people said, there are too many characters. You know, I find it overwhelming, the number of characters and the number of names and so on. He took the chapters about one of the characters, Daenerys Targaryen, didn't he?

17:31Dominic Sandbrook: And he published them as a standalone kind of novella. I can see how that would work. It works very well. It's a very good story. So for people who don't know, it's this princess, effectively, who is exiled, who is sold off to these horse lords. And it's a classic example of us seeing an alien world through the eyes of an outsider to that world. So we're traveling with her, and it's a portal fantasy. So it's like you've gone through a portal with a character who doesn't know what is on the other side, and you're seeing through their eyes this new and exciting kind of landscape. Anyway, he publishes more books, and then obviously the TV series 2011 turns it into this tremendous phenomenon with which surely everybody listening to this podcast is reasonably familiar, even if they've never seen so much as a frame of the TV series or read a single line of the book.

18:20Dominic Sandbrook: Everybody's heard of Game of Thrones. Yeah, definitely. But just a quick, I mean, word here on the style before we dig into the plot, which will be recognisable to most people. As we've said, it unfolds via multiple characters' perspective. So this is a limited third person. So you have an external narrator who has access to the thoughts and feelings of only one character. So in this book, we have seven of those. They're mainly Starks and they're mainly nobles. And that's probably why it's the noble houses and particularly the Starks that we sympathize with most over the course of the series. And why the peasants often seem like, I don't know, kind of, I suppose, the most basic view a person might have of medieval peasants.

18:59You know, they always seem a bit uneducated and a bit naive.

19:02Dominic Sandbrook: It's not interesting. I hadn't thought of that. But it's very much a top-down view of this world, isn't it? Definitely it is, you know. Yeah, the peasants, people who are not aristocrats are generally, what do they call them? NPCs. You know, they don't appear to have inner lives. I mean, they must have inner lives, but we're never given access to them. They're like sort of the great mass of the suffering majority, you know, and that's kind of it. But with one exception, and this is the prologue where we're inside the minds of a lowborn member of the Night's Watch. These are the people that guard the wall that separates Westeros from kind of the wild lands beyond.

19:35and I actually think this opening is so good because you know straight away you're in some kind of medieval magical world from the clothes the descriptions there's a highborn knight and then there are the kind of you know the low-born men around him and it's very eerie and it's it's very creepy but as the series progresses as we've said these viewpoints multiply and there are more and more and more and so it becomes more unwieldy but something that is brilliant I think about it is that it is so unreliable throughout because you have different perspectives and so people come across in different ways and there are moments when you might be tricked into wondering whether oh are the Starks really the good guys so for instance there's a character called Jorah Mormont who is helping the princess Daenerys through her travels and he sees the guy who in this book is essentially our protagonist Ned Stark as a terrible man you know harsh in his principles whereas for us expending a lot of time this book in Ned's mind he seems like a very decent good

20:31Dominic Sandbrook: you know honorable man i think it's a it's a deceptively simple device but allows quite a sophisticated characterization so the funny thing about this is on the surface a game of thrones seems to be very very simply and excessively written so the prose is i think i think you're more keen on the prose than i am i think the prose is unremarkable and and quite workmanlike I don't really mean that as a criticism, because as we've said before on the book club, sometimes very simple and accessible prose works greatly to your advantage. You don't always have to be writing like Charles Dickens or Vladimir Nabokov or something.

21:14Dominic Sandbrook: If you want to write a successful popular book, you know, simple, clean, unremarkable prose is a great way to get lots of readers in and to prioritize your narrative. but what martin does i think by focusing you know he'll have a chapter called caitlin a chapter called eddard a chapter called aria or whatever and we're seeing the world through that particular person's eyes what he does is exactly as you say he allows us shifting perspectives on the events that are going on he allows you to appreciate and particularly in later books as you as as these point of view chapters multiply you begin to realize that it's actually not as simple as you thought when you started.

21:55Dominic Sandbrook: And that actually, you know, an event that happened in the past is capable of having multiple different interpretations. And actually, you know, with my historian's hat on, I think that is a nicely complicated and nuanced way to think about political events or kind of, you know, things that have happened, great traumatic moments in people's lives or whatever, where you think, oh, it's a simple clash of good and evil. But actually, because Martin allows you to see that through the eyes of different characters over time, you realise, okay, I was wrong about that. Maybe there was another side to the story.

22:27But he's also kind of playing with the idea of the ideas of kind of sagas or songs or, you know, stories about legendary events from the past, which are often kind of glorified and people are turned into heroes because he uses this slightly kind of chivalric language, you know, my sweet sister, or, you know, my Lord Father or whatever it may be.

22:49Dominic Sandbrook: So you mentioned some of the chivalric language. In a lot of fantasy books, that is very annoying. And it's a very arch. You know, it's very flowery and over the top. And even Tolkien, when they get to Gondor and stuff, there are bits that Tolkien critics scoff at, because Tolkien is writing in a deliberately very archaic way. Martin, I think, has found a very nice middle ground, where it's not quite modern prose. You know, it doesn't feel too 20th century or 21st century but at the same time it is not fake medieval prose that you would get in some sort of Victorian you know some incredibly lush Victorian romance about knights you know he's found a nicely neutral narrative voice I think to tell his story anyway let's talk a little bit about characters and the story so this is particularly this is a bit of a reminder I guess for people who've read it or seen the tv series and a sort of a crash course for people who haven't so you mentioned already we have the prologue the prologue is basically these blokes who are guarding effectively hadrian's wall they go out into the north and they discover there's basically you know zombies out there who have come out of nowhere and this is absolutely terrifying because this is like a sort of climate change style event that is going i mean it literally is climate change isn't it because winter is coming and this is basically going this is an existential apocalyptic threat besides which the petty arguing about who's king is nothing then we move on to the sort of petty arguing because we get to you said they're our protagonists i think they kind of are they're set up that way the stark family so they are the lords of the north you've got ned the father edard as he's his but we everyone calls him ned he's married to caitlin um and they've got these kids rob the oldest who's very he's your classic oldest son from the chronicles of narnia or from whatever you know brave dutiful a good person decent and all of this you've got sansa who's very romantic and completely like obsessed with kind of the chivalric stuff and and also with boys um you have bran who is mischievous and has a sort of there's a from the beginning you kind of oh is he gonna be our hero a whiff of destiny yeah it's exactly he's he's fun and he's a bit naughty and you kind of think okay he you know he could be a character to kind of you know to invest in uh you have aria who is a tomboy she's girl she's but she's a tomboy she likes you know fighting and swords and stuff um you've got a poor rickon everyone forgets him and no one cares about him because he's how old is he three or four or something and basically no one cares yeah he's the baby yeah there's another bloke hanging around called john snow he's their half brother because he's ned's bastard child or appears to be anyway and also ned has a ward called theon grayjoy who is sort of more saturnine and sardonic and stuff yeah i think we should have he's got red flags all over him right from the start because everyone comments on the fact that he laughs too much and he laughs everything that he should kind of take seriously but i was going to say about the kids He'd be doing well on this show.

25:56Dominic Sandbrook: He would do, actually. The thing about the setup with the kids, I think this is a classic device from children's fiction or teenage fiction, which is you have a family, you have all these siblings, each of them given different qualities. And when I first read it or when I first saw the TV series, I thought, okay, I know exactly how this is going to go. Basically, they're all going to split up, the kids. They will all face challenges. It's kind of in a weird – I mean, this is a very weird comparison to make but there's a slight you know it's not unlike little women or something each of the children is given a different identity each of them is given different flaws each of them is given a set of different challenges and the expert our expectation is they will overcome these challenges they will mature and become well-rounded people and then at the end having separated and gone their separate ways they will reunite the fellowship will be reunited and they will you know the final scene will be the Starks all grown up, you know, laughing and exchanging happy memories because they have triumphed effectively, because that is the trajectory of so many children's fantasy novels and books for kind of, you know, younger readers.

27:09They're given this kind of, there's this portentousness right from the start because they discover these dire wolves in the snow and they, it's the sigil of the house of Stark and they each have one. It's the perfect thing. Every single Stark child, even the bastard has a direwolf to keep it company, to defend it, to fight for it. And so you kind of think, oh, these are our heroes, nothing can go wrong. Anyway, a little bit about Ned himself. He's honorable, he's a good man, he's stern, he's dutiful, he's probably the best, the most honest, the most admirable character in the book.

27:42Dominic Sandbrook: He's the soul of integrity, isn't he, Ned Stark? Yes. He's sort of humorless, unfortunately, but he is incorruptible. Then he's married to Catelyn Tully, who is a family from the South. She loves her family. She's dutiful. She's a very strong woman. She makes mistakes though. And the other thing that you don't see in the TV series that comes across a lot in the book is Ned constantly has dreams or is flooded with memories from a time before the present in the book, from battles of the past and also this recurring memory of his sister's death, his sister dying. Anyway, then we get the kind of the other, I don't know, I suppose they are the antagonists of Game of Thrones.

28:25The Lannisters arrive at Winterfell.

28:28Dominic Sandbrook: So this is the king, Ned's old mate, Robert Baratheon. He just featured on the show there, amazing. So Ned and Robert basically teamed up in the past to overthrow this bloke who they thought was a terrible king, a tyrant, a mad king. They overthrew him. Robert seized the throne. He's a Targaryen and they're the longstanding ruling dynasty of Westeros. Exactly. They overthrew the Targaryen dynasty. Robert took the throne. Ned hasn't seen him for years because Ned's been up in the north and Robert, his pal, has been down in the south ruling in this sort of very, you know, Rome or Constantinople-like capital in the sort of Mediterranean capital.

29:04Dominic Sandbrook: Robert turns up. He's come on a great visit with his wife's family. His wife is from a very rich family, the Lannisters, who are kind of famously cynical and ruthless. They all turn up and Robert, to Ned's shock, has got very fat, hasn't he? He's really let himself down. He drinks too much, he eats too much, he hates being a king, he's bored by it all. Exactly. He turns up, he's got his wife Cersei, who you played in the introduction, who is very beautiful, but she's very cold. She's chilling, isn't she? I mean, she's icy as a personality. She's manipulative as well. She's clever. She's wicked.

29:48Dominic Sandbrook: She is. She has this twin brother called Jaime, the Kingslayer, as he's known, because he supposedly killed the Mad King during this uprising and betrayed his oath as the king's bodyguard. So people have a sort of a very conflicted view of Jaime Lannister. I think when the book begins maybe I'm just this is just my own personal prejudice but I assumed when you first read the book that he was going to be the primary antagonist because he is somebody who has betrayed his oath he is suave he is handsome yeah but he is shown to be violent cynical ruthless all of these kinds of things and I sort of thought okay they're setting him and his sister up as the primary antagonists These are clearly the villains of the story.

30:37Dominic Sandbrook: But he also has a brother, doesn't he? So they have another brother, Cersei and Jaime. And this is Tyrion, who basically ends up taking over the entire series. I mean, he's the character who kind of comes from nowhere to grow and grow and grow and to dominate the story. He's probably the most iconic character from Game of Thrones, partly because of the TV show, partly because he's known to be kind of witty and intelligent. And he's a very complicated character. He's actually the character that George R. R. Martin himself said that he liked the most. And he said that if he could be any of them, he's the one he'd like to be.

31:12Dominic Sandbrook: Nicole, our producer, says that he's the most lovable in the chat. I think Nicole might be right about that. He's very lovable. So the Lannisters have come because Robert wants to ask Ned to be his Hand of the King, kind of his Lord Protector, his advisor, because his own Hand of the King, a guy called Jon Arryn, has died under mysterious circumstances. is ned therefore kind of reluctantly agrees he doesn't want to enter the snake's pit you know in a sense he didn't he doesn't want to go south the north is where the air is clean you know it's not corrupt it's it's things are simpler and more honorable but yes he finally does agree and then something terrible happens bran the his son who we were speaking about he falls out of a very very high tower and almost dies and he loses the use of his legs and we discover this is a spoiler but we discover that he was thrown out by jamie lannister because he had caught jamie and cersei having sex incestuous sex because they are twins but the thing is we know this but none of the other characters know this no one no one knows what's happened to bran so we enter this phase of the novel it's kind of a murder mystery and i really like it because ned goes south with his daughters he goes to king's landing along the way we learn a little bit about the malevolence of uh of uh robert's apparent son joffrey who's a terrible terrible person and he has um sansa's direwolf lady killed out of spite just a quick thing on him killing the wolf on the wolf being killed sansa's wolf this is what i think the first moments in the book where we start to think that um where it might occur to you that george r r martin is going to has been subverting your expectations because as you said tabby when they in you know that this was the first thing that came to him remember the scene of the child finding the wolves in the snow and i think that when you the different wolves are allocated to the different children you do think oh so the children and their wolves are the heroes and they're going to clearly survive and they'll all be reunited and isn't this going to be lovely and sansa really loves her wolf who's called lady you know she sort of grooms it and she's you know she's in the way that a sort of teenage girl can be about a dog right but lady is killed very brutally her father is basically ordered to put lady down and i think that's the first moment that's what 100 pages in or something where you think god this is actually pretty brutal like you definitely wouldn't give this to a child because the child might be very upset about this and you realize that martin is doing something much more brittier and much more cynical with his world than you might expect also lots of more wheels start coming off the minute we enter king's landing which is kind of like this it's this court of vipers it's like some sort of byzantine court of kind of corruption and scheming and whispers and ned begins investigating john aaron's death and it takes a very unexpected turn in that the truth behind his death is much darker and much more adult and much kind of you know more salacious than you would expect from a book the book that you've tricked into believing that you were reading with its direwolves and its children and its castles and its swords the tension and the drama really starts escalating because then his wife Catelyn takes Tyrion Lannister prisoner because she believes that he was responsible for Bran's near assassination and then Ned our hero is injured and in time also imprisoned after threatening to expose Cersei's secret the secret behind the parentage of her children with Robert Baratheon and this is the scene from the very beginning um and so when robert baratheon dies ned tries to have his brother stannis crowned and instead you know our hero is flung into a prison and his fate hangs in the balance and while this is happening his son rob goes to war and wages war on the lancers so if you've never read the books by the way and you're confused at this point we should just say that the the thing to bear in mind is that basically they've george rr martin has set up this world with this family and and terrible things have started to happen to the family They've split up.

35:16Dominic Sandbrook: Various of them have been locked up or whatever. Their sort of high idealistic expectations of what life would be like have been completely punctured. And the question that's by about three-quarters of the way through is, well, are they going to overcome these trials and everything or ultimately be happily ever after? Or you start to think, you know, I can't actually – there's a point where I think when you're reading it where you think, I can't actually see a way out of this for them. You know, surely he's not going to start killing off some of these characters in whom we've invested and so that creates i think the 10 i mean you are you're right there is a mystery element to it which is very exciting but the the question about whether he's going to actually sacrifice characters that you've come to know and like that's what keeps you turning the pages i think by the time you're at like page 500 or something now meanwhile there's another there are two other elements to the story aren't there one of which you've mentioned already so one of which is this character called Daenerys from the old dynasty she's in exile with her brother and she's basically been sold off to the horse lords so they're like the mongols or something I think are probably sort of step nomads they ride around on horses they're incredibly violent they live by a completely different moral code there is an awful lot of sexual violence which we'll probably talk about after the break and so she's been sold off at the age of 14 to this terrifying but also hunky horse lord there's a lot of you know she's basically forced to sleep with him but then ends up falling in love with him yeah it basically all culminates in this in in his death the death of the baby that she had been carrying and you know the possibility that the dragons which haven't been seen in westeros for hundreds of years since the targaryens were at the height of their power may come back and that daenerys may bring them back you know by uh by entering the flames of her husband's funeral pyre.

37:08And then the final narrative that we're following is the bastard, Jon Snow. He's at the wall. He's joined the Night's Watch, the defenders of the wall. And his is a very different narrative. It's the narrative that allows us to play with the possibility of the supernatural because he's not that invested or interested in or close to the politics of King's Landing, the medieval world down there, the Byzantine medieval world, the more historical world. He is kind of coming face to face with a terrifying ancient threat, supernatural ancient threat and he encounters this firsthand so we can see from all this that westeros itself is an incredibly detailed sprawling world on the map it resembles britain and you know the way that the north is depicted versus the south there's something of britain

37:52Dominic Sandbrook: i think in that historically oh completely and the wall obviously yeah we'll get into all the history history behind this in a second but i would say this world is much much more complex in the TV series. And for instance, if you just look at all the sigils for all the different houses and the way that he's plotted their family trees and stuff, it's remarkable. And the way that he melds... So the sigils are kind of their heraldic emblems. Yeah. So it's the direwolf for Starks and they have their words. The Lannisters have their words and they have their lion and so on and so forth. And the TV show is deceptive in that you think there are a couple of main houses.

38:28There are so many in the book and he melds different histories, different cultures. He's pulling from all sorts of fantasy precedents, allusions to magic, politics. So it is an incredibly impressive world, I think.

38:42Dominic Sandbrook: But so play devil's advocate with you, Tabby. George R. R. Martin himself once said there are two different kinds of fantasy writers. There are architects and gardeners. So an architect designs the world and then puts you within it. And he sort of said, the gardener, the world somehow exists and you're discovering it. and you're tending it, and you're going through it, and you're kind of planting new things and whatnot. The problem with being a gardener is, I mean, Tolkien was a bit of a gardener in a way, because the Lord of the Rings didn't turn out as Tolkien expected. You know, you can tell that when you read the book, in that the first section is very much like The Hobbit.

39:17Dominic Sandbrook: It's set in the Shire and so on. It's kind of a little bit twee. And then there's the stuff with Tom Bombadil and whatnot. You know, he's going off on little tangents and side quests, and then he gets into his big story, which is drawn from his earlier kind of Middle-earth stuff that he'd been working on. George R.R. Martin, there's a definite element of him making it up as he goes along, I think. And by the time he's in bit four or five, he thinks to himself, I'm kind of a little bit bored of these main characters now. I'm going to introduce some new characters and some new cities and things.

39:48Yeah, and I'm going to, if anyone ever played Age of Empires, you know where the map kind of expands and you go into the darkness. There's definitely a sense that he's doing that with this and he's like, oh, I actually am really struggling to write the plot. So I'm going to just, you know, work out what's going on with the Red Wines, you know, who are family or whatever it may be. And he definitely, you can tell in this book, elaborates the history behind the book as he goes. You learn more about the war that resulted in Robert Baratheon becoming king. And you learn more about the ancestors of Westeros, the children of the forest and things like that.

40:19Dominic Sandbrook: That's something he's got from Tolkien, isn't it? The idea of a deep history behind the world. And he gives you clues, little clues and hints. The characters sometimes talk about it. they sort of say oh these this is where the first men lived or this is where the children of the forest came from or all of this stuff but it's kind of mythologized it's like a bit like talking about um i don't know the the viking sagas the nordic sagas or whatever you know you're never really sure you know how much of it is real and he says this lovely thing where you can tell that he just loves painting the world he loves doing his gardening much more than kind of shaping the narrative where he says there are days when i sit down in the morning with my cup of coffee I fall through the page and I wake up and it's dark outside and my coffee is still next to me it's ice cold and I've just spent the day in Westeros and I love that because you can see that he's just like a total fantasy head he's a total nerd like you I mean this speaks to you Tabby but I know you love all this stuff and the kind of world building and the genealogies and the maps and all that I can't tell you how many YouTube holes I've fallen down just about like Westeros but um it is also heavily based on history or is it heavily based I would say that it draws on an idea of history.

41:28It draws on the sexiest, most popular version of historical events there are, kind of the guts and the glory. And the medieval world, this is a medieval world that we're in essentially, in the same way that the Lord of the Rings, Middle Earth has shades of a medieval world around it. The aesthetics of the medieval world, you know, it's court rituals, it's chivalry, it's soldiers, it's a feudal society. But I would say it owes more to kind of, you know, the horrible histories interpretation maybe of the medieval world where it's...

41:58Dominic Sandbrook: Because it's so bleak, you mean? Yeah, it's so, it's all the, it's only blood, rape, brutality, dirt. I mean, we can talk about the cynicism of the book, but I think it is a very grim view of the Middle Ages. So high ideals are always punctured. I mean, there are lots of things that are missing from his medieval world or relatively absent that are also absent from, for example, The Lord of the Rings. So he doesn't really care about the economics of how it works. He admits that though, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think that would be perhaps a weird thing to put in a fantasy book. He's not terribly interested in ideas.

42:37Dominic Sandbrook: So, you know, characters, we're not really introduced to scholars who are thinking about ideas or philosophers or any of these things. But then there are actual features of the medieval world that he draws on or events or organisations. So, Hadrian's Wall, probably most obviously. Yes. Yeah, you love that, don't you? Because he... I do. I do like this, actually, because I would do this. He went to Hadrian's World in the 80s and stood out and kind of thought what it would have been like to have been a Roman soldier and looking into the wilds of Scotland and wondering what kind of terrible things were happening.

43:12Horrors are coming his way.

43:13Dominic Sandbrook: Well, you did that recently. You went to Hadrian's World, didn't you? Did you gaze out and pretend to be a Roman soldier? Totally, I did. Totally, I did. I know that actually you probably did. Yeah. I'm not joking. and then there's so the people on the uh on the wall are themselves you know there are clearly historical inspirations for the night's watch so this is this kind of monastic order that are protecting westeros from you know whatever horrors lie north and they're based on the crusader knights that sort of knightly orders you know they're they're knights templar or the hospitalers or whatever from the middle ages but there's also a french foreign legion side to them isn't there because they're kind of convicts and rapists and bad people who basically get sent to the wall to join the Night's Watch as part of their punishment.

44:01And a little bit about the Black Watch, which is a battalion of the British Army in the 18th century, and they were there to police the Highlands. But I think the greatest precedent of all, and Martin himself has admitted this, historical precedent that is, is the Wars of the Roses. So he said, my model for this was the four-volume history of the Plantagenets that Thomas B. Costain wrote in the 50s. So The Walls of the Roses, a series of bloody conflicts between two powerful English houses in the 15th century. You have the House of Lancaster, they have the Red Rose, House of York, the White Rose, and they're fighting for the throne.

44:34So in this book, the Yorks are the Starks, they're a northern house, and then the Lancastrians are the Lannisters, they're the wealthy southern house. And then, you know, people have actually used the Walls of the Roses to try to work out how the books will end by trying to follow the historical precedents. But then there are specific kind of characters based on specific historical figures. So you have the Duke of York, who was appointed protector of the realm. And that is kind of, you know, Ned Stark is loosely based on him. They're both quite honourable men and they both...

45:04Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, Richard of York. Yeah, Richard of York. And they both face the same fate. And then that means that Robb Stark is kind of a young Edward IV. Young warriors, very good at battle. They win, have a series of early victories. But Robert Baratheon is the most Edward IV figure of all because they both won the throne. They were both physically imposing and very good warriors in their youth. And then turn into Elvis in Las Vegas. Then they literally turn into Elvis in Las Vegas. Exactly. They eat too much. They have mistresses. Yeah. Bloody good lads. So there's basically two Edward IVs in this book.

45:39Yes, exactly. The young one and the old one. Yeah. And then you have, and they both had a kingmaker, Tywin Lannister, the Earl of Warwick. They grow increasingly reckless and they both have sort of troublesome brothers. So Robert has Stannis and Renly based on the Duke of Clarence and Richard III. But then there are other kind of illusions. So Tyrion could be Richard III. But then is it a historical Richard III or is it a more literary Richard III? We'll discuss this. And then Cersei is quite an Elizabeth Woodville character. So this was Edward IV's beautiful queen who filled the court with her own family to have as much power as possible.

46:15And then also quite a manga of Anjou character. You know, she fought tooth and nail to get her son on the throne. So she was the wife of Henry VI.

46:23Dominic Sandbrook: So basically what George R.R. Martin has done is taken a very, very sensational soap opera from the 15th century. sort of that your classic medieval soap opera and and and taking aspects of all the characters and create a different versions of them and basically set them at each other's throats which is a very fun thing to do and the wars of the roses by the way i loved the wars of the roses me too i still do yeah and actually i think we've both read the same bodice ripping historical novel the sun and splendor by sharon penman yeah you've read that haven't you yeah cool i love that so So that's from the perspective of Richard III.

46:58Dominic Sandbrook: It tells you the whole story of The Wars of the Roses. It's very, very romantic, isn't it? And there's a lot of sort of fumbling with dresses and stuff. So when I was 13, I thought it was the best thing ever written. Yeah, absolute heaven. While other boys were like really getting into, I don't know, like page three in The Sun or something, you were like, oh, The Sun in Splendour. Fantastic. But it's actually really relevant because I would say that what George R.R. Martin is doing is he isn't basing the series so much on actual history as the interpretation of history in literature, I think, particularly Shakespeare.

47:35Dominic Sandbrook: Yes. So there are definite literary precedents. I know we've got to get to a break eventually. Otherwise, Nicole will never, ever forgive us. However, he's obviously drawing on Shakespeare. He's drawing on a French writer called Maurice Drouin. Have you ever read him, Tabby? I can't say that I have, no. So Maurice Drillon was an ultra-conservative. He's one of Vladimir Putin's favorite writers. No way. He's an ultra-conservative writer. He wrote these books in the 50s, 60s, and 70s called Les Rueins Maudis, The Accursed Kings, about sort of, what is it, 14th century France. And so they're historical novels.

48:10Dominic Sandbrook: I've actually tried reading them. Some people rave about them. I found them very thin, gave up. I thought they were bland. Not as good. I think, genuinely, not as good as George R. R. Martin. And actually, the author himself, Maurice Drun, thought they were rubbish. He just wrote them for money. Anyway. In an odd way, I respect that. So they're based on these precedents. Obviously, Shakespeare, Macbeth, you know, the idea of Circe as Lady Macbeth, that hangs over it, doesn't it? Totally. Yeah. The idea of power corrupting, the idea of a reign based on the bones of violence and therefore being inherently unstable.

48:51Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, exactly. Then you've got obviously Tolkien. I mean, Tolkien hangs over this whole project. Martin himself admitted that what he was doing was, you know, partly a kind of homage to Tolkien. It would be inconceivable that you'd be writing medieval fantasy without Tolkien's model in your head. But at the same time, what he's doing is he is trying to escape from Tolkien's shadow because, as he himself admits, Tolkien is writing in a kind of heroic, mythic, moralistic, good versus evil vein. The idea of evil is such a huge part of Tolkien's world. Martin's world is much less idealistic. Idealism is punished.

49:31It's random as well.

49:33Dominic Sandbrook: It's lawless. The operation of fate or destiny or providence which runs through the Lord of the Rings, the sense that everything is preordained, you don't get any of that in George R. R. Martin at all. Yeah, and also it's this, you know, we said that Martin was a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. And he has said of Tolkien that he and Tolkien have, they have very different perspectives on things. He even says that they have different attitudes about war and sexuality. so it's almost as though what Martin is trying to do is say I'm actually showing you the I'm not showing you the version that they sing about in the songs or they write about in the epics I'm showing you the real world version you know this is what the middle ages was like this is what war is like it's blood it's guts it's rape and everyone is stabbing everyone in the back but isn't it interesting though that of these two men the bloke who actually fought in one of the most horrendous battles in human history the battle of the Somme Tolkien in the trenches in the mud and amid the slaughter that he writes the Lord of the Rings which is much more idealistic and and Martin who didn't fight in Vietnam slightly wallows in the violence and particularly the sexual violence I actually think too much I think he goes overboard with all that but I think that's because if you had actually experienced the horrors of war particularly if you were from the generation that Tolkien was these were people that you know didn't believe in leaning into your pain they believed in kind of carrying on yes and it's that painful and it's that raw you're not gonna it's not going to be an easy thing to do to talk about war based on your experiences of war so you probably subliminally channel it into other things whereas when you write about war it's probably easier for you to draw especially if you're kind of if you love history as as he did to draw upon something that is idealistic and chivalrous and legendary, because it's less painful for you, isn't it?

51:29Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, I mean, I think it just would have run counter to the way that people talked about their experiences in wartime. It wasn't the ethos. No, absolutely. But I think it's psychologically interesting that Tolkien still, you know, he's not blind, of course, to the suffering and whatnot, but he still presents us with quite an idealised version of medieval combat. whereas Martin who never you know had been in a war zone absolutely you know he he I mean as you say I think there is perhaps an element of it it being not not self-indulgent but I think there is a kind of voyeurism sometimes particularly to the sexual violence in Game of Thrones yeah and they also have very different attitudes to like the supernatural and in you know trying to make magic trying to build a system into or not but we have to get to a break now because this is actually just we're like martin we've gone off on total tangents it's out of control so we'll get to a break and then when we come back we will talk about the way that uh george r martin handles the supernatural in game of thrones we'll talk a little bit more about the sex and the violence and we'll talk about the most shocking moment in all of fantasy from the studio that brought you wandavision i was an avenger but i'm not a hero anymore the vision returns for the final chapter of the groundbreaking trilogy.

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54:11Dominic Sandbrook: hi everybody welcome back to the book club tabby we're talking game of thrones at great length of course we've done a george rr martin so we've mentioned already the supernatural element of it the interesting thing about this is that this is kept really at arm's length isn't it throughout the first book in the in the sequence so there is a sense that there's all this sort of very gritty realistic power politics in king's landing but that out there almost beyond the imagination of a lot of our characters who are very literal minded there is this sort of um this otherworldly the world of the kind of numinous and the divine and whatnot that is actually going to whether they like it or not that is going to kind of eventually get across the wall and consume westeros and you undermine all their ambitions and stuff.

55:00Yeah, it kind of exists in the North, the hint of the supernatural. We're far away from King's Landing, where it's politics and it's machinations and it's very human. The implication is that the very human threats of the novel are drowning out the real threat of the novel, which is the supernatural. It's almost as though in the prologue, George R. R. Martin is telling us to look out for the real dangers at the heart of the book and also martin's very keen in interviews to always say that he's his is kind of a hard magic system there's logic there's laws to it it makes sense it's almost scientific and he it's a departure from kind of the soft magic system of lord of the rings so he's still trying to root it in the real world but i think he does this very well i think he lulls you into forgetting that this is a fantasy book and there is magic and there are dragons and there are zombies and then suddenly he lifts the curtain and particularly when you're following Jon Snow's narrative and it comes as a really exciting shock.

55:59Dominic Sandbrook: When the zombie, for example, attacks the Lord Commander of the Night's Watch. And it's not just about who's allied with who in King's Landing and who's closer to winning the throne. And it's at the very end of this book, a massive spoiler, that we find out that the dragons actually exist so that is kind of the ultimate reveal that yes we are in fact still in a fantasy but the interesting thing about the dragons though is that the dragons that they're playing the part that you know if this was a modern thriller a tom clancy or something they're playing the part of weapons of mass destruction aren't they so even though they're magical creatures or they're that we regard them as supernatural creatures they are actually that their function is to be nuclear weapons or something or to be chemical weapons that that the targaryens have used in the past to subjugate this world and that now daenerys has the possibility of doing so again so they are magical but they're they're not human they're animals if you see what i mean they're not magical beings you know they're not like the dragons of aragon or whatever you know he's even himself said that he wanted them to be realistic i mean they are still dragons but he said you know they're Not Smaug.

57:16Dominic Sandbrook: They don't chat about burglars. Exactly. He said, you know, they could only have two legs and two wings because what animal do you see in the real world with six legs? I mean, I've never seen a dragon in the real world either, but you know what I mean. It's the hard magic again. But despite all this and the fact that there is a supernatural dimension to Game of Thrones, the evil in the book is firmly rooted in humans. The worst parts of it are always humans. So it's not like, say, Stephen Erickson's Book of the Fallen or the Wheel of Time series, where the evil is kind of some often nameless and then very dramatically named supernatural threat that's coming in and the forces of good have to battle against it.

57:53In this, it's humans committing, you know, pillage, rape, doing battle, shedding one another's blood. And that's the most violent and aggressive feature of the novel.

58:04Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah. And so actually, do you not find when you read it that as much as, you know, the stuff with the white walk what are they called the white walkers the others in this yeah the others yeah the stuff with that is fine you know it's i don't mind it i like it but the real interest lies in the politics that's where martin's his heart really lies because as you say the suffering the wickedness the cruelty is so much more intense when it's done by humans to each other than when And it's done by, you know, these sort of zombie figures to the members of the Night's Watch. It's such a cynical take on, I mean, we said the medieval world, but it's such a cynical take on human nature.

58:44Ultimately, everyone will betray everyone. And the people that refuse to betray someone will ultimately end up dead. But then it's not even a barbaric system in a way. There is no system. It's kind of like the Crusader states or something. Everyone's just fighting to get on top. It's not a question of good or bad. And this is why, you know, you're lulled at points into thinking that this is, you know, a chivalric romance, something Arthurian even, you know, something that came out of the reign of Edward I or whatever. But then you're constantly reminded that that's just a story and that's not the real world of today.

59:16Dominic Sandbrook: Well, this is the point about the children. The children have grown up with reading chivalric romances. And certainly one of them, Sansa Stark, who's one of our, you know, one of the characters in whom we invest. I mean, she's quite annoying, isn't she? She's a teenage girl. Yeah, she grows on you though. She does grow on you, I think, because once she starts to suffer, you really start to feel for her. She can be a little bit spoiled and a little bit selfish, but not in an outrageous way. She likes pretty things. She's just very ladylike. She's a classic kind of teenage girl protagonist. But I would never, ever, ever call my dog Lady.

59:52Dominic Sandbrook: No, that is terrible. In fact, a lot of them have bad names for their direwolves. Shaggy Dog. Shaggy Dog is a shocking name. Yeah. anyway she goes to King's Landing and she believes she idolises Prince Joffrey yeah her sweet prince she has a massive crush on him and she goes to see a tournament and I think this is actually very well done this scene you know this is my favourite scene in the whole book because you can see how I mean I read books about tournaments when I was a kid you know you'd be oh I can't wait and then right away in the tournament very early on there's a bit where this terrifying character called the mountain sir gregor clegane who's an absolute horrendous bruiser he he's in a joust with this other night and um to quote he he strikes him under the gorge it was such force that drove through his throat killing him instantly the point of sir gregor's lance is snapped off in his neck and his life's blood flowed out in slow pulses each weaker than the one before and this is one of the first moments in the book again one of the early moments when george r r martin it's like he's he's forcing you he's got you and he's pressing you right up against the screen or something you're saying look this is what it's actually like it's very intense it's very visceral and it's kind of like that's the real knights you know chivalry is dead that's what knights were really like they're not like this guy soloris who wears beautiful armor and hands women roses as he rides around they're like this they kill and blood will be shed and it's right after that moment actually that sir gregor's brother who is called sandor who is called the hound he's talking to sansa and he says you know his face is all being burned and he tells sansa my brother sir gregor did this to me held me down and he pushed my face into a fire and whatnot and it's a really kind of oh my god you know again a very sort of striking moment so you think that you're in this kind of traditional epic fantasy world but it's it's far more brutal it's random it's unforgiving it's unusually violent and you know when this book came out in 1996 that wasn't unusual it wasn't unusual to encounter genuine darkness in in in all fatalism in fantasy so you had conan the barbarian by robert e howard dark visceral even quite sexy but these stories were kind of about wizards dragons and destiny but they in a sort of medieval world a bit like this very much walking in the footsteps lord of the rings but they had delineated good and bad and they usually leaned heavily into the environment you know sweeping landscapes think middle earth i guess and that's not something that martin is particularly interested in he has his maps and things like that but it's constantly rooted in as we've said in the human sphere it's about people so what it does is and what he does very well is he mixes the radical and the new he takes on a lot of these themes and a lot of the kind of furniture of the world and coaxes you into a feeling of safety.

1:02:49You feel like you know what to expect, as you said, with the Stark children. And then something totally unexpected and shocking happens. And this was very unusual fantasy. It wasn't just dark. It was shocking. And good and evil don't really exist. And the characters aren't just good or bad.

1:03:06Dominic Sandbrook: Well, I think this point about good and evil is actually a really important distinction with Tolkien. So Tolkien, who's obviously to some extent Martin's kind of mentor or whatever, his godfather. Tolkien had an incredibly powerful sense because he's a very very serious kind of Catholic. He has a very very powerful sense of the issue of evil, what evil is, the evil that lies within us, original sin, all of these kinds of things. And it's not true I think that Tolkien, people sometimes say of Tolkien oh it's very simplistic. I don't think that's true at all because actually the whole point of the Lord of the Rings is that we all carry the evil within innocent the ring brings out our inner corruption exactly the ring equals temptation and we're all tempted even frodo baggins the hero is tempted even aragorn who's kind of the perfect knight right but in this all the characters are it's not that there is evil within them so much as the distinction between good and evil just doesn't really exist at all no exactly there's no system each of them in that from their own perspective is doing the right thing to survive in this darwinian world where as you said earlier you know it's that classic line it's the cersei line when you play the game of thrones you win or you die you absolutely have to do you have to be a killer you have to do what you have to do to survive you have to sacrifice every principle every friend and if you don't do that if you show mercy if you show idealism then you will be punished for it and this is i suppose some readers of martin think he has a he has a sort of relish for punishing virtue so as we'll see some of the starks you know they show mercy they show decency they show kindness or compassion and whenever they do you think oh don't do that because martin will punish them for it yeah and this is this is very i mean this is very sam brookian i think in that basically you know we you've always said that the more ruthless you are kind of in history the better you tend to do the better you do yeah whereas you know ned stark you know so if you're robert baratheon and there's a targaryen threat on the horizon the sensible thing to do is kill that threat even if it's a young girl whereas Ned is like no because it's just wrong it's morally wrong Cersei plays the game very well she's a terrible person but who wouldn't and and it actually asks you that question in a way who I mean if you take if you take Cersei out of the mold of just wicked queen and you think to yourself as a mother what wouldn't one do to save your children I mean maybe sleep with your brother but well you're a twin as well tabby i mean tread carefully i was so afraid that would come up but but cersei you see we are led to believe through most of the book that she's a absolute monster but i think as certainly as the series develops we see that although she can be cruel you know conniving all of these kinds of things in her own mind she is simply doing what she has to do to survive and actually no character who captures that better than Tyrion Lannister than the dwarf because he doesn't have an eye.

1:06:25Dominic Sandbrook: Well, actually, this is the funny thing. Does he or doesn't he? He has been brutalized all his life by being treated as an unwanted child. Everyone's been horrible to him because he's a dwarf. He once fell in love, didn't he? He fell in love. But actually, it turned out that the girl had been paid, that she was actually acting. And then her father gave the girl to his guards to kind of to sleep the guards or slept with her and she was handsomely paid for it and Tyrion's heart was broken and I think the fact that his heart was broken suggests that there is a kind of romantic side to him an idealistic side that has been shattered and damaged I guess and so he purports to be more cynical than maybe he is do you not think yeah and I think that's definitely true the fact that he tries to help Bran to ride after Bran loses his legs you know because he understands what it's like to feel like a cripple.

1:07:19And it's interesting as well, because he's always the character that's the most intoxicated by or fascinated by this almost mythological past, you know, dragons and what exists beyond the wall, even though he purports to be a man of intelligence and reason. So, yeah, I think that's definitely true. I think he's many things at once, and that makes him very interesting.

1:07:37Dominic Sandbrook: And also, that's true of Jaime Lannister. So, Jaime Lannister, who I said in the first half, I think at the beginning you're set up to believe that he's going to be the great villain, that Ned Stark will defeat him in a final duel for the, you know, and good will triumph over evil. Do you not think that over time, over the books, you start to become much fonder of Jaime Lannister? And again, you see that actually he's not the cynical villain that everybody thought he was. And actually, then you take a good character, so Daenerys Targaryen, in whom so many readers invest very early on, and they end up naming their kids after her and all this kind of thing.

1:08:16Dominic Sandbrook: But actually, she turns out to be much more morally ambiguous, doesn't she? Even in this book, there's good in her, but she is capable of great ruthlessness 700 pages into this book. Makes her a great queen. Yeah, because we're not even talking about the TV series where she has that very controversial ending. In the books, she does a lot of very, very brutal things. and, you know, believe she's right to do it. And that is another massive element of Game of Thrones that sets it apart from other kind of epic fantasies. It is so very violent and there is so much sexual violence. And, you know, in that way, it's actually, I mean, you could say, is it more Sarah J Maas than Tolkien?

1:09:01Because in her books, there's always full of, you know, sexual violence and stuff.

1:09:04Dominic Sandbrook: In a different league though. Exactly. This is not a book for teenage girls. It is so gritty and it's full of references to brothels prostitutes i mean the dothraki wedding when the 14 year old daenerys marries this massive hunk do i want to say hunk definitely not my type but um dothraki lord karl drogo there's just people having sex like all around them left right and center but also there's bloodshed right men are grabbing women and and having sex with them and then if they're fighting over a woman they will fight with knives and kill each other and then go back to having sex or whatever there is an aggression there was a definite aggression now george r r martin would say that's fine that's the real world and of course it is and we're much more aware now of how rape is used as a as a weapon of war and actually i do think martin wrote this between 1991 and 1996 one of the themes of the book is how the violence as how political decisions have horrendous consequences for ordinary people they're the villagers for the small folk yeah the villagers are put to the torch they are massacred all of this kind of thing and actually the probably the single biggest international news story of the 19 early 1990s when he was writing this was the war in bosnia and scenes on the news every night and this would have been the case in america as much as in europe of paramilitaries invading villages burning people's houses driving them out you know neighbor turning on neighbor for political reasons that you don't understand you've suddenly been kicked out of your house men are being separated from women being led off to be shot all of this kind of thing i mean obviously you had the genocide in Rwanda at the same time so there's a lot of very bleak news going on at the time that Martin is writing this a lot of stuff about how political violence is is is vented on ordinary people who don't you know are completely helpless and I think that that's again a big difference from Tolkien you know and you don't get anything like that in Tolkien and and someone who objects to war anyway as Martin does I mean he might say that no I'm not being voyeuristic i'm just telling you like i i'm telling the truth i'm saying that war has terrible consequences and it's not glorious and it's not kind of um myth you know it shouldn't be mythologized i guess exactly i mean it's all just very intense though the the violence the rape but also the the twists you know we we said how he slowly slowly kind of lets you know what kind of a story we're dealing with and that it isn't going to be the chronicles of narnia or whatever and then there's probably you know there's so you have bran being thrown out of a window very early on by you know a couple having incestuous sex and you're like whoa and then you get um daenerys's brother's death which is appalling and this is where this was very iconic in the tv show as well and this is where he has molten gold poured over him and so his skull sort of melts and then he collapses on the floor it's it's very shocking and you don't see it coming at all because you you know you see characters kind of being a bit you know brash and rude and he's been knocking her around a lot anyway and then this happens and he just comes out of nowhere and then the most shocking scene of all a scene that i think um joe abacombi the guy that wrote the introduction for the folio society edition said changed fantasy forever and this is the execute massive spoiler alert, turn off if you're like one of the three people who hasn't, you know, seen the series or read the books.

1:12:38Well, this is where our hero, Ned Stark, is unexpectedly executed after having shown weakness by admitting to treason that he didn't commit.

1:12:48Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, so it's very well done this, I think. There are a couple of things to say about it. Number one, as you absolutely say, Ned, he's tried to do the right thing and he's been punished for it. He wanted to spare Cersei he wanted to um you know he's when when his friend died he wanted to give the throne to his friend's brothers rather than his son who's not really his son Joffrey um and but he's shown compassion he hasn't moved quickly enough he hasn't moved ruthlessly enough he hasn't killed his enemies all of that he's been crippled because he's been injured in the leg and then he's locked up and it looks like he's going to be forgiven or because he grovels and he to save his family he grovels and he says I was wrong and I committed treason and all of this but the other thing I think that's so interesting about this that makes it so effective it's so effective precisely because of Martin's narrative method we've been in Ned's head he's been one of our chief point of view characters so a lot of chapters have been narrated through his eyes and it never occurs to us as a reader that one of those characters would be sacrificed now interestingly we don't see his death through his own eyes it's like the angle has changed and we see it through his daughter aria's eyes because she's in the crowd which is horrific she's a child and she barely understands and it's a really clever moment because we have invested so much in this character we assume he's the hero and then bang he's out if you were watching the tv series of course the fact that he was played by sean bean should have been a giveaway sean bean always sean bean never lives in anything since the fellowship of the ring i know he dies so well he really does but then this is nothing in comparison to some of the shocks that come in the later books i mean i'm not going to say what it is but the red wedding yeah i mean massive shocks although i think there is definitely a point so i people have always said about this well the effect of this is that you know no character is safe that anybody could die i'm not sure about that because i think once you're about three or four books in you know that he's that there are some characters in whom george r r martin has invested so much they're carrying so much of the narrative there's no way he's just so for example tyrian or daenerys targaryen because if daenerys targaryen suddenly died in book four you'd be like what so the whole of that narrative was a complete waste of time this brings us nicely to the question hanging over the game of thrones books now it's so discussed will he can he ever finish them you know because the theory goes that he told the showrunners of game of thrones that that is loosely how his books would be tied up and then they obviously did the ending that they did on screen there was huge huge clap back and now he doesn't know what to do because he has to change his ending because he doesn't want the same response and the thing is it is almost impossible because if you've put so many different stories in so many different characters' heads.

1:15:46How do you tie that all up? They're all in different places geographically. You know, a lot of them don't know the others exist and don't relate to each other. Like, do you have a second red wedding, but bigger? But then how do you get everyone there?

1:15:58Dominic Sandbrook: So I've read them all, as you have. By the time I got to the last one, what's the last one called? A Dance of Dragons, is it? Huge, like 7 ,000 pages long. There's a point at which he introduces a new claimant to the throne there. And I just thought, come on, come on, this is insane. Really, I like him. Now, he's traveling under a false name, isn't he? And he lands with some group of mercenaries. I can't remember the full details. Anyway, I just thought that's mad. You cannot now be introducing new characters. And I did also think by that point, you're never going to wind this up because the characters have traveled too far away.

1:16:30Dominic Sandbrook: I mean, this goes back to the point about the discipline, right? Tolkien has a small group of characters in the Lord of the Rings. There's the breaking of the fellowship and they go off in a couple of different ways, in groups, but it is clear that it would be relatively easy for Tolkien to reunite them you know in you know in a few in a couple of hundred pages time Frodo and Sam Aragorn and Legolas and Gimli or whatever you can bring start to bring them back together in this we are thousands of pages deep in the series and you're like they've spent thousands of pages to travel further and further and further away unless suddenly somebody they get to a civilization where they've actually invented air travel, there's no way that these characters are going to be, they're not going to be reunited before they're 70.

1:17:15But also because in Lord of the Rings, they have one goal. Both sides have one goal. You know, Frodo, Aragorn, all those guys want to destroy the ring, they want to bring down Sauron. In this, they all have different agendas. Some of them are trying to take down the White Walkers. Some of them are trying to, I don't know, make deals in Tarth or whatever. And Martin himself has said, The Winds of Winter is not so much a novel as a dozen novels, each with a different protagonist each having a different cast of supporting players and antagonists and allies and lovers around them and all of these weaving together in an extremely complex fashion so it's very very challenging and he's not wrong well it's more than very challenging it's impossible

1:17:51Dominic Sandbrook: because their agenda their goals and some of them are mutually exclusive it's you know the iron throne only one person can claim the throne and they get the parlor game people play who do you want to win you know i'd like daenerys to win or i'd like john snow to win or whatever the fact is they can't all win and the rules of the game that martin has established are such that if one person wins other people have to die and he i don't think could bring himself to kill off some of these characters but who would you like to win if if it were possible you know perfectly well who i like go on you know that i have always reveal yourself very much reveal that you are a well he's It's dead.

1:18:30It's not that's not interesting.

1:18:31Dominic Sandbrook: It's dead, but I think the throne should go to Stannis Baratheon. Yeah, you know what? He's a proven soldier. He's very good at governing. I think he'd be a good king. He's Tiberius. He's based on the Emperor Tiberius. He is based on the Emperor Tiberius. Yeah, who I don't like. Whereas I think you are very much, come on, you're surely team Renly on you or something like that. Renly? Are you doing it? Yeah, come on. I do like Highgarden though. I like Margaery Tyrell. No, I want young Griff to win. What? So hold on. what were you doing in the first four books like there was no one who appealed to you i had my heart broken so many times i decided to bet on an outsider because i couldn't i couldn't keep losing my men um oh what you don't want you you don't want to i mean obviously ideally daenerys but you know that is one thing i think they did really well in the tv series was marrying the threat of the north from the north of the white walkers with the the struggle for king's landing by bringing together you know john snow and daenerys and then sending them to winterville I did like all that but you like I mean I didn't like the way the TV series ended and you did so massive now we're massively into spoilers for people who are going to watch the TV series people don't like the ending because of Daenerys big spoiler because of Daenerys revealing that she's basically been so brutalized by her experiences she's become so ruthless herself she's become so fanatical and so bloodthirsty that she will kill everybody in King's Landing if necessary because she thinks she and her family have been wronged so much you know and and that there was a darkness in her people didn't like that because they'd invested massively in the character i thought you just haven't been watching properly from the very beginning i thought she'd be moving in that direction the way she she was brutal to the slavers wasn't she in all those kind of eastern cities she's right though but that's the point isn't it she thinks she's right you know there's a point at the very end tragically i actually watched the last episode of the whole series to prepare for this tabby i watched the first episode what's wrong with you come on so the bit where john snow kind of confronts her and she says come on break the wheel with me you know and he says i know what's right and he says but there's lots of people who know what's right you know how do you know or whatever in his what was that well it's in a slightly wooden way uh he says this well there goes our opportunity to have kit harrington on the show i think it's in the probably in the directing rather than the acting anyway i think you know she says i know what's right and all of that kind of thing i think that that's it's been building to that from the beginning i felt it was consistent i felt it was plausible with her character i thought that probably is what would happen that she would lose the plot and she would kill everybody i liked it i think also the fact that she's seen so much hideous sexual violence that she's been raped that that's that would have no effect on her saintly character of course it would yeah of course of course but the thing is it all happened too fast the pacing was ridiculous they managed to wipe out the biggest threat known to westeros you know the gathering might of the white walkers who are going to wipe out human civilization you know in the course of a night they weren't even that well prepared and they were all in the dark and also why would aria be the guy to kill the the guy well the girl to kill the night king when she's had no connection to him whatsoever whereas john snow has been you know he's the he's the boy of destiny you know he's been he's the son of ice and fire and also bran the broken on the iron throne madness so i agree with that because no one cares about bram like boring character get rid i also i told you before we started recording how i would have i would have had aria kill cersei and jamie lannister and then i would have had john snow kill the but i guess they thought that everybody thought that's what would happen and they wanted to that's the risk i think that's the other difficult thing for George R.R.

1:22:19Martin now is when everyone expects you to do radical things you start writing for the crowd and then you're no longer you know keeping to your own

1:22:26Dominic Sandbrook: ethos I don't I feel sorry for the showrunners because I think I mean this is very I know no one agrees to me on this the showrunners had a really really difficult task okay much more interestingly let's finally before we grow old and die let's work out which houses we'd be in so i'm going to go for you first because i've already thought this through you would 100 % be um a denizen of high garden you'd be a tyrell oh wow i'll take it nice okay well because they like is that perfumed poison perfumed yeah so i'm hanging around with diana rig and natalie dormer yeah you like nice things you know you like thing you know nice things you like nice things but uh You know, you're calculating.

1:23:11You're calculating behind the petals.

1:23:14Dominic Sandbrook: I love Marjorie Tyrell as a character. Do you? I think she's great. Yeah. I think we'd be a great match, actually. Yeah. Well, she plays the game well. Yeah. She plays the game really well, but she's also sweet and nice. Do you think? Yeah, so that's fine. It's only paper thin. Yeah. Thank you. Exactly. Okay, so I've massively overthought this. I've actually nailed you down to a character. Oh, okay. So. Fun. Well, I mean, you're obviously either going to be a Lannister or a Targaryen, given your appearance. I'll take it. And I think, here's the thing, you are, we've actually alluded to this character already.

1:23:51Dominic Sandbrook: So this character purports to be very cynical and sardonic. Goes on an awful lot about how much fun they're having, how much they love parties and drinking and, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. but actually deep down i think this character is much more sentimental than uh people realize very witty actually so a lot of people really like this character so you are so tyrian lannister it's unbelievable oh my god you knew that was coming unbelievable i'll take it i'll take it come on it could have been worse tabby yeah it could be worse could be an old nan which is what i said last night yeah you did you did after i'd said come on i know i'm varus and i just you did say that you said if you say i'm varus on the show i'll never forgive you so that's it i think we all came out of this how many how many molten golden crowns i'm gonna give it eight okay i do think it is a it's a masterpiece of of um fantasy writing world building all of that yeah i think it's undisciplined i think he has lost the plot a little bit but in this book it's quite cohesive it's quite tight you get a really good sense of all the characters when you're in their heads and i was riveted to it when i read it and actually when i rewrote it this time and yeah so that's my take uh boring so boring i'm going to give you exactly the same mark i'm going to give it an eight as well um i think um it's it's not high literature it doesn't purport to be it's uh a uh absolutely as you say riveting um page turner um i loved reading it the first time i couldn't put it down the second time i thought that's going to be a massive slog because i know what happens i can't believe i'm gonna have to plow through all this again for this podcast and do you know what i really enjoyed reading it again much more than i i enjoyed being in the characters heads i like the world i think it's well done i think it's it's a fascinating case study in an author losing completely losing control of his material um but i i i think there is so much to enjoy i mean this is why for example i gave it to arthur my son because i said to him i think you'll love this and of course he did love the first three books and then i could see him losing interest by about book four or book five and I thought that's just like how I felt when I was reading this that I couldn't get enough of it at first and then the more complicated the narrative became the the more the characters you know the more characters Martin threw into it the more I could see his attention sort of waning and I thought this is the problem that George R.

1:26:27Dominic Sandbrook: R. Martin has. So what have we got coming up? We've got the thing called book club notes and these are uh it's a weekly newsletter it's completely free you get talking points you get book recommendations there's loads of insights from other listeners so we want it to be a real kind of club newsletter um there's a real sense of community tabby which i know you you love a community just like a king's landing so that will be delivered to your inbox every saturday morning if you just go to the book club website and you just put in your email you will get the the newsletter and there's loads of stuff about we'll be also giving updates about the books coming up so loads to look forward to and um on that bombshell tyrian lannister thank you very much and goodbye thanks all done bye

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